While last weekend’s title success was obviously the culmination of six long, hard years of blood, sweat and pain for Marc Marquez, it represented more than just a return from injury to take yet another MotoGP crown.
It also marks the completion of the 32-year-old’s transformation from singularly-focused racer into someone who as a result of all that he’s endured has come out the other side more human and more relatable than ever before.
While egotistical perhaps isn’t quite the right word to use to describe him back when he was winning world championships the way that the rest of us win board games, it’s fair to say that he was certainly a cocky character.
Success was taken for granted. Wins came at the click of his finger. No one ever questioned him, let alone Marc himself. He was an unstoppable force of nature, and even onboard a Honda that was already showing signs of becoming not very good, he was quite clearly going to keep winning until he got bored with it.
Obviously that all came crashing to a halt at Jerez in July 2020. The invincible superhero could, in fact, bleed just like the rest of us, and for the very first time in his life Marquez was left facing a very different reality as he battled with physical and emotional pain to find his way back to MotoGP competitiveness.
But even amid that, there didn’t (at least on the surface) seem to be much in the way of a different character emerging. At least initially, following the arm injury in 2020, it looked like what we all expected it to be at the time: a temporary setback for someone who’d made a full recovery in quick order.
That was derailed, of course, by Marc’s own impatience - something where perhaps those hints of ego came back into play. He rushed back, confident in the belief that he’d be able to manage the situation. And it bit him in the ass, spectacularly. Further damage and post-operative complications meant he spent all the remainder of that bizarre COVID-struck season on the sofa rather than the RC213V.
Yet while it might have meant that 2020 was a write-off and 2021, hampered both by the lingering effects of his injuries and, at the end of the season, by a fresh recurrence of the double vision issues that cost him a Moto2 title in 2011 following a training crash, it didn’t do much to change the attitude of a guy who wanted to get back to winning ways as soon as humanly possible.
That was abundantly clear when we did our first big sit down interview together after the 2020 accident, during the 2022 pre-season in the pitlane at a brand new Mandalika circuit in Indonesia.
Fresh from finishing 2021 in seventh in the standings after missing the final two rounds (but winning the two races before that), you’d have perhaps been expecting Marquez to temper his ambitions.
But rather, the guy I ended up talking with was annoyed with himself that they’d missed an opportunity to win, given the state of the bike, and ready to fight for the title in 2022 on a Honda that by then had morphed into something quite a bit more forgiving than its Marquez-developed predecessor.
That didn’t go according to plan. First, another recurrence of the double vision issues after a nasty warm-up crash at Mandalika a few weeks after our interview. Then, the bombshell announcement at Mugello early the summer: his arm, twisted 30° off-centre, needed fresh surgery and many more weeks at home recovering rather than racing.
Six races were missed before he returned, and while a podium at Misano was an unexpected highlight of the second part of his season, it was another year that amounted to nothing - and one that perhaps laid the seeds for what was to come in 2023.
With hindsight now, it feels like with all the suffering Marquez has gone through, 2023 might have been the hardest. It was, at the very least, the straw that broke the camel’s back and convinced him after a last season in Repsol and Honda colours to go looking for employment elsewhere.
First a crash in Portimao that broke his hand. Then, of course, that punishing weekend at his beloved Sachsenring. The onboard camera images of Marc giving his bike the finger after yet another huge movement perfectly captures what was going on: the machine was unrideable, and he was a man up against the clock if he wanted to make good on his promise to win again.
Ducati was the obvious answer, even if taking an unpaid satellite ride alongside brother Alex at Gresini wasn’t. Yet, in the grand scheme of both racing and life, it’s going to be perhaps the single most important decision of his life, not just for racing but for what comes after it too.
When we next sat down together just the two of us, it was once again in pre-season testing, this time in Qatar 2024 and sporting Gresini colours. In that interview for The Race MotoGP Podcast, Marquez did something I’d never seen him really do before: he lost his temper.
Up until injury, he was always the perfect PR machine, someone who often sounded like they were loading a soundbite from their memory banks when asked a particularly troublesome question by a journalist. Everything felt rehearsed, a product of the environment he grew up in, a world where he most likely spent more time on media training than on homework even while still only a kid.
Coming to Gresini ripped him out of the environment that had produced that version of Marquez, though. Circumstance dumped him into a familial team, one where he was far more likely to be laughed at than treated with deference and one that finally helped the kid grow into the man who (spoiler alert) once again lifted a MotoGP championship trophy last Sunday.
When we did that interview at Lusail, he wasn’t angry at me or my questioning, but rather at the people who had written him off. He wasn’t done, he insisted, but he hadn’t spent as much time suffering to get back only to ride around off the pace.
It didn’t take too long to prove those critics wrong, of course. Podium success on the Ducati came almost instantly. Victories came later in the year, but once they came the floodgates opened, and the path to factory status basically set up 2025’s title domination even before he had ever jumped on the red bike.
Which brings us nicely to last Thursday, and my latest chance to spend 20 minutes in a small box room at the Motegi circuit with the soon-to-be-crowned 2025 champion. You’ll be able to read more about our chat soon, and he very much completed the three-part story by talking at length about what exactly had changed not just in his racing but in his personal life.
“Suffering” has been the word he keeps coming back to. Before 2020, he never had to suffer - but as anyone who has been through life-changing experiences will tell you, it’s adversity, not easy times, that really brings out a person’s inner character.
Now that he has suffered, he insists he’s a better person for it. More mature, calmer, less focused only on MotoGP and more able to live a normal life away from the track. The sort of stuff that makes it much easier to, for example, find love - and he was quick to praise girlfriend Gemma Pinto for the role she played in his return to glory.
In a nutshell, the current iteration of Marc Marquez isn’t just establishing his legacy as perhaps the greatest motorcycle racer of all time, and the star of one of sport’s greatest comeback stories of all time.
He’s also found more of himself along the way, transforming himself from an arrogant multiple champion into the ultimate broken underdog before making it back to domination without losing any of the fans that he made when he was at rock bottom.
