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Championship, and I knew that if I was going to win it, this was going to be the year. I literally put more work and more commit- ment into that year than I had put into anything in my life." But, once again, things didn't start off so rosy. At Glen Helen, Albertyn got caught in pileups and netted a disappointing eighth place overall. The follow- ing weekend at Hangtown, he was taken out in the first turn of moto two and suffered another setback, finishing sixth overall. "I was already back to like fifth in the championship, and it was like, 'This is it.' I was up to my eyeballs in frustration. I sat down at Mount Morris, the third national of the year, I sat down with our chaplain, and I said, 'I've done everything I can possibly do. I'm better prepared mentally and physically than I ever have been. What's going on?' He said to me, 'Why don't you tell the Lord that?' So, I did. I got on my knees the night before the Mount Morris race and said, 'Lord, Your word says that You will not push us beyond what we can endure. I am at that breaking point.''' Albertyn says that if he hadn't won that weekend, then he would have quit right then and there. Apparently, someone was listening. Instead of quitting, he swept both motos, claimed the overall and got himself right back in the championship chase. "It was a major turning point," Albertyn said. He would go on to win two more AMA National rounds that season, Millville and Steel City, and when he didn't win, he almost won, just missing the overall at RedBud. Before it was over, Albertyn clawed his way back to win his first and only career AMA National 250cc Na- tional Motocross Championship. "It was such a deep satis- faction, but it wasn't like the first championships I'd won," Albertyn recalls of his feelings over winning the title. "When I won those, it was like, 'Yes, I've finally broke through. I'm a World Champion. Nobody knew who I was, but that was what I had worked for ever since I was an amateur.' When I won this time, it was like, 'Thank you, Lord. I know that You had me come over for a reason.' I had over- come the odds." Even with Ricky Carmichael's much-heralded move to the 250cc class for 2000, Albertyn says that giving up or just taking it easy was not part of his mind- set once he had the champion- ship in hand, but in 2000 the injuries returned, and Albertyn made the difficult decision to retire at the end of that season. Afterward, he remained a part of the Suzuki organization for two years before moving on. When reminded that he was the last man besides Carmichael to win the 250cc National Cham- pionship (in the two-stroke era), Albertyn said that he had forgot- ten that fact. Carmichael won the 250cc MX title from 2000 through 2006, the last champi- onship coming when it changed to the 450cc class. ''That shows you how long Ricky has been dominating," Albertyn says. "But I'm happy with my career. Over the 11 years that I raced, I won four titles, so that's about a 35-percent suc- cess rate. When you're talking the likes of Ricky, it's actually pretty poor, but I have absolutely no regrets when I look back at my career. It's the life values that you take away from it that are the most important. Ten years from now, nobody will remember who Greg Albertyn was." That's debatable. Greg Albertyn will always go down in the record book as the last guy to win the AMA 250cc National Champion in the pre-Carmichael era, and that's most definitely a turning point in the history of American motocross. CN This Archives edition is reprint- ed from issue #7, September 21, 2005. CN has hundreds of past Archives editions in our files, too many destined to be archives themselves. So, to prevent that from happening, in the future, we will be revisiting past Archives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones coming down the road. -Editor CN III ARCHIVES P106 Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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