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/917325
P206 CN III OBSERVATION CHECK BY KIT PALMER W hen this issue of Cycle News magazine hits the press—okay, when we hit the "live" button these days—it will be my 33rd "issue 50." Around here, issue 50 means the big one. It's the final issue of the year and we pack- age it with a few extra stories and interviews to keep you busy reading while we take our tradi- tional year-end two-week break; it's a tradition that Cycle News has been doing for a long time, long before I ever showed up as associate editor in 1983. Actually, when I was hired, my official title, for a short time, was editor, but I was far from being the actual editor in the true meaning—that job belonged to the senior editor, and he was the man who hired this young kid that was barely old enough to buy a six-pack of Coors Light, but more importantly at the time, rent a car, a necessity when covering faraway races that involved getting on a 727 to get there. That man was Dale Brown who I am still to this day grateful for taking a big chance on me, by offering me Karel Kramer's former position at the CN office in Long Beach, California. Karel had left CN for a new magazine— Dirt Rider—that had just arrived on the scene. Thanks to Mr. Brown, on September 1, 1983, I officially, and proudly, became a member of the Cycle News editorial staff, which was at that time made up of just two other editors—David Edwards and Lance Bryson. Not long after I arrived, just a few issues later in fact, Edwards took an editorial position at Cycle World and eventually became the magazine's editor, and Bryson, who was also the senior editor of ATV News—a sister publication of Cycle News—at the time of my CN arrival, is now the main man behind the scenes of AMA EnduroCross. Blink, and it's 34 years later and my title is editor, once again, and issue 50 number-33 for me is about to "go out the door." Yes, I realize that the numbers don't add up but in 2010 we did not officially print an issue 50; that was our transition time between going from print to digital and we did not produce an issue for a few months. Dur- ing my tenure at CN, we didn't always name a rider of the year like we do now in our year-end issue-50 special. The first one that I remember, or was at least involved with, happened in 1992, when we named Wayne Rainey Cycle News Rider of the Year. Before then, I remember Luis McKay, aka Phantom Duck of the Desert, getting a lot of CN accolades. Since Rainey, however, we haven't missed a beat in selecting who we feel deserves to be our ROY winner, which we don't take lightly. After all, we're not just selecting one rider from one genre of motor- cycling, but all genres. Select- ing someone deserving to be CN's Rider of the Year is some- times a no-brainer—an obvious choice (Jeremy McGrath, Ricky Graham, Ricky Carmichael, IT NEVER GETS OLD