Márquez: ‘This surgery wasn’t for pleasure – this is to win’

This time thirty years ago Mick Doohan was recovering from his career-changing accident, at Assen in June 1992.

Doohan came within hours of having his broken right leg amputated, because local surgeons had botched surgery on the tibia, so the leg was dying and “smelling like a bad butcher’s shop”. Then they thinned out his blood so much, in the hope of getting blood into the leg, that his internal organs were at risk of shutting down.

That’s why Italian Dr Claudio Costa flew in to kidnap Doohan in a Learjet ambulance and take him to his clinic in Italy.

“A week later I noticed a lot of very black skin,” Doohan remembers. “The doctors took a spoon-type instrument and started removing it until they got down to the tendons and bones and the metal plates and screws.”

Costa knew he had to get radical, so he sewed Doohan’s legs together – the good one would save the bad one. Ten days later the legs were separated and a few weeks after that Doohan was racing at the Brazilian GP.

On the night before the race, the terribly infected leg (he obviously shouldn’t have been allowed to race – would he be now?) tried to cry enough but Doohan still raced.

“I woke up and the leg had basically exploded with all the infection. All this pus oozed out over the bed, so Costa came in to flush it out with saline solution. He’d pour a litre through this hole, like a big boil-type thing, then flush it back out to get rid of all the crap. That was the night before the race – it wasn’t the best of nights.”

“Why don’t you give up, you’ve won enough, you’ve got enough?”

There are no gory scenes like that in the Marc Márquez: ALL IN documentary series, but the suffering is still there, mostly hidden from view, because who would want to watch an arm getting sawn in half?

The series is excellent and is close as you’ll ever get to seeing the real anybody nowadays. The cameras basically have access all areas – save the operating theatre – so you get to see much deeper into the man behind the rider than you’ll ever do during a race weekend. On the other hand, this is his sponsor’s film, not work of documentary journalism, but that’s the way it is now, across any sport. So, like I said, it’s as close you’ll get.

What you witness is a man still on fire – after 13 years of racing that’s won him nine world titles and three years of pain, misery and disappointment.

The main question of the documentary, spoken by his grandad during a family lunch, with grandkids Marc and Alex and their mum, is: why don’t you give up, you’ve won enough, you’ve got enough? You should live a calm life…

Can you imagine Marc Márquez living a calm life? The series is a whirl of racetracks, team meetings, team dinners, surgeons, consultations rooms, hospital wards, gyms full of torture gear, training on bicycles, training on motorbikes, private jets, hanging with his gang at the brothers’ Le Corbusier-style mansion in Madrid and lots of pain and moments of dark thoughts.

After the fourth operation on his arm, in June last year, he’s wheeled out of surgery, still drugged up to the eyeballs, with all his power gone, his fire extinguished, like Samson shorn of his locks. He lies there weak, like you’ve never seen him, defeated like you’ve never seen him, his face greyish green, his voice little more than a croak.

No wonder there are times when even Márquez decides that it isn’t worth it, that he may as well retire. His fire becomes nothing more than a pile of dying embers, then it’s raging again, like someone threw petrol at it.

And every time he reaches the crossroads where most people would turn towards a comfortable life as a retired hero, Márquez goes the other way and comes back for more.

When he talks about when he was going to quit – because what’s the point of continuing if you’re in pain and can’t ride at 100%? – he twice wells up, stops talking, only just holds back the tears and finally continues with a voice cracked by emotion.

Like many racers, Márquez would struggle to find life worth living without the kick of several hundred horsepower up his backside and the joys of waging war on the racetrack.

Most racers are the same. For a while. I only had one bad injury when I raced – ten days on my back after mashing up a knee. It was horrible. I’d just started really having fun in my life, had a nice girlfriend, a bit of money. I was missing life, missing my mates, missing going down the pub, missing having a laugh. I didn’t want to be in that place again, so for my last couple of years in racing I knocked the throttle back a degree or three, never quite enjoying it as much, because I knew I wasn’t throwing my life into it: death or glory!

And then there’s Márquez: hundreds of crashes, one at over 200mph, innumerable injuries, a dozen or two operations, some of them big ones, and yet he still wants it and will twist the throttle as far as it goes.

His desire is astonishing and he needs everyone else’s to be the same, which is why he’s lucky to have brother Alex and a tight-knit support crew around him. The doc doesn’t record his meeting with senior HRC management at last year’s Austrian GP, but he tells us what he told them, “I want to get back to the top with you. But if it’s not with you, I will find a way”. And, while revealing the ugly scar on his upper right arm, he told them, “This wasn’t for pleasure – this is to win”.

The doc doesn’t only highlight his comeback. Márquez admits that on the racetrack, he’s “an asshole”. Smash cut to his crew chief Santi Hernandez, giggling, “He said it!”.

To me, Márquez has always been the Ayrton Senna of motorcycle racing, prepared to win by any means necessary.

“If you no longer go for a gap that exists you are no longer a racing driver,” said the three-time Formula 1 champion.

“I have a racer, killer, winner, mentality. I like risky!”

In fact, to me, the best motorcycle racers go for gaps even when they don’t quite exist and make them exist, just as Valentino Rossi, Marco Simoncelli, Márquez and all the other riders that look for an edge beyond the edge happily do. This doesn’t always require bumping and barging, it can be good old-fashioned intimidation: you show your rival your front wheel and if he knows how far you’re prepared to go, he’ll make way for you. It’s a nasty business, always has been.

“I have a racer, killer, winner, mentality,” says Márquez. And, “I like risky!”. Just in case you hadn’t worked that out already.

Like George Orwell, the author of 1984, wrote: “Sport is war without the shooting”.

Márquez also talks about 2015 – MotoGP’s most infamous days – as well his relationships with Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo and Repsol Honda team-mate Dani Pedrosa.

He was always going to fall out with Rossi. They were too similar and they were both chasing the same thing. Márquez’s mum reveals that after Sepang 2015 she cleared all the Rossi miniatures from his bedroom and put them in a box, which soon disappeared. I wonder where they went: were they chucked in the bin or burned on a ceremonial fire? I must ask the next time I see him.

He tells us he never liked Lorenzo, when they were racing. And he admits to tensions with Pedrosa, from the moment he graduated to MotoGP in 2013. “You’ve got to make your team-mate’s life impossible, if you can,” he says.

Just like three decades earlier, when three-time MotoGP world champion Wayne Rainey spoke about his Marlboro Yamaha Roberts team-mate John Kocinski, who never won a MotoGP title.

“I started working on John from the very first lap of the very first test,” said Rainey. “I always made sure that at the end of the day I was quicker than him. I didn’t care what it took for that to happen. I knew if I could do that enough to John, it would be enough for him to stop thinking about me and start blaming everything else.”

All top racers are there to destroy their rivals, starting with their team-mates.

The doc also covers Márquez’s split from manager and former 125cc world champion Emilio Alzamora, who nurtured his protégé from childhood, but isn’t the kind of guy that understands (or wants to) the ways of the modern media world, and introduces new manager Jaime Martínez, who had been with Red Bull for 11 years and obviously wants to break Márquez into the mainstream.

There’s no doubt that MotoGP has lost a lot of its sparkle since Márquez has been away from the track or not quite there when he has been there. There’s less overtaking, due to technological ‘progress’, but also because Márquez hasn’t been around, firing it up the inside, boot rubber smoking on the asphalt, rear end kicked sideways, front end twitching this way and that.

He’s like Kevin Schwantz was in the 1980s and 1990s – when he’s out there, fully fit, anything can happen. And there’s nothing more you can ask from any sportsperson.

And that’s the hope for 2023 – that with his right humerus rotated 40 degrees – Márquez will be able to sit on his RC213V the way he needs to, so he can ride like he did until 2.45pm on 19 July 2020. During that race, like several others before, Márquez looked like he had been put in the wrong group on a track day – a fast rider out with the intermediate riders.

Or as Danilo Petrucci put it after Márquez had taken pole at the 2019 Brno GP, during a rainstorm, while using slicks, 2.5 seconds faster than anyone else, “I don’t understand how the track was dry for Marc, but not for the rest of us”.

Will the rebuilt Márquez be able to win more races and world titles? I have absolutely no doubt that he still has the desire and talent to win again and also the will to take more risks. As Lorenzo says, during an interview filmed only months ago, “He’s the only one that isn’t scared”.

What I don’t know is whether Márquez will be absolutely back to full strength, because he needs a lot of muscle to ride the way he likes to ride. And neither do we know whether the latest RC213V will be good enough for him to fling it up the inside of the Ducatis. Of course, the bike doesn’t need to be quite as good as the dominant Desmosedici, because Márquez still has the speed to win with a smallish technical deficit, but the gap needs to be smaller than it was last year.

You should watch ALL IN. It’s good or better than the Andrea Dovizioso doc from a few years ago, also by Red Bull, and it will tell you a lot you didn’t know about MotoGP.

Marc Márquez: ALL IN is available on Amazon Prime.