God-given ability can be a crutch or curse depending on the mindset of an athlete. Talent can take you all the way to the top, but eventually you’ll face a challenge that can only be overcome through hard work.
Lessons need to be learned along the way to ensure success, and only a handful of riders ever make it to MotoGP on their talent alone.
Most riders marry talent with dedication at an early age in the Grand Prix paddock, and some have had to learn those lessons at a very young age. Vince Lombardi once said that “the only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
In any sport, to get to the very top you need dedication as well as raw talent, but how far can natural ability get you in motorcycle racing? We set out to answer that question at the recent Qatar Grand Prix.
“Talent got me all the way to MotoGP, but it wasn’t going to get me any further than that,” said MotoGP race-winner Jack Miller. “From the point of making my debut until now, I’ve had to focus so much and work so hard.”
For Miller – a rider hand-picked by Honda to make the jump from Moto3 to MotoGP – the challenges were exaggerated. He had to change everything about his training and approach to racing.
In the smaller class, the key was to keep his weight down, but in MotoGP his goals changed. Needing strength and endurance to race at the highest level, Miller spent his rookie year adapting.
At his first winter tests at Sepang in 2015, the talk about the paddock was his ballooning weight. It took time for Miller to understand how to add bulk rather than size, but by the mid-point of his rookie campaign, he was on track with his program, and since then he has proved his fitness.
Miller has found a way to match his talent with dedication, and a lot of that has to do with his winter program in the United States.
“I spend the winter training in California, and last year I was riding mountain bikes with Johnny O’Mara, Jeff Ward, and Peter Atherton. Those guys are all ex-motocross riders, and they’re probably the most gnarly dudes on a mountain bike!”
“They’re old guys, but they do it every day, and they live for it. I was riding with them every day, and learning so much from them about the focus and determination that you need, because they’re all champions and you learn so much from them. I’ll go back over for another week of hell in April.”
“I’ve been noticing that I’ve been getting more and more into my fitness and that side of my life. It becomes an addiction, and I definitely have an addictive personality!”
“I’m a creature of habit, and the more enjoyable I find something, the more I do it. I know what I need to do now to get the most from myself. Training and your diet is everything at this level, and I didn’t understand that when I was younger.”
“Racing is the fun part of the job, and everything else is time spent preparing for the part where you can have fun. I’m getting worse and worse about my diet! I’m getting more and more into eating clean and doing all the stuff that I would have called crap in the past.”
“I’m into smoothies and eating things that I wouldn’t have eaten before – spinach, avocados, and stuff like that. I hated some of those things in the past but now I’m into them so much. I’ve cleaned up my diet so much, and it’s definitely made me more of an athlete.”
Talent is what ear marks a youngster coming up through the ranks. It’s what opens the door and gives you the opportunity to perform at a higher level, against better competitors.
As you move through the junior classes with success, it breeds better opportunities. To understand the margins between success and failure for a young rider, Scott Redding reflected on how he came to 125GP as a marked man.
“Looking back to when I came to MotoGP in 2008, I was on the front row at the first 125GP in Qatar. That was me and that was my level when I was 15-years-old.”
“If I look back to when I won at Donginton and see what’s happened in my career since, I’d have thought it would be a lot better. To be straight down the line, I thought that I would have one or two titles by now. That was my mindset as a 15-years-old because all I had done was win.”
“I won in England, went to Spain and struggled at first, but once I was on the right bike I was dominating. I won the last race at Valencia by ten seconds. I was the next big thing…until I wasn’t. It was at that point that I missed out on the guidance.”
“Talent got me to the grid in 2008, and gave me the opportunities, but you need to work hard. When you cross talent with hard work it’s the perfect combination, but pure talent will only take you so far.”
“I’ve seen some incredibly talented riders come through the ranks, but they threw away good opportunities because they weren’t willing to put in the hard work.”
“If you want to be successful you need to go to Spain when you’re young. The level is so high and I always tell kids, or their parents, that you need to take them to championships where they’ll be beaten. They need to face that competition and learn from it.”
“I was brought up by being beaten and learning from people with more experience. When I was 11-years-old, we forged a birth certificate so that I could race against adults! I said that I was 13, so that I could race against guys that I’d have to earn the wins against.”
“You can stay where you’re comfortable, and win races with one arm tied behind your back, but you don’t learn.”
“Young riders need to move at the right time, and not think about winning the championships along the way. You only want to win a world championship and everything else is about getting here. It’s about the big picture and in that you learn more from being beaten than by winning easily.”
Motorcycle racing at the highest level isn’t a sport of perfection. However, it’s in that search for the ultimate lap-time that a perfect race can develop from.
You need dedication to win, and Marc Marquez is the example cited by many riders about being a game changer. The Spaniard has won his world titles not because he is the most talented rider on the planet.
He’s won his titles because he’s the most talented rider around who has never relied on his talent. It would be easy to take time off and relax between rounds but he’s relentless.
That relentless drive to succeed is what many riders on the grid respect about Bradley Smith. The Briton is a self-confessed grinder who loves to work in the shadows to improve.
Unlike many riders on the premier class grid, Smith says that talent only took him to the famed Spanish Academy of Alberto Puig. From that point onwards, it was his work ethic that would give him a chance to be successful.
MotoGP podium-finishes have followed from success in 125GP and Moto2, but Smith knows that he can never rest on his laurels and be pleased with how far he’s come. What goes into finding that edge between success and failure for a grinder?
“Talent took me to the Spanish Academy with Alberto Puig in 2005,” said Smith. “I was the most inexperienced and slowest guy there.”
“At the first test, I was last, and I was last for ages. I had to work hard all the time on the small details and the bigger stuff. My mechanic picked me, and it must have been hard for him to deal with, because he had to put up with the other mechanics laughing at us.”
“Being the slowest has never been a concern to me; it’s been a motivator. From that Academy, I was the one that worked the hardest and made the most progress. Whether it was in the fitness tests or on track, I could see so much progress and when we won a race at the end of the season it was huge.
“I don’t have a natural flair on a bike. I’m not a rider, like Dani Pedrosa, that you look at and say that he’s impressive. My style isn’t the nicest but through determination I make it work.”
“My handling skills and throttle control is a strength and being consistent is too. I’ll never look nice on a bike but I can get the job done. It took until 2015 for me to prove the hard work was paying off. The speed came and I was the top satellite rider that year.”
Photo: MotoGP
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