Marc Márquez (Ducati) looks out from the Lenovo Ducati workshop at Le Mans.
Despite countless interpretations about what has been happening to Marc Márquez Alentá — the 33-year-old nine-time world champion, winner of 99 Grands Prix, and widely regarded as the greatest motorcycle racer of all time, not merely for his titles but for how he achieved them — the truth is that this morning he will once again enter an operating room at the Ruber Internacional Hospital in Madrid. He arrived there overnight on a private jet from Le Mans, to undergo surgery again on his right shoulder and the fracture of the fifth metatarsal in his right foot, which occurred yesterday.
Much has been written and said about what Márquez has been experiencing at the start of this World Championship, where he failed to string together any winning streaks in the first five Grands Prix in Thailand, Brazil, the USA, Jerez, and France. “I even asked myself during these months if it was a mental issue, something in my head, and honestly, I didn’t really understand the situation,” the Ducati leader admitted yesterday before leaving the French circuit.
One positive aspect of this break, which had to be moved forward a week due to yesterday’s crash in the sprint race and especially the fracture in his right foot, is that after his fall at the Spanish Grand Prix in Jerez (“these things happen and life goes on,” he said in a rather low tone), Márquez visited his doctors in Madrid and tried to find out what was wrong.
This year, Márquez started with the feeling that something wasn’t right, but he didn’t know what. Recently, he discovered that the screw in his right shoulder was moving and pressing on a nerve, preventing him from riding as he wanted. Now he knows what’s happening, and he is calmer.
“And finally, we found out what was going on: the screw in my right shoulder — the one placed to stabilize the fracture caused by Marco (Bezzecchi) in Indonesia, completely unintentional — was loose, out of place, rubbing against the nerve and robbing me of strength,” Márquez explained. What does that mean? The Catalan rider now knows his problem and had decided to fix it right after the home Grand Prix in Barcelona, where he already knew he wouldn’t be able to fight for victory either.
Despite being 33 and having won everything — not only that, but having staged the most spectacular comeback in sports history — Márquez still wants to fight to be the best and to win. So much so that yesterday in Le Mans, he produced another historic performance: out of the three fastest lap times of the day, Marc set two of them.
A record time
In Q1, he incomprehensibly set the lap record for the French track, stopping the clock at 1:29.288, something never seen before — all while dealing with the recently diagnosed right shoulder injury and the nerve-crushing screw. Juliá, his father, put his hands on his head in a corner of the Lenovo Ducati garage; David Tardozzi, the Italian team manager, couldn’t stop waving his right hand as if to say “Look what he’s done!”; and ‘Pecco’ Bagnaia, his teammate and admirer, flashed a smile in celebration of such a feat. Minutes later, with the same injury, in Q2, Marc set the third-fastest time of the weekend (1:29.646), just 12 thousandths off Bagnaia’s pole of 1:29.634. In other words, ‘Pecco’ didn’t even come close to Márquez’s record.
Even after the crash and the confirmation that the scheduled break for surgery — the eighth procedure on his right arm/shoulder since 2020 — had to be moved forward to today, Márquez didn’t want to leave Le Mans without explaining his situation. Naturally, he spoke to Izaskun Ruiz of DAZN, to whom he admitted he felt like crying.
