CONTEPARTIRÒ
(TIME TO SAYGOODBYE )
After 26 seasons in the saddle and nine world championships, Valentino Rossi’s career on two wheels has finally reached the finish line. Mat Oxley pays tribute to the MotoGP maestro
Throughout his career, Rossi has raced as No46 –a number often used by his father Graziano, who himself was a world championship bike rider from 1977-82
Aged 20 in a London photoshoot in 1999, the year he took the 250cc title
Like father, like son in 1997, with Graziano on a 1970s Morbidelli racer while Valentino is on his 125cc Aprilia
Some of Rossi’s fanbase – he has 5.5 million Twitter followers
Doctor on the go – in Italy ‘doctor’ is sometimes used in reference to highly respected people
Still smiling after all these years, here at the Spanish Grand Prix, May 2021
THE MOST REMARKABLE GRAND prix career – in Formula 1 or MotoGP – came to an end at Valencia, Spain, at 2.42pm on November 14.
Valentino Rossi finished his 432nd GP in 10th place, the 42-year-old Italian going down fighting at the end of a mostly grim final season in MotoGP.
Rossi, who dazzled GP racing for more than two decades, had been in freefall during his final few seasons, due to machinery issues and the fact that time waits for no man, not even a superman.
So let’s focus on his distant glories, not his recent failures.
Rossi in his pomp was unique – one man transforming an entire sport with his speed and his joie de vivre. Until he arrived in the spring of 1996 motorcycle racing was a mostly dour, macho pursuit, not so much something to be enjoyed but endured – pitiless two-stroke engines, dead eyes and broken bones.
Somehow Rossi changed all of that, all on his own. True, riders still break bones, and worse, but modern MotoGP events are joyful affairs, full of colour and clamour, a rock and roll petrolhead party.
“One man transforming a sport with his speed and joiedevivre”
The scenes in the Petronas garage after Rossi’s final race in Valencia on November 14
GETTY IMAGES, YAMAHA
All this began in the late 1990s as a new breed of race fan flocked to racetracks to see the clown prince in action, wowing the crowd and performing outlandish post-race theatrics which, in his own words, “switched on the emotions of normal people”.
For example, my girlfriend at the time watched the 1997 Japanese GP from home in London while I was at the track. Rossi led the 125cc race by a few metres until he got too greedy with the throttle when exiting Suzuka’s chicane on the penultimate lap and got spat off.