Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/126457
o 00 0') 1a"••lo.. 01 I". aoa·ap aad w ld'. 1."0..11. _oloao....., Bo.... D.Co.I... d..c a .......... ".wllc" 10 Bo.d., y.an I d·ap wll" I". I.a.dlbl. Jo.1 Bob I, I"...."olallo....y Blbl 10... aad lala... 01 U.S. _oloc..o ••. I". By Len Weed During the past decade he has been referred to simply as The Man. Everybody knew who The Man was. Roger DeCoster. He reeled off World Championships with nearly the same never-miss regularity of the big bore piston stroking inside his Suzuki. DeCoster and Suzuki seemed synonymous. Roger wasn't the ji'rst World Champion to n'de in A merica. In fact, when he ji'rst came in 1967, a year after Torsten Hallman pioneered the annual visits, he was still a few years away from top honors. So Hallman and another 250cc World Champion, Joel Robert, shared most of the attention. Robert ceased his winning ways in the early seventies. Since then it's been DeCoster's decade on the European motocrosser hit parade. Roger's tremendous populan'ty astrounds many. Everybody respects a champion, but A men'can race crowds have seemed to revere Roger. The result - rampant ambivalence a:t Amen'can races 'in the old "them versus us" game. A perfect example: Several ye~rs ago at the U. S. Grand Prix at Carlsbad, Rex Staten grabbed the early lead with Roger on his tail. A bout half the crowd was flag waving, cheering on "their" n"der, ahead ofall the Europeans. But the other half was cheering "their" rider, the Belgian champion who had so capitvated followers ofthe fledgl'ing sport. During the late 60s Roger DeCoster made the Americans cross-up conscious (or cross-up crazy, pZ'ck one). Then in the 70s he gave us another kind of demonstration a demonstratz"on ofstyle - on the track and off He became, assuredly, the most popular and 6 respected non-Amen·can in Amen"can motor- cycl'ing, and served as an inspiration to many ofour top runners today. His annual dominance of the Trans-AMA sen"es every autumn was a foregone conclusion -four straight sen'es wZ'nsfrom 1974 through 1977. His selection of racing number 111 one year prompted one n'der to comment, ''Roger's so baaad he gets three ones!" DeCoster's GP racing career began in 1965. He first attacked the entire schedule in 1967. After placing fifth for three consecutive years he switched to the 250cc class in 1970 and ji'nished third. A year later he followedJoel Robert to Suzuki and returned to the 500cc class. The next nine years in Suzuki yellow produced the following results: 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3, 6. Twice in his career, Roger battled back from life-threatening injuries. In February of 1978 he was on the cn·tz"call'ist followz'ng a practz"ce crash that ruptured his spleen. Yet, seven weeks later he appeared at an internatz"onal race in Belgium and won the ji'rst moto by a wide margin. Desp'ite missing precious tra'ining tz"me, he rode the entz"re GP sen'es and f'inished th'ird. . Last year, shoulder and knee injun"es contributed to his worst placing ever, szxth. Roger had already z'ndicated that 1979 would be his final year of GP racing, one ji'nal attempt at hz's szxth world title. Then the plot thickened. Suddenly he's back in the saddle again, at least for a little while, sporting new colors. And the red, wh-ite and blue seemsji·tting. Not just because they happen to be the colors of another manufacturer, but because they represent the colors of his second home, the natz"on whose motocross community he so inspired.