Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 35 SEPTEMBER 1, 2015 P61 for someone who is always in the championship fight. After all, on your way up, you're thinking about taking over the top spot from one or two other guys. Once you're at or near the top, you have to be thinking about everybody who wants to do the same thing to you. "Honestly, I think just being a top contender every single weekend is the hardest thing," Dungey said. "It takes a lot of energy—a lot of mental and physical energy. Not that it's a bad thing, but it's the hardest thing to be a top rider and stay there. How to handle that, how to control that, and how to take the expectations that come with being in the position I'm in. The job isn't easy. If it was easy wouldn't have. There are a lot of ifs and buts in bench racing, and one of them revolves, once again, around Aldon Baker. If Vil- lopoto were still around, maybe he'd have still been with Baker, and that would've definitely hurt Dungey's chances. But with how things are right now—with the new KTM, and with the peace of mind that Baker has brought to Team Dungey—it's not unlikely that Dungey would've defeated Villopoto. But Dungey says he doesn't spend any time thinking about it. "I don't care," Dungey said. "Those were points in my career when I had really tough competi- tion. We'd all love to come out and be like Ricky Carmichael was, but the truth is that we're all To Dungey's credit, though, most racers in the Jeremy McGrath, Ricky Carmichael and Ryan Villopoto eras were defeat- ed before the gate dropped. Af- ter being beaten time after time by these guys, most racers be- gan hoping for second place. A big part of all of their dominance was that other racers stopped putting up a fight against them. This wasn't luck—they demoral- ized their competition on pur- pose—but it was reality. Unlike most, though, what makes Dungey a true champion is that he never lined up hoping for second place against Villo- poto or anybody else. He always expected to win, and he was always dejected when he didn't. That holds true today as well. "Yeah, I wouldn't ever give up," Dungey said. "Just because I get beat today doesn't mean I'm going to get beat tomorrow. I can improve, and if I'm get- ting beaten, that means there's room for improvement. That's an opportunity, really. It's a good sign that we've got something to reach for. Yeah, he [Villopoto] retired, and he's moving on, but there's still a race to be run, the competition is getting faster and stronger and tougher every weekend, and there are more challenges all the time. Just because Villopoto isn't there doesn't mean it's easy at all." And ultimately, meeting those challenges is what champions are made of. CN "BEING A TOP CONTENDER AND STAYING THERE. THAT'S TOUGH." everybody'd be doing it. But it's rewarding, too, to put in all the work and then perform on the weekends. I'm hungry. There's still a lot I want to do. Being a top contender and staying there. That's tough." >>RIVALRY And finally, there are fans who would argue that if Ryan Villopo- to were still around, Ryan Dung- ey wouldn't have won these two titles this year. After all, Dungey has never beaten Villopoto for a championship, but that's not to say that he couldn't have or different, and if I was supposed to be Ricky Carmichael, I'd have been born Ricky Carmichael! But I'm not. I'm human, and I'm different. I have to learn things in another way about how to do better. Villopoto was one of the toughest competitors out there, and guys like that are very few and far between. They're rare. If you were in my shoes, since I was a little kid back in the day, that guy has given me a lot of tough days and a lot of tough years. He beat me a lot of the time, and that's hard. That's so hard."

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