Dovizioso: Sacked When He Was 13

Dovizioso may be in the fight to win the biggest road race gong of them all, but he’s a motocrosser at heart.

“I was a motocrosser when I was a kid, like my father. I never thought about road racing. I rode bikes because I liked riding bikes, nothing more.”

But Antonio Dovizioso had other ideas: he entered his son in his first motocross race when he was four and in his first minimoto race when he was six. The minimoto craze was huge on the Adriatic coast during the early 1990s. The scene launched the careers of Dovizioso, Valentino Rossi, Marco Simoncelli, Alex De Angelis, and Mattia Pasini, who were all born in the area. Dovizioso and Simoncelli were big minimoto rivals and soon fell out over their dramatically contrasting riding styles.

Dovizioso graduated to a full-size motorcycle at 13: straight from a minimoto to an Aprilia RS125 GP bike. Big mistake. “It was very traumatic. Going directly to a GP bike was too big a jump because the bike wasn’t easy and the engine was so difficult. The first three times I went very, very slow and the team fired me.”

Help came from some locals who offered a 125 sport-production bike. “I won my first race on this bike and then the championship.” Two years later, he made his GP début and became a full-time

125 GP rider in 2002. He scored his first podium the next year and won the title in 2004. He spent the next three seasons in 250s, twice finishing second overall on a Honda RS250, beaten by Jorge Lorenzo’s faster Aprilia.

MotoGP next, with a private Honda team, then with Repsol Honda, with whom he won his first premier-class race at a damp and dismal Donington Park in July 2009. A year with Tech 3 Yamaha followed, then the call from Ducati. It took him until last year to win his first race with the factory at a soaking Sepang. This June he won back-to-back races at Mugello and Barcelona, so he had won as many races in eight days as he had in the previous eight seasons.

With Desmo Dovi, it’s all about intelligence and perseverance.