Jorge Lorenzo - A Rock-Hard Rider Who Can Dismiss Pain
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Aug 02, 2008
MotoGP
It is an inspiration that he has needed in a troubled debut year in motorcycle racing’s premier category. After winning two 250cc world championships, Lorenzo became MotoGP’s poster boy after qualifying on pole in his first three races this year, winning in Portugal and, briefly, leading the points table. But he fell in practice in China and fractured both ankles and since then the crashes have continued: the latest was in the US Grand Prix at Laguna Seca last Sunday. He is now wearing a cast on his left foot in order to allow three fractured bones to heal.
“I was born in Majorca, but I think my soul comes from Sparta,” Lorenzo says in his recently published biography, which is currently available only in Spanish. “Since I came into the world I was raised for a cause, to reach the highest level in motorcycle racing. We fight back to back to win battles, and like them [the Spartans] we don’t like to be beaten.”
Each time he was carried away on a stretcher, and there were many who thought that someone – a doctor, the race director, or a member of his Yamaha team – should have said, firmly: “Jorge, clear off to a beach and rest. Don’t come back until you’re strong again.”
“I felt scared, very scared,” Lorenzo said. “I thought I’d hurt myself more. Physically, I was in a bad state, destroyed, but after the storm comes the calm.”
Sure enough, in the race the following day on the Le Mans circuit he axed through the field to finish second, behind Valentino Rossi, defying the pain to earn his fourth rostrum position of the year.
“We have to accept that we’re in a sport where sometimes you’re going to fall and hurt yourself,” he said.
But the Lorenzo phenomenon is about much more than a rock-hard rider who can dismiss pain. He has survived a difficult rift with his mentor and father, Chicho, and has completely remodelled his once surly personality to open himself up to his fans.
“I will be grateful to my father all my life, because he gave me the opportunity to do my job at this level,” Lorenzo says. “But we got to a point where we didn’t have confidence in each other, and I preferred that he didn’t come to the races.”
Chicho now, presumably, follows his son’s career by watching MotoGP races on television in Majorca, where he runs a training school for young riders. “I speak to him once a week,” Lorenzo says. “I love my father. He will never be a poor person, but at that moment I thought that he shouldn’t ask for money from his son.”
