Augusta, Argentina and two ticking clocks
The Tiger Woods and Marc Márquez stories appear to be converging...
(This article also appears on my new MotoGP page, the MotoGP Zone.)
Looks like it’s going to be one of those waiting weeks for sports enthusiasts. Moto GP fans are waiting for Marc Márquez to tell them whether or not he’s going to make the Argentinean Grand Prix following his colossal crash in Indonesia. And the golf world is once again waiting for Tiger Woods to decide whether he’ll tee it up at the Masters — this time following an extra-curricular car accident last year.
And while we eye our news feeds, I can’t resist the temptation to compare these two all-time greats as they battle their bodies, the passage of time, and chilling realities no genius wants to hear. The parallels are too fascinating.
Both men, at their best, have been nothing short of sporting magicians. Márquez flirted with disaster for fun, yet his physics-defying saves seemed to be exactly what made him untouchable. After all, nobody could explore the limits, and get away with it, the way he could. And Woods’ ability to will a ball into the hole when it mattered most also seemed supernatural at times. You don’t need me to dive deeper into the remarkable work of these two athletes.
One reminder, though: we’re talking about the youngest ever premier class champion (at 20) and the youngest ever Masters winner (at 21). Both of these guys were wunderkinder. But as their immediate sporting fates hang in the balance this week, years after those moments of youthful upstartery, it’s interesting to note what their paths have in common.
April 13th, 2008, is a great place to start. That Sunday, Tiger Woods — then 32 and the owner of 13 Major titles — finished three strokes behind Trevor Immelman at the conclusion of a tough Masters. Second place. A few hours earlier that same day, straight across the Atlantic on the Portuguese coast, a 15-year-old Marc Márquez had made his World Championship debut in the 125cc category. For the record, he came home a lowly 18th on his KTM.
June of that year was a pivotal month for both. Woods hobbled to his famous US Open win at Torrey Pines, climbed back on a knee surgeon’s table a couple of days later and then — if we’re brutally honest — began watching his career go bumpily, messily and stutteringly downhill as his fitness issues compounded. (Yes, there was a little scandal too.) Over at Donington Park in England, meanwhile, the young Spanish biker announced his arrival with his first podium finish. He’d be 125cc World Champion in a couple of years. And then become the Tiger Woods of motorcycle racing — for his era at the very least.
For many years since that Sunday, their careers were moving in opposite directions. But now, fourteen Masters tournaments later, there’s a sense they’re beginning to converge. Woods is 46, but he’s playing a sport where you can still hope to win Majors at fifty. A sport that has given him time to pepper a gradual decline with plenty of highs.
Márquez is seventeen years Tiger’s junior, but he’s playing a game where not even Valentino Rossi could claim to be his former self once his mid-thirties came knocking. Now 29, it’s not crazy to say Honda’s flagship rider is at a similar juncture to Woods. Even assuming full fitness, they’re approaching final years that could theoretically still be fruitful — yet the jury’s out for both of them.
Both men need only rewind to the year 2019 — yes, the last one before COVID crawled out of China — to find themselves on top of the world. Márquez secured a fourth straight world title that year, and the combination of Marc and Honda looked as unbeatable as ever. And Woods took our breath away with what may be the finest sporting comeback of all time, delivering a virtuoso performance at Augusta to grab that fifteenth major many believed was out of his reach.
Woods hasn’t played much serious golf since his successful 2019, bar a few unremarkable showings in 2020. It’s mostly just been COVID and the leg injuries from that car crash just over a year ago. The status of his career remains one giant, brooding question mark, but there’s no doubt he’d find things easier if he didn’t have to nurse his body all the time.
Marquez at the end of 2019 was a bit like Woods in 2008. It looked like nothing could ever topple him. Except injury. But a break of several months, as all sport was suspended by the pandemic, ended in just such a disaster. When the 2020 season finally got underway in July, Marc high-sided off his RC213V at Jerez. He bust his arm. Cue something of a Tiger Woods story in microcosm: painful, premature comebacks; then more considered returns to action, then questions about whether he was ever going to be his old self, then emotional comeback wins.
But, just like Woods, an extra-mural accident (on a motocross track late in 2021, in Marc’s case) came along to provide another setback. Diplopia (double vision, an issue he’d dealt with before) struck, causing him to miss the end of the season and casting a shadow over this winter gone. But by the time the 2022 season began earlier this month, the man from Cervera looked good to go again. He scored a respectable fifth place in the Qatar opener.
But then came the highside to end all highsides on Lombok last weekend. The double vision is back. Argentina looks more than a little sketchy at the time of writing.
The ongoing health questions aside, it’s getting increasingly difficult to shake the feeling that Marquez is no longer a magician on a motorbike. His method of riding beyond the limit and figuring out what to do when he gets there no longer seems to work: he’s ending up with a face full of dirt just like everyone else. While he was no stranger to losing the low side even at his best, there’s now a worrying trend of him jumping over the handlebars too. Crashes like that are relatively rare in modern Moto GP, but Márquez is the one rider who seems to court them now.
As he already knows very well, highsides are the ones that can really hurt you. Break you. Any rider from the 500cc two-stroke era will tell you the same thing. Back then, Marc would not have been alone in this kind of crashing. Sometimes, two riders even did it in the same television frame. (Check that out here)
Assuming Márquez doesn’t actually want to go flying like it’s 1990, the logical conclusion is that he’s having some difficulty coming to terms with slightly adjusted limits to his abilities. Another clue that he’s become a little more human since Jerez 2020 has been the fact that he’s looked ordinary in changeable conditions, his damp win at his beloved Sachsenring last year notwithstanding. He crashed more than once in the dry-then-wet French Grand Prix last year, and also went down after swapping bikes in the Austrian deluge. As though the feel that used to make him untouchable in such races has gone walkabout.
Maybe there’s nothing in this theory at all. Maybe I’m wrongly judging a man who hasn’t been 100% fit since July 2020. Maybe I’m reading too much into tweets following the latest setback…ones translating to, ‘I don’t feel much like smiling today’. Maybe, like Woods did at Augusta in 2019, Marc Márquez will storm back when he’s strong again, and prove his doubters wrong. Maybe he too will have to rely on cunning and experience rather than brute performance.
Then again, perhaps 2019 will indeed prove to be the last champagne moment for both of these legends as they battle their bodies and stare down the notion that all good things really do come to an end sooner or later.
I think I can speak for all sports fans when I say I hope it’s ‘later’ in the case of these two champions. But we just don’t know. Therein lies the unscripted beauty of sport. So let’s keep an eye on the news this week, and stay patient as we wait.
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Photo credits:
Marques: Box Repsol, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Woods: MC3 William Selby, USN, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons