He has changed, Francesco Bagnaia. It must be the effect it has when you are recognized as the best rider in the world. The one to put your money on. And it is impressive when he says, in an interview after the second consecutive world championship, that he kept everything inside. To know where to improve. And, again, that he found the motivation to continue to stay at the front, thanks to his talent and the pressure used as a weapon
It’s fast, but above all concrete. He’s the Sunday man, because despite everything, Sunday is the real race day. In a MotoGP in which no rider has managed to win two races in a row, in which out of 20 GPs we have seen eight different winners, Francesco Bagnaia manages to be constant. This means much more than you might imagine: it means feeling good on every circuit, in every condition, against every opponent on the day, because a good part of the drivers have the day. His approach, for example when he says there is still room to improve and he knows where to do it, should scare others. Francesco transformed a championship as angry, unpredictable and dangerous as an angry bull into a pony to show to children. “To find motivation, two or three times we said with my coach that the only two to hold the title in the last twenty years were only Vale and Marc,” says Pecco in an interview given to Dorna with the title cup in the background. When he says “two or three times” he probably means two or three hundred times. Because to get to repeat yourself you needed obsession. Then she talks a little about her season: “It’s been a long journey, even mentally it’s been really hard. But I think what we did was fantastic, I started in the best way possible, except for Austin and Argentina where I crashed.”
The moment when it’s worth listening twice it’s when he talks about the fall of Barcelona, the day we saw his partner Domizia crying outside the medical center and Davide Tardozzi trying to console her. Pecco arrives the following week at Misano, wearing the yellow tracksuit to celebrate Ducati and a bandage on his right leg. He says he can’t even go to the bathroom on his own. “After Barcelona I started to suffer more,” he recalls. “It was one of the toughest and most difficult moments of my career. The day after I woke up completely destroyed. I couldn’t even move from the bed. It wasn’t easy but we pushed hard mentally. We preferred not to talk about it too much with the media, with people. Because people can’t understand everything. I didn’t want to have any excuses”.
In these words there is all of Francesco Bagnaia. I didn’t want to have any excuses, it may seem trivial but it isn’t at all: he who has never asked for help from others, who runs without having to give explanations, who seeks media and sporting pressure because silencing the world for an athlete is one of the sensations biggest and most enveloping you can try. The reason? You feel like the master of your destiny, which in a world where every detail makes the difference and luck becomes fundamental is the greatest strength you can rely on. Pecco Bagnaia is this stuff here. Hard, straight, cold. He understood that you can’t run without feeling human from time to time, and he plays to exploit this card too.
You understand it even better when it continues, when he talks about the rivalry with Jorge Martin that sparked the season finale: “After Barcelona Jorge became really fast. He proved to be the fastest in some moments of the season. In the Sprint he has always been very strong and there you have to be the fastest. To win but on Sunday you have to be the strongest, and we proved that it was always us. Pressure is a privilege. Without this feeling, without this sensation you can’t enjoy it. Winning, losing and being able to be under pressure is great. It’s the best feeling possible and I want to say thank you to Jorge for helping me, for making me feel more like this”.
Now, it’s hard to know how much he said this for himself (almost certainly) and how much, instead, he wanted to take the liberty of reminding his old teammate which of the two has the upper hand. “It will get harder and harder.” he explains about 2024. “Next year there will be Marc with the Ducati, and Jorge Martin will still be there, then Bezzecchi, maybe Quartararo with the Yamaha, maybe Morbidelli with the Ducati and the KTMs, impossible to forget them. But victories call victories. I think I’ll never stop wanting them.”
2023-12-09 12:08:33
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