Unnecessarily Fast, or Unnecessarily Dangerous?

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.” This truism comes from boxing, but applies to all walks of life. Innovative MotoGP superstar Marc Marquez, however, adds a new twist.

- By Michael Scott

“The faster they are, the more often they fall.”

It’s easy to make light of crashing, when you crash as often as he does. He even joked at round one in Qatar that he obviously wasn’t back to his full form “because I only fell off once”.

His fifth crash of the new season, on the morning of the Indonesian GP, was far from humorous. A very fast and very brutal high-side that left him visibly dazed and ruled him out of the race.

Worse followed. The concussion diagnosed on the day became more complicated, with vision problems recurring on the flight home. Back in Spain and straight to the specialist, and he was diagnosed with a return of the double-vision syndrome that struck last year, ruling him out of two races and leading to a second successive winter of recuperation.

The same problem almost ended his career back in Moto2 days in 2011. The threat remains … But why should a rider of such manifest genius crash so often? Five times, in the first two races!

Pushing over the limit has always been his way of finding out exactly where it is, and he does it better than any other rider in history. So even after having missed a full 2020 season and much of 2021 after his seriously broken arm at Jerez, he could still make light of it. That was, after all, his first significant fracture in more than ten years of GP racing, and a huge number of falls.