THE YOUNGEST-EVER rider to net a MotoGP world championship in his rookie year, and now just one short of his arch-rival Valentino Rossi's trophy count, motorsport child prodigy Marc Márquez is probably still recovering from the hangover from celebrating his latest title – which he is guaranteed to take home, whatever happens in the final four races of the 2019 season.
“This has been a dream year, almost perfect,” says the 26-year-old from Cervera in Catalunya's land-locked Lleida province.
The 'almost' is largely thanks to a tough winter during which the Repsol Honda star was unable to ride at all due to having to rest his injured shoulder after surgery.
But now with eight world championships under his belt, of which six are in the master category of MotoGP, Márquez has little to complain about.
And although he is hoping his victory on the Buriram circuit in Bangkok, Thailand which sealed his 2019 title is just another step forward in a career which has barely started, Márquez says he is 'not counting' trophies as he is well aware that his crown could be whipped from his head at any moment.
“I like to live from race to race,” Márquez, whose first MotoGP championship came at the end of his first year at the sharp end, aged just 20, in 2013.
“I said [the day before Buriram] that my intention was to win at the weekend, or at least, to attempt it, and I did attempt it, right to the last bend.
“But I prefer to live in the present – I've never become obsessed with numbers of titles or with names.
“I'm conscious that, at any moment, a new rival could appear and knock me off my pedestal. I'm living the dream, but you never know whether it's all going to end next year, or the following...this year we've managed to win lots of races and we'll carry on trying to do so, but you never know whether another rider or another factory is suddenly going to start making it harder for you.”
Exactly, in fact, as Márquez himself did: Italian veteran Valentino Rossi dominated the top spot with an unbroken run of championship wins from 2001 to 2005 inclusive, and with the exception of the USA's Nicky Hayden the following year, the world title was shared equally between Rossi, Spain's Jorge Lorenzo and Australia's Casey Stoner until Márquez burst onto the scene, fresh from his epic Moto2 championship in 2012.
Youth prodigy with an (almost) unbroken run of wins
The young biker was just 14 when he started out in motorcycle racing on a KTM RR with team Monlau Competición in 2007, and was already riding alongside the likes of Tito Rabat, Dani Pedrosa, and Pablo Nieto, son of the late legend Ángel Nieto who died in a quad accident in Ibiza two years ago.
Márquez was 15 when he became the youngest Spanish rider in history to reach the podium in a world championship race, at the British Grand Prix in Donington Park in June 2008 – a somewhat accident-prone season he was unable to finish due to breaking various bones and ligaments in his arm and leg – then, at 16, became the youngest Spanish rider to achieve pole position, at Le Mans in May 2009.
This, his penultimate year in 125cc, saw Márquez leap from 13th to eighth in the world championship standings, before netting his first title in 2010.
Since shifting up a gear to Moto2 and then MotoGP, the now near-legendary rider's lowest position in the world championship standings has been third – following the controversial back-of-the-grid start which put Rossi out of the running in 2015 and gave Lorenzo his third title – with one reserve championship at Moto2 in 2011, the only two occasions in a decade he has failed to reach the top.
Now with four titles on the trot, Márquez is quietly confident about the 2020 season and, if he clinches this, too, he will be level-pegging with his one-time hero and now sworn enemy Rossi; to equal the world record in MotoGP championship wins, he will also have to ride to victory in 2021 to match the eight scooped up by the all-time king of two-wheeled racing, Italy's Giacomo Agostini – seven of which were consecutive, between 1966 and 1972.
Could he do it? Well, even if he does not want to count his chickens, Márquez believes anything less would be a failure.
“My aims for 2020 will be the same as always – if, by this time next year, we're not at the top of the standings, it'll be a season where we've fallen short of our objectives,” he says.
New rivals pose future challenges
Of course, as is the case in most sports at world-class level, MotoGP participants 'grow old' rapidly: whilst, at 27, Márquez will by no means be a geriatric in motorcycle racing terms by next year, he will have aged significantly since his début year when he left fans stunned at the new and unstoppable kid on the block they saw exploding onto their screens from almost nowhere.
And he is already mindful he could be about to meet his match in younger blood.
“This year, France's Fabio Quartararo [third picture, by Yamaha Racing] has been a 100% revelation – in Misano and in Thailand I had a real struggle to beat him,” Márquez recognises.
“He's going to win a race sooner or later and I'd put money on its being before the end of the year. Next year he's going to be one of my biggest rivals for the championship title and I think Yamaha [Quartararo's team] will be taking that very much into account.
“There are at least eight bikes on the circuit right now very capable of winning races, so I'll have to keep learning from the veterans – and also from the younger riders – and reinventing myself.”
One lesson Márquez is already learning is that he cannot relax, even having only lost one world title since he started out in MotoGP.
“I paid for my overconfidence in Austin [Texas] earlier this year,” he remembers.
“I was in the lead by a clear four seconds; it was almost a victory in the bag. But I got too complacent and I fell off.”
Who's who in Spanish MotoGP
Few sports at the peak of their category are as heavily-dominated by Spaniards as MotoGP – and although Italians (helped largely by Giacomo Agostini and Valentino Rossi) followed by Brits (Geoff Duke, John Surtees, Mike Hailwood, Phil Read, Barry Sheene and the first-ever, Leslie Graham) have won the most world championships, the UK has not done so in 42 years (Barry Sheene in 1977) and the last Italian other than Rossi to do so was Franco Uncini in 1982.
The USA and, more recently, Australia, have been almost as successful as Britain and Italy, but Spain began to cause all four nations to tremble in their boots when it took the top title for the first time exactly 20 years ago, with Àlex Crivillé clinching his sole championship trophy.
Whilst the only Spaniard other than Márquez to have made it to the top spot since Crivillé is Mallorca-born Jorge Lorenzo (fourth picture), his own track record is nothing to be sniffed at: before his young former team-mate from Cervera took the limelight, the 32-year-old from Palma was the one to watch, snaffling the titles in 2010 and 2012 and then, through the disputed sanction that blocked Rossi's eighth win, in 2015.
In fact, the Ducados Bend on the Jerez circuit was renamed the 'Lorenzo Bend' in 2013, and the character Jorge in the video game Halo: Reach is named ater him – he wore a replica helmet from the series 10 years ago at the Grand Prix in Cheste, Valencia.
MotoGP Legend medallist of 2018 Dani Pedrosa, who graces the International Motorcycling Federation Hall of Fame, is probably the third-most famous Spaniard at the upper end of two-wheeled motorsport at present and, although he has yet to win a world championship in MotoGP, has scooped up three in lower categories – in 125cc, in 2003, and the next two years consecutively in 250cc.
Born in Castellar del Vallès (Barcelona province), the 34-year-old Red Bull KTM member was, in fact, the second-youngest rider in history to win a 125cc world title, aged 18, after Italy's Loris Capirossi in 1990, who was then 17 years and five months old.
Márquez had more to worry about in 2015 than Rossi alone – Rookie of the Year Award winner from Figueres (Girona province) Maverick Viñales was showing great promise, with six finishes in the top 10, riding to victory for the first time in MotoGP at the British Grand Prix the following year and looking set to become the new prodigy for 2017.
Viñales, now 24, became the first rider in 13 years to win on his début race with team Yamaha when he clinched a victory in Qatar in 2017, which he followed up with a resounding first place in Argentina, leading the bookies to start taking bets on his dethroning Márquez – but despite his third win of the year, in Le Mans, a crash-out in the USA and a disappointing sixth in Jerez saw him drop into third place in the standings.
The last two seasons have been tough for Viñales, although by no means unsuccessful: with five and six podiums respectively, one win in each and two fourth places in the world standings on the trot, it could be we have not yet witnessed the full extent of this up-and-coming young rider's capabilities.
One of the young riders Marc Márquez hopes to learn from is 23-year-old Álex Rins, from Barcelona – who shares the defending champion's younger brother's first name and age, although Álex Márquez is still in Moto3. Rins won the Grand Prix of the Americas this season (shown in fifth picture), won Rookie of the Year Award in Moto2 in 2015, and is currently third in the standings in MotoGP, pending the end-of-season results.
Rins is paired with fellow rookie Joan Mir on team Suzuki – the 22-year-old from Palma de Mallorca who won the 2017 world championship in Moto3. He has yet to make it to the podium, but his promising start and lightning-quick rise through the ranks to MotoGP in such a short time means he could prove to be a force to be reckoned with as he matures in the sport.
Keeping it in the family, the Espargaró brothers Pol and Aleix, from Granollers (Barcelona province) are both on the MotoGP circuit right now – but on rival teams. Pol, 28 (KTM) won the Moto2 championship in 2013 and also the Suzuka 8 Hours in 2015 with the UK's Bradley Smith and Japan's Katsuyuki Nakasuga, then again with the latter and with Britain's Alex Lowes in 2016. Last year, he became the first-ever KTM rider to finish on the podium in MotoGP, with a third place at the Valencia Grand Prix in Cheste. Aleix, 30, rides for Aprilia Racing Team Gresini, but is marginally less successful: his highest championship standing position was seventh, in 2014, the year when he gained his first pole and second podium position – the first being in 2011 in Moto2.
Esteve 'Tito' Rabat, 30, came into MotoGP relatively late, at age 27, two years after winning the Moto2 world championship with a record 346 points. Despite 13 race wins at this level, he has not yet achieved a podium place in MotoGP, with his first top 10 position of a total of six so far being in his début year in Argentina, which he last managed in June this year at the Catalunya Grand Prix. His highest race position in MotoGP to date - seventh - was also in Argentina, in April 2018.
The last race of every season is always at the Ricardo Tormo Circuit in Cheste, Valencia, which will be on Sunday, November 17 this year, but before then, the 28 riders currently competing in MotoGP will be revving up at the Twin Ring in Motegi for the Japanese Grand Prix (Sunday, October 20), Philip Island in Ventnor, Victoria for the Australian Grand Prix (Sunday, October 27), and at the International Circuit in Sepang for the Malaysian Grand Prix (Sunday, November 3).
