MICHAEL SCOTT ‘Cal knows more about racing than Rossi’
It’s the moment to pay tribute to Joan Mir, squeaky-clean new world champion. Marc Marquez’s new nightmare. But heck, there’s plenty time for that in the future.
But we’re running out of time for tributes to the most successful British rider in almost half a century. Cal Crutchlow has announced that he’s calling it a day. It’s news that, thinking back on all the times we’ve seen him limping towards his bike smelling of surgical spirit, is welcome as well as sad. He’s given so much. Time to walk away – even if he can’t walk in a straight line. The lopsided gait is one legacy, as he explained at Silverstone last year, of a long career of big highs and lows.
The highs were remarkable. Cal won three GPs and stood on the podium another 16 times. Almost all of these were in some kind of daunting circumstances. It’s not right to say he rode like a bulldog, because with those paws a bulldog wouldn’t have the technique. But Cal didn’t need a studded collar to make the point.
He arrived in MotoGP with famous piercing stare already welldeveloped. That was not unique. A rarer quality was his painful honesty. “I know I am a crasher,” he told me once. But it was crashing in a good cause. Worth it.
The other side of that coin was incurable optimism.
It never mattered that Cal might have qualified or finished 15th, he would without fail point out how he could have been top three, but for some minor glitch or other. Optimism that I guess pays dividends when you’re up against it, as is always the case for everyone riding at GP level.
He was also scarily brave: not just making frequent returns from injury, but usually barely waiting until the doctors had tied the last stitch. Remember when he both broke and dislocated his ankle at Silverstone in 2012? He missed qualifying in hospital, proved he could jump up and down on it on Sunday morning and finished sixth, fending off Nicky Hayden, in unimaginable pain. Injury prone? I think yes. He even managed to sever a finger tendon while cutting cheese at home for pasta. Came back and raced anyway.
It’s been fantastic to see, enough to make anyone proud.
Now with retirement Cal has shown he knows more about racing even than Valentino Rossi.
He knows when to stop.
‘It was crashing in a good cause. Worth it’