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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VOL. 55 ISSUE 12 MARCH 27, 2018 P121 Marquez allowed that "after you race to the limit, it is nice if you can talk together." Dovi was a little more analytical, admitting it was "not always possible, de- pending on the way people are racing, but it is important for me to have this [good] relation." If this artificial sweetener sparked a note of mischief in Rossi, he kept it hidden. I was dying to ask him if he shared the lovey-dovey imperative, looking back over his past relations with Biaggi, Gibernau, Lorenzo et al, but my hands-up waving was studiously ignored (I like to think because I am the black sheep of this imaginary "family"), and I never got another chance. So I spent most of the week- end glowering angrily, seeking relief by remembering racing times when rivals were rivals, and didn't mind who knew it. I first got interested in rac- ing way back when so-called teammates Phil Read and Bill Ivy were openly at each other's throats, much to their employer Yamaha's dismay. In the end, Read earned Yamaha's rejection when he turned his back on an internal agreement in 1968, a dominant year for the tuning-fork factory. The plan was for Read to take the 250 title, and Ivy the 125. But Read broke ranks after Ivy had problems, and took both of them. I laughed along with all other cynics when Barry Sheene wielded his razor wit to belittle his rivals. There were too many examples to count. To get on the wrong side of Barry all you had to do was line up on the same starting grid. Here's one, aimed at irritatingly fast new Suzuki teammate Pat Hennen, in his weekly column. "If you pay pea- nuts, you get a monkey." ("Some monkey," Sheene's friend Steve Parrish told me later. "This one had horns.") I vividly recall how Lawson and Gardner could hardly bear to be in the same room. Indeed, the ever-independent Lawson wasted little time making even false friends—his repudiation of a proposed riders' strike in Brazil was both high-minded and spectacular. "Whatever you guys decide, I am going to do the op- posite," he told a fractious riders' meeting. And how about, especially in their early AMA champion- ship days, the sizzling enmity between Rainey and Schwantz, each willing to kill the other. Then the open disdain to John Kocinski by pretty much every- one. Those were the days. But you don't have to go too far back to find recent ex- amples, as well as the Rossi cases above. Casey Stoner for instance was never once to mince words or sugar the pill. Who can forget his comment to Rossi after the Ducati-mounted superstar had knocked him off at Jerez. "What happened?" asked Casey. "Did you run out of talent?" Much more recently, Rossi's attack on Marquez in Malaysia at the end of 2015. He accused the Spaniard of helping Lo- renzo to the title by beating the Spaniard in Australia, taking five points from him. Rossi's reason- ing was inexplicable, but the emotion and aggression entirely understandable and admirably sincere. Modern racing, however, seems intent on keeping real- ity at bay. As for Dr. Pangloss, everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. And if this doesn't sit comfortably with the actuality of racing—a truly tough and frequently brutal contest, with every other rider just somebody to beat—that's too bad. As I frequently reassure my- self, at least they still have a race on Sunday. And what a race, desperately fierce and close, with yet another of Marquez's frankly almost lunatic last-corner attacks, and yet another win for super-calm Dovi. And if they chatted happily afterwards for the cameras, only one of them really meant it. CN