“For Marc Márquez this latest operation is his last roll of the dice” Mat Oxley
MotoGP has lost its two greatest stars this season: Valentino Rossi, who has switched to cars, and Marc Márquez, who is once again recuperating from major surgery. Márquez has suffered many injuries during his career but this latest operation is his last roll of the dice. If it doesn’t work, he’ll be forced to retire.
The Spaniard, arguably the greatest rider of all time, dominated MotoGP from the moment he arrived in the spring of 2013 to the moment he crashed out of the season-opening 2020 Spanish Grand Prix. During seven seasons he won the championship six times, only missing out in 2015 due to machinery issues.
That Jerez fall broke his right humerus (upper arm), a complex injury that required three operations – including lots of metalwork and a bone graft – and a nine-month lay off. He returned in April 2021, won his first race three months later and two more shortly after that. It seemed he was back to his best and would challenge for this year’s MotoGP title.
However, all was not well. MotoGP riders contort their bodies into extreme positions to control their motorcycles through corners, especially the right side of the upper body, because while hanging far off their machines, scraping their right elbow on the road, their right hand must be able to work the throttle and front brake with great finesse.
This is why two of Márquez’s three victories following his return were at anticlockwise circuits, where his right-arm injury was less problematic. In right-handers he never felt comfortable and couldn’t use his right elbow as an outrigger to save crashes when he felt the front tyre slipping away from him.
At the first few races of 2022 it was obvious that all was not well. The arm was no stronger than it had been at the end of 2021 and he continued to struggle in right-handers. In June he underwent a fourth surgery on the arm, which would keep him out of racing for the remainder of 2022. There was no point continuing if he couldn’t ride at his maximum. Motorcycle racing is a cruel, brutal sport, but this latest of many surgeries was somewhat barbaric. Márquez had a complicated humeral osteotomy, which involved cutting the humerus bone in two, rotating it 30 degrees and plating it together.
“Riding like I am at the moment I cannot continue,” he said before going under the knife. “If the operation is a success, then we will see how I can ride a bike. This will be the last chance to improve my physical condition. Having the operation is the correct decision for my future, but it’s not like I’ll have the operation and I’ll win again. No. The target of the operation is to try to enjoy riding and racing again and have a normal athlete’s life: training and forgetting the painkillers and all these things.”
“The target of the operation is to try to enjoy riding again”
The road back from this surgery is long. The 29-year-old had to keep the arm fully immobilised for six weeks to ensure the two halves of the humerus had started to reunite before he began the lightest of rehab regimes.
Márquez hopes he may be able to return to riding a MotoGP bike during the championship’s single post-season test at Valencia, Spain, in November, but it’s more likely that he will have to wait until the first 2023 pre-season tests next February. Assuming the operation and recovery are a success he will start the new season in March. In other words, after another nine-month lay off.
There’s never been a top rider in the history of grand prix motorcycling who’s been through such hard times, trying to fight back from injury. Mick Doohan, MotoGP champion for five consecutive years from 1994, came close to having a leg amputated following a crash in practice at the 1992 Dutch GP before achieving his successes, but he was never off a grand prix bike for more than a couple of months.
Maintaining the desire to race again and win again through those many months of lying on operating tables, lying in hospital beds and spending week after week in the gym, slowly rebuilding strength, trying not to overstress the still healing bone, is something incredible. But Márquez lives to race and won’t surrender until there’s no alternative left. Will he be able to return to peak performance next year? No one knows yet, not even the man himself.
Márquez’s Repsol Honda team manager Alberto Puig also went through hell, after mangling his left leg when he crashed at Le Mans’ 160mph Turn 1 in 1995, but even that wasn’t enough to make a successful return.
“The injury was a disaster,” recalls the 55-year-old. “Everything in the leg was destroyed. The nerves were cut, the ankle and toes were fused and the bone got infected. I returned to racing, taking one and a half grams of antibiotics every day for three years. Then they fitted an external fixator. Then they removed the tibia and gave me a graft, from a cow. Finally I understood that I couldn’t be competitive any more because now the leg only works as a stick.
“Later I realised that also I had got some fear from the injury. I was no longer capable of racing from a physical point of view, but also from a psychological point of view. It may sound strange, but to be a rider you sometimes need to be an idiot. You just have to race the bike and if you think too much you delay all the processes and the lap time never comes. I had to move on.”
By this time next year we should know if it’s time for Márquez to move on.
Mat Oxley has covered motorcycle racing for many years – and also has the distinction of being an Isle of Man TT winner
Follow Mat on Twitter @matoxley