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/870143
VOL. 54 ISSUE 35 SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 P127 caused his front-brake master cylinder to malfunction in Texas, or he could've not had that bad race in New Jersey. But if he had a time machine and could go back to New Jersey and do it over, I bet he'd do it differently. There's no reason he shouldn't have won the New Jersey race, but even finishing third that day would've added seven points to his championship total. He lost by five in the end. And outdoors this year, he had some rough times, too. Unlike in supercross, Tomac was favored to win the title outdoors from the start, and he dominated at Hangtown—something he's done many times in the past—had his front-brake malfunction again at Glen Helen, struggled at his home race in Colorado, and again in moto one at High Point, then went on a winning streak for a while before hitting the slide again late in the series as it seemed like he was trying to protect his points lead. Eli Tomac is like a lot of really great racers in that he's basi- cally unstoppable as long as he's attacking, meaning his focus is 100-percent forward on the task immediately at hand. Where he (and many other great racers) tends to falter is where he starts thinking about points, or really anything other than what's in front of him. So it's not simple enough to just say, "He can't handle the pressure." The problem is that the pressure causes him to lose focus on what he's doing on the racetrack, not that the pressure causes him to "buckle" or some- thing like that. For some racers, championship pressure gives them extra focus, but those rac- ers are rare. Most racers simply have to learn how to put the championship out of their mind and focus on the immediate task at hand. That's why you hear rac- ers talking so often about, "We just have to take it one race at a time." That's a strategy to avoid losing focus due to thinking about the championship. And it's also not fair to say that allowing championship pres- sures to influence their focus makes a racer "soft" somehow. In fact, that might be the op- posite of the truth. The only reason championship pressures, or any pressures, really, cause racers to lose focus is because they want to win so bad it's all they can think about. These men aren't soft. They're gnarly. They're the kinds of people you don't want to compete against at anything. Kind of ironically, there's an- other guy who used to have this problem maybe even worse than Eli Tomac: 2017 450 Supercross Champion Ryan Dungey. Early in his career, about 10 years ago, he folded up bad in a 250 title chase against Jason Lawrence. "I was young..." Dungey said this past May at his retirement announcement. "[That year, against Lawrence] I'm trying to learn all this stuff. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to win a race one year and the next year how I'm going to win the champi- onship!? So boom, boom, it just escalated from one to the other and here we are in the thick of it. There's an opportunity [at a title]. It's the first one, and you want to hang onto it. You do everything you can. I didn't handle it the right way, mentally..." But here's the thing: It's all about how you handle your failures. That's really what life is about, not just racing. And Dungey sorted it out. "I will say, that was one of the best years for me in my ca- reer," Dungey said. "Although I crumpled under the pressure, I failed and this and that...I don't even like to call it a failure—it was just a learning experience. That forever, for the rest of my career, mentally just put me in a better place and made me stronger. That was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. It sucked at the moment, but hindsight is 20/20..." So, yes, Tomac has struggled a bit, but you'd be a sucker to think he's going to keep doing it. If anything, getting the monkey off his back with this outdoor title might be the thing that makes him almost unstoppable for the perceivable future. CN