Cycle News

VOL. 56 ISSUE 11 MARCH 19, 2019 P125 SX title). Carmichael didn't fail enough as a racer to give him the necessary perspective to speak about what racers are going through when times are tough. This doesn't just apply to an- nouncing. I think this is also true when it comes to coaching. If I had a child who wanted to learn about riding and racing moto- cross, I'd want them to learn from somebody who lost more than they won. Timmy Ferry would be a great motocross coach, for example. At the start of the season, things weren't looking good for Carmichael as an announcer, but in hindsight, I think he was trying to find his legs. By around the halfway point of the series, Carmichael won me over. Like Romo in the NFL, Carmichael can describe what's going through racers' heads no matter what position they're in. He tells the audience why racers make the choices they make. He still occasionally falls into the trap of calling out lap times or reciting running orders like Emig used to do, which usually means he's looking at a computer screen instead of what's happening on the track. (It's pretty annoying unless it's directly applicable to what's happening on the track or in the championship.) However, on the whole, his insight is really valuable. During the Atlanta round, after Marvin Musquin tagged his teammate (and race leader) Cooper Webb in a corner, Carmichael said of the incident: "That's when you know things are going good for you, Ralph; when you make a mistake in the whoops, and your teammate or someone has the position to pass you, and it ends up work- ing out worse for the guy behind you!" This seems like a minor comment, but in context, this was a thing that Carmichael thought about a lot during his racing career. Chad Reed even used to say that Carmichael had a horseshoe shoved up his butt because it seemed like even when Carmichael made a mistake, he'd gain time with it. I can vividly remember many oc- casions when Carmichael would swap like crazy going into a cor- ner but somehow his motorcycle would always seem to swap right into the rut he wanted to hit, and he'd be on the gas and gone, adding another couple tenths of a second to his lead. Following that incident, Carmi- chael went on to say: "I believe that the reason that Cooper lost his balance through the whoops is because that was his first time jumping through there. He probably sensed maybe that that's where Marvin was gaining the time on him and made the adjustment, but he just needed to get his timing right." After the race, Webb vol- unteered this: "The track was changing a lot, and I knew where I was good, but I was also get- ting caught by Marv [Musquin] in the beginning in some places. I knew where [the whoops], but I wasn't sure what line. When you're out front, you can't see where you're going slow or not, so I was trying to hit my marks, and I felt like they weren't work- ing as well as I'd like them to, so I started searching. And you make some mistakes as the race goes on, and I actually felt like I kind of, toward the end, started hitting some better lines." Carmichael told us precisely what was going on with Webb, and he does it all the time if you pay attention to what he's saying. So, I think I owe Carmichael an apology about my skepti- cism. And maybe I owe him an apology about what I think about him as a racer, too, because when he was racing he played his cards close to the vest with the media and didn't let us know all of what he knew, so I used to think that his suc- cess was mostly just raw speed and determination. However, he has proven during his short (so far) tenure as an announcer that he was a much more cerebral racer than most of us probably realized at the time.CN

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