Cycle News

VOL. 55 ISSUE 25 JUNE 26, 2018 P139 Roczen would've achieved by this point. Ultimately, though, luck plays a very big role in championships. To win a championship, you must be fast, you must be in very good physical shape, and you must be lucky. You're going to fall, but how you fall will make all the differ- ence. And outside of the physical pain, it takes incredible mental strength to keep getting on the bike and trying to win a title after strings of bad luck. In a less-flat- tering light, it's stubbornness. Motocross racers are the most stubborn people you'll likely ever meet. But when Geico Honda's Jeremy Martin hit the deck this weekend in Tennessee, I was gutted for him. Just absolutely gutted. To know why, first you have to know a little bit about Jeremy Martin. Jeremy Martin is a pretty unas- suming guy. It's pretty rare that I've seen him without a smile on his face. He's usually cracking jokes, and the last few times I've seen him, he actually asked me some pretty insightful non-moto- cross questions just in passing. That stuck with me. He pays attention to other people, not just himself. And that's not typical for a championship-level motocross racer. They're selfish people. They think about themselves all the time. That's a big part of how most of them become cham- pions. But Jeremy Martin isn't exactly like that. Martin has struggled in su- percross since he moved to the pros. Sure, he's won some races, but he's always shined outdoors, where he's won two 250MX titles. And when Yamaha chose to move Cooper Webb up from the 250MX Star Rac- ing team to the 450cc squad instead of him, Martin left for Honda. And he struggled there for quite a while. But during the AMA Supercross season this year, something clicked. All of a sudden he was the outright fastest guy on the track much of the time. He didn't get a title for myriad reasons, but Martin was showing something he'd never shown in supercross before; raw speed. He wasn't holding back anymore. He credited the team with helping him find some set- tings that made him comfortable, and it showed. Once the series went out- doors, it was on. He was in the hunt at every race through the first three rounds, finally taking his first win at round three in Col- orado with a 2-1, and then he had another 2-1 in the bag at High Point a race later when his bike quit on him while he was lead- ing the second moto. He didn't whine. He basically shrugged it off and showed back up at Muddy Creek ready to do battle. (The Geico Honda team has a fantastic track record in terms of mechanical reliability with their machines, but nobody's perfect. Stuff just happens in racing sometimes.) What does Martin do? He goes out and wins the first moto with apparent ease, slicing 13 points out of the 20-point deficit he had to make up on points leader (and former Yamaha teammate) Aaron Plessinger. Then he smiles. "We had an issue in that sec- ond moto, when we would have had the overall and maintained the points gap the same, but it's a new weekend and we move on," Martin said, matter-of-factly, after winning the first moto. "There's more motos to win. I've got to give it up to the man up above. It's a blessing to be able to do what I love everyday. I've go to thank the whole Geico Honda team. I don't think those guys slept this week. So I'm really proud of them and their effort..." And then, an hour or so later, a few turns into the second moto, while battling around the tail end of the top five with Plessinger's current teammate Justin Cooper, Cooper inadvertently seemed to move into Martin's line in the air, and that's it. Martin's in the hospital with a broken vertebra, and his season's over. And there's no smile you can put on something like that. I just hope that Jeremy still has the stubbornness it's going to take to go out and start over in 2019 as he tries to do it all over again. CN

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