until Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League
It’s fair to say that Honda MotoGP rider Marc Marquez’s Thursday schedule at the Spanish Grand Prix (an event he isn’t even competing in!) was somewhat chaotic.
What started as a relatively innocuous media appearance to update us on his injured right hand turned into something of a circus event – changing time, place and size multiple times as both his team and the series itself jostled to find a way to speak to the press.
With Marquez already in town to help launch a new exhibit of six of his bikes in Jerez city centre on Thursday. despite the hand injury he suffered in Portugal continuing to rule him out of racing, Honda made the somewhat natural step of announcing a media scrum for Marquez alongside his team-mate Joan Mir and stand-in rider Iker Lecuona in its hospitality.
Nothing that hasn’t happened before for Marquez or other injured riders who happened to be in attendance at races, it raised no eyebrows when announced. Our brief internal conversation at The Race about whether it would offer enough detail beyond the team’s press release to warrant a fresh story on his condition and recovery progress was probably typical of the reaction.
That changed on Thursday morning around 10am, when the scheduled media scrum (normally a relatively informal affair where journalists ask questions and the only recording is made via our dictaphones) was changed to a live TV press conference hosted by MotoGP itself rather than by Repsol Honda – a decision that opened the floodgates on social media.
Within minutes of tweeting about the new schedule, I was being bombarded by messages demanding to know what it meant. Was a major announcement on the cards? Were we potentially facing an extended time without Marquez? Even more significantly, was this even the news no one wants to hear: that he was retiring from the sport altogether?
In reality, it seems that what actually happened was a lot less dramatic. Less about announcing major news and a whole lot more about series promoter Dorna simply wanting to put the face of the championship on screen and in front of his fans. But it seems that it did so maybe without anticipating the consequences online.
Calm was called for. Another announcement was made within a few hours: the press conference would no longer be a press conference but instead a media session once more, albeit one held primarily in Spanish not English as is usual, and aired live on TV (in Spain, at least).
But by the time Marquez eventually took to the stage at 4pm local time to reveal nothing much more than Wednesday’s press release that first announced he wouldn’t take part in the Jerez race, one point had been made abundantly clear: regardless of recent form and differing championship winners, MotoGP still very much has a Marc Marquez addiction.
There’s no other rider on the paddock for whom the announcement of a press conference would have promoted such a huge reaction, not just from fans but from inside the paddock itself. My phone was buzzing all morning with messages asking me what he was going to say, social media was practically in meltdown, and at least one rival team in the paddock had even started a sweepstake on what would happen next.
That’s not exactly a huge surprise, either. The last time, after all, that we were called into an exceptional Marc Marquez press conference was at Mugello last year – where he announced an extended absence from the championship to undergo yet another major surgery to his right arm.
And, given not just the extent of the physical abuse that his body has taken over the past three years (since first breaking his arm at Jerez in July 2020) but also the mental suffering that he’s endured since then, it’s not a huge shock where many peoples’ initial thoughts went.
You can’t blame the series bosses at Dorna, either – even if it might have made the initial decision without necessarily thinking through the consequences for the blood pressure of many a Marquez fan at home.
In fact, if the reaction showed anything at all it’s that (for better or worse) MotoGP still really leans on Marquez, arguably the only real breakout star since Valentino Rossi to make a name for himself in wider popular culture outside of the sport (especially in his native Spain).
But it should also come as something of a warning. We’ve already seen the error that comes from putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of marketing: MotoGP continues to struggle to this day because it had no succession plan for when Rossi inevitably retired, and both TV channels and race circuits have struggled since to sell the series.
Hopefully, with a new chief commercial officer now in place who has done a great job in the past of turning players into stars in the National Basketball Association, it’s something that’s going to change – because repeating the mistakes of the past at a time when MotoGP is already reeling from a big blow could well spell even more trouble ahead.
