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Monday, 7 November 2011

MotoGP, Valencia, 2011

Yes...Yes....YYeeesss....oh, no.
I was all ready to dismiss this race, and indeed this season, as one of the most boring races/racing seasons of all time. Then the last three laps happened and we were almost, for a fleeting moment, back to the not-so-bad old days of the early 2000’s as we had a fight to the wire which ended in the underdog not winning, despite looking like he might.
We are at a curious crossroads n MotoGP in that we are being forced to look at Casey Stoner as one of the greats; but he gives us little, apart from his race win statistics, by which to find him an attractive champion. Not for him the crowd-pleasing antics of Rossi – contrived, calculated or simply accidental – but rather a cold desire to win by the largest margin possible; sod spectacle, I’ve won.
We can’t realistically blame him for winning in such a dominant fashion. Just as in Formula 1, first with Schumacher and now with Vettel, these guys are paid to win and if the circumstances of chance bring the best rider and best bike together in a season, who are we to deny them their success even if it denies us the spectacle of a great race?
Was it not Casey Stoner who, after crashing so many times in his first two seasons of MotoGP and earning a reputation that was not unequal to Marco Simoncelli’s, climbed aboard the Ducati and turned it into a championship winner, something that not even Rossi has been able to do? To then climb onto the Honda and trounce his team-mates who have been with the team for longer than he has, indicates that the guy is clearly a genius rider. But, stir the soul he does not.
And, understand it or not, and quite unlike Formula 1, bike racing does stir the soul. Or at least it should do. Motorcycle racing is so clearly a battle not between a rider and his rivals, but between a rider and his machine, and it is all right in front of us to see and admire. Whilst a car driver sits in a cocoon of carbon fibre, hidden to the world, the bike racer is there for all to see – arms, legs, body, everything and, whether he is absolutely on the limit or way beyond it and cartwheeling down the track, it is he who we are watching and not the machine.
So why, with the greatest mixture of ingredients, is it that we are subjected to hideously dull and processional races that serve no other purpose than to turn off armchair spectators in their droves?  There is just no passion in MotoGP at the moment and the ever-fickle media have even abandoned Rossi because he has stopped troubling the podium, let alone winning a race. Nothing is old hat like yesterday’s star fading.
I have seriously become very blasé about catching a MotoGP race of late because it is almost guaranteed to be sleep-inducing. A quick check of the sports pages the next day tells you all without making you feel like you have missed anything.
Another problem is that no-one actually likes a champion who hasn’t proved his worth in combat. Danny Pedrosa can win brilliantly from the front – dull as hell as it maybe – but put him into a scrap for first place and all bets are off. It’s the same with Stoner; he has proven that he can run away with a race but examples of his having a race-long scrap and coming out on top are few and far between.
Look, it is awful to have to refer backwards, let alone to a particular rider, but references to Rossi are unavoidable, past it as he may be. Single-handedly he brought passion and excitement back into racing; probably helped that he was from Italy and not Northern England, but that’s not his fault!
Now, with Simoncelli gone, it seems as if we have been robbed of a natural successor to kick the sport up the backside and make it fun again. Of course, no one rider can make the paltry grids look any more populated. After watching 30+ riders start the Moto2 race, watching 14 or 15 start a MotoGP race, especially when only two or three have a realistic chance of winning, is, or should be, very embarrassing to those in charge.
There will be those who will claim that yesterday’s race was a classic, but they are wrong. What we had was the leader disappearing into the distance and then a squabble for second and, no matter which way you cut it, a squabble for second is still a squabble for the first loser. Then that squabble caught up the leader and passed him and, for the past few laps we were almost treated to a race. Ben Spies couldn’t quite make a break and Stoner wasn’t letting him get away. Last corner and Spies just holding on but the drag to the line sees the Honda take the win by a thousandth of a second.
If that’s what passes for a great race in this day and age, you can keep your MotoGP.

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