Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
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VOLUME 58 ISSUE 13 MARCH 30, 2021 P123 back. He appeared in a video, looking drawn and tense. Eight months without riding had clearly taken its toll. Normal bloke? Give it a rest. After his big crash last year, Marc leaped almost straight off the operating table, trailing the smell of surgical spirit and worried-looking nurses, and jumped back on his Repsol Honda less than a week after the fracture. This was headstrong to the point of foolishness, made his injury much worse, and was almost certainly the direct cause of his long exile. But the action sums him up. He can bounce. Now, passed fit to test only a few days before, Marc was directly out testing at Barcelona, on a track-prepped RC213V-S street bike, then again at Porti- mao. And looked pretty good, sliding flamboyantly and almost getting his elbow down. Don't know how many laps he did but more than 30 days to round three, 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. (Me, among others.) How riders return from injury depends on a number of factors, including the powers of physical recovery. This is not the first time injury has threatened his career. Back in 2011 he was charging to- wards a maiden Moto2 title when a concussion triggered double- vision problems, ending his sea- son early, and only cured during the winter by micro-surgery. This broken arm is Marc's first serious fracture, and it certainly took it's time to get better, with broken plates and bone infection preventing the fracture from knit- ting. But at 28 he's on the right side of 30 to heal well, now the complications have apparently been eliminated. Past comebacks are instruc- tive. Barry Sheene had to do it twice. After his first Daytona leg- mangler at age 25, he returned at full strength for two titles, but after smashing his legs again at aged 30, he struggled and ultimately failed to regain past momentum. Kevin Schwantz accumulated injuries and kept shrugging them off, until by the age of 30 they did it or him. Mick Doohan was 28 when he suffered mightily from botched HOW RIDERS RETURN FROM INJURY DEPENDS ON A NUMBER OF FACTORS, INCLUDING THE POWERS OF PHYSICAL RECOVERY. surgery on his broken leg but came back to achieve total domi- nation. But it took more than a year of recovery. He won only one race in the interim. All of these examples, es- pecially the last, demonstrate the most important factor—the capacity to heal mentally, to regain not just physical strength but also that obsessive willpower without which nobody can be a serial winner. That was what Doohan found, and what was in Schwantz's case gradually eroded. And, though he denied it, what left Sheene trailing, something that Mick Doohan, with eloquent simplicity called "The Want." The past eight months were clearly hard for Marquez to bear, but the first shoots of recovery will have triggered a rapid trans- formation to his mindset. Here's betting that Marc will get The Want back sooner rather than later. CN IT'S BEEN INTENSE AND EXCITING WITHOUT HIM. WHEN HE RETURNS THE TEMPERATURE WILL RISE STILL FURTHER.