P190
CN
III OBSERVATION CHECK
BY KIT PALMER
I
'm a sports guy. But motorcycles—
more specifically motorcycle
racing—is my number-one pas-
sion; that pretty much goes without
saying. Ever since I threw a leg over
a two-wheeled vehicle that I didn't
have to pedal, that had its own
source of power, oh man. I've never
looked back.
I love riding motorcycles so much
that I was unbelievably fortunate to
be able to make a career out of it.
Still, I never lost interest in sports
in general, even the standard ones
like baseball, football, basketball
and hockey. I have my teams I
follow, hoping they all go on to
win the "big one" at the end of the
season—at least once in my lifetime.
In 2012, when the L.A. Kings won
the Stanley Cup for the first time,
I joked afterward, "okay, I'm good
now, all of my teams have won the
big one—I can go to heaven now a
satisfied man."
Well, maybe not completely
satisfied I later thought, because
the U.S. had never won the ISDE!
We've won the Motocross des Na-
tions (yes, "des") a million times but
never the ISDE.
I covered my first Six Days in
1985 and was super anxious to go
to Alp, Spain, and see the ISDE with
my own eyes. Like many of us, our
introduction to the Six Days was
watching Malcolm Smith on the big
screen in the movie "On Any Sun-
day" navigate the foggy, single-track
trails in the Pyrenees Mountains of
Spain. This really stuck with me,
especially when the narrator said
that riding the ISDT (which is what it
was called back then) was like "six
days on a bongo board." I thought,
"Man, that sounds gnarly (whatever
a bongo board is)."
The ISDE is an amazing event
FINALLY!
2016 U.S. ISDE Teams
PHOTOGRAPHY
BY
JONTY
EDMUNDS
