2023 must be the year in which the return of the king of MotoGP takes place, the definitive one, the one in which a Marc Márquez fully recovered, with his injury forgotten and with the desire and strength to be able to fight for the World Championship, if Honda allows it, and put on the show that has always characterized him. To that end he is preparing this winter and to that end he has traveled the hard road that has brought him here and that he reviews in detail in an extensive interview with GQ magazine.
The ilerdense man considers that his “mentality and ambition” led him to rush his comeback attempt just four days after fracturing the humerus of his right arm in Jerez 2020, but also that this has given him everything he has achieved in MotoGP, for which “the scale is balanced”. Despite competing in races in 2021 and 2022, he was not the same, “I didn’t have my head in the competition”. “There is a moment when I say to my doctors: ‘Here something is happening in this arm, I’m going backwards. I’m crushing myself and I’m getting worse every time, ”he recalls.
“Competing to compete does not make sense” for Marc, which is why they concluded that the best thing was a fourth operation after racing in Mugello to correct a 34-degree rotation in his humerus. Although he won three races with his arm like this, he couldn’t enjoy it: “I would win and I would cry because of the pain that I suffered constantly and that I could not forget.” It was the last attempt, as he promised his grandfather, one “of the supporters of leaving him”: “I told him: ‘Let me try, there is a solution.’ I tried her out and she has changed the whole movie.”
This time yes, things were done well, with the intervention in the operating room and with the times that Márquez set to recover correctly, without taking steps back, something that his doctor had to make very clear to him: “I told him: ‘Look , I am a wild animal that you have right now inside a cage. When you open it, I’m going to run away, so open it only when you see me ready, when you know there’s no risk.’ I asked him like that because if he tells me that in a month or a month and a half I can test the bike, I know I’m going to test it”.
“It is hard for me to see the risk, and that is sometimes a strong point and other times, a weak point”, The six-time MotoGP champion acknowledges one of his main qualities, taking more risks than others, although he already knows where he should do it and where not: “I have learned that I don’t have to take risks in the way of facing a recovery, but I will continue to risk the same on the track. I will always assume that risk, because the day I stop doing it I will start to slow down and then it will be time to go home”.
“Don’t touch me what you don’t have to touch me…”
In addition to everything he has gone through with his injury, the Spaniard also talks about another of the key points in his career, the beginning of his enormous rivalry with Rossi in 2015, in line with what will be seen in Marc Marquez: All In, his documentary for Prime Video. Specifically, they ask him about the last race in Valencia in which he finished second behind Lorenzo, which gave the Majorcan the title to the detriment of the Italian: “Overtaking him (Jorge) meant taking a very big risk.”
“Whoever wants to see it black will see it black, and whoever wants to see it white will see it white, but whoever wants to put themselves in the situation of a 22-year-old boy who has lived through all that, will see it grey”, summarizes Marc about that and leaves “a phrase that defines it very well”: “The one about ‘I have character, but more eggs’. Do not touch me what you do not have to touch me because then it will be worse. As some have been able to verify…