Michael Scott on Marc Marquez
If there’s a perfect slogan for MotoGP 2021, it’s this: ‘Please Stand Well Back from the Barriers’.
It’s always like that, obviously. But it will be more so when Marc Marquez explodes back into action. For a while, it looked like he’d be out in Qatar, but this has been delayed until round three in Portugal. When he will be ready to confound all predictions (my own included). It’s been intense and exciting without him. Now the others have two races more of the same. Then it will ramp right up.
Not long ago, when judged as if he was a normal bloke, it seemed certain the octuple-champ would have his confidence badly dented. Normal bloke? Give it a rest. He leapt off the operating table after his big crash last year, trailing the smell of surgical spirit and worried-looking nurses, and jumped straight back on his Repsol Honda less than a week after the fracture. Headstrong to the point of foolishness, making his injury much worse. But it sums him up.
Now, passed fit to ride only a few days before, Marc was directly out testing at Barcelona, on a trackprepped RC213V-S street bike. And looking pretty good, sliding the rear and almost getting his elbow down. Don’t know how many laps he actually did, but with more than 30 days before Portimao, so what? After all, his rate of recovery makes that old Lazarus look positively sluggish, and stands to make false prophets of those predicting a troubled return. (Again, me. Among others.)
Another great return comes to mind… that of deposed emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, marching towards triumph in Paris after escaping exile on Elba. Famously, newspaper headlines changed as he remorselessly tramped across France towards the capital. First described as “the Corsican ogre”, the reports switched steadily from condemnation to sycophancy, until he was gleefully hailed as the rightful ruler.
Well, nobody called Marquez an ogre, but perhaps I wasn’t really joking when I said he was going to return and win his first race. Do not rule it out.
Mick Doohan may have taken a bit longer to regain supremacy, but his injury was quite a lot worse.
So I’m happily prepared to be proved wrong, just as I have been before after writing Rossi off more than once.
It’ll actually be an honour for the sport itself when he does take his first win.
‘Marquez has made Lazarus look sluggish’