By Emilio Pérez de Rozas
There is no other reading. We are before the only pilot that exists in the world, the only one, I’m sorry, that will do the possible and the impossible, the legal and almost, almost, the illegal, the difficult and the unprecedented, the easy and the twisted, comfortable and improbable, on the asphalt and on the wire, to pass you, to win you, to overcome you, to defeat you, to get you off the podium, to beat you.
If Marc Márquez has shown anything since he was a child, very young, he is born to win you. To whatever. He does not want to lose, they say, or in training. And if something has shown the double champion of Cervera is that he never gives up. And, much less, in the last corner. And much less in Jerez. And much less to reach a curve that, perhaps, would have wanted for him, with his name, and it turns out that, a day earlier, they gave it to the champion, the tremendous champion, who was ahead, Jorge Lorenzo.
As Valentino Rossi, who is god, counts, right? “If Marc (Márquez) has taught us these years, he is the only rider who does not protest when you overtake him, he simply tries to give you back the overtaking.” And that’s what Márquez has been doing since he flattened swampy terrain, the minefield of MotoGP. Not only has he become the precocious child who announced, with great fanfare, happy to have obtained his signing, Shuhei Nakamoto, but he has sung to the thousand winds that went for them. And he achieved the youngest pole position. And he was the youngest winner. And he is the precocious leader.
In Qatar, he said he had learned a lot from Valentino Rossi. In Austin, he explained that he had learned horrors from Dani Pedrosa. And, apparently this Sunday, in Jerez, he learned a lot, only until he got to the last corner, Jorge Lorenzo, who was shoved as Michael Doohan abused Àlex Crivillé in 1996, as Valentino Rossi defeated Sete Gibernau in the 2005 and how Lorenzo attacked and beat Pedrosa in 2010.
The first thing the World Cup has learned, the whole paddock, is that Marquez has come to stay, to win, to win. Already the god Rossi said in the second test of Sepang (Malaysia) this winter: “Today I just realized, seeing Marc on the track, that Márquez has come to win the title, but I am referring to the title of this year”. What a wink is the boss, whose company, what a pillo!, Has already been done with the sale of shirts of the two-time champion of Cervera.
If Lorenzo, who had occasion to learn in the skin of Rossi and Pedrosa, did not realize that behind him he was carrying a true cannibal, it is Lorenzo’s problem. The whole world knows that if Márquez is the third race of the World Cup or the last one, you open the door, he goes to your kitchen. And that was what happened. “I had already settled for third place, but I saw Jorge open the door for me and I thought, try!” Test for Márquez is as if the traffic light went off, as if he saw the checkered flag at the end of the curve, as if he smelled the podium.
It was not necessary the lesson of Jerez to know that we are before the most daring kid we have ever seen, ever, on the asphalt. “This is not tennis, this is racing; you have to swallow this, “said the Dutchman Wilvo Zeelenberg after the suicidal maneuver, or not so suicidal (” I saw myself on the floor “, recognized Lorenzo), of Márquez, who thus became the precocious leader of the MotoGP World Championship. Because Marquez is here to stay. Even if it’s pushing. Or pushing. Before crashing, pushing, frightening, he already showed in Qatar that it was big, huge, and dangerous. And in Austin it was fast, a rocket. In Jerez it has confirmed, once again, that it ignores what is ‘reverential respect’. He is a collector of deeds. And he lacked this: to win the bichampion of the MotoGP world in the curve that bears his name.
Lorenzo denied him the greeting. It is a position. I simply kept it to myself. Those are things that are decided between the white lines, on the black belt that they call asphalt. There are too many races left for there to be no retribution. Remember the Rossi thing: “Marc does not protest, he gives it back to you”. It is Marc who chooses the weapons. Or so it seems.
And he never cheated on us: he plays at that.
Motocuatro.com
