AJ Catanzaro hasn’t practiced in nearly three weeks. The massive cold front that struck the entire eastern half of the country has made it nearly impossible for the Connecticut native to get any practice time at the Club MX training facility in South Carolina. So, he and his mechanic Konnor Buffis loaded up early to make the trip to Atlanta. They would race Monster Energy Supercross Saturday night and then head to Florida to hopefully get some much-needed seat-time in before the Daytona Supercross this weekend. That was the plan, anyway.
It was early Saturday morning, and Catanzaro and his mechanic pulled into the privateer parking lot near the Georgia Dome. Immediately, they sensed something was wrong. “We showed up Saturday morning, and I could kind off see it from the road,” Catanzaro told us earlier today. “I thought I saw the trailer door down. I asked my mechanic Konnor, if he had gone in there for anything and he was like ‘You’re screwing with me, right?’ So we pull in and I sprint over to the trailer and it’s wide open and stuff is everywhere—and the two bikes are gone.”
AJ’s brand new 2015 RM-Z250 and Buffis’ 2013 CRF450R, along with two helmets, had been stolen the night before. Instantly Catanzaro took to social media to spread the word, hoping it would attract attention.
“Within a couple minutes, I had 500 or 600 hundred re-tweets. Jamie Little and Carey Hart were messaging me and wanting to help because they had heard about the NASCAR that had gotten stolen,” he said.
Catanzaro uses Team Gus to transport his race bike, but without his only practice bike, his only time on the track would come during the races. “At this point I’m thinking, ‘Okay, I’m just going to drive home to Connecticut and hang out during the week and fly to races on the weekend and try and race,’” he said.
After contacting police, Catanzaro tried to re-focus on practice and the race later that night. “Just trying to ride the whole day with that on my mind...it wasn’t easy,” he explained.
After qualifying twenty-second in practice, he just missed out on making the main in his heat, finishing tenth. Later, he found trouble in the LCQ as well and failed to make his second main of the season. After returning to his hotel later that night, Catanzaro received a surprising text from his team owner—a screenshot off Instagram of someone riding his bike with his helmet.
“Can you imagine? We get this picture and start losing it in our hotel,” he says. “We’re freaking out. Within five minutes of that I got a call from the officer that I dealt with, and he said he thought they had may bike. They chased him down from a Chevron gas station and I guess the dude crashed trying to get away and hopped on another dude’s bike and just booked it. My bike ended up in an impound.
“Still, at this point I couldn’t get enough information to know if this was the truth or not. The next morning, it was in the impound and we went and picked it up. The bike was in perfect condition except for a broken clutch lever and a bald tire.”
After recovering his bike, AJ took to social media to share the news, and a screengrab of the thief riding his stolen bike around. Quickly an innocent post turned into more. “At this point I’m putting up stuff on Instagram and people are commenting—and some people were probably taking it too far,” he says.
Boom!Guy tried to run from cops and crashed. Picked her up from impound,just a broken clutch lever and a bald tire! pic.twitter.com/WIEJx1lJXc
— AJ Catanzaro (@AJCatanzaro) March 1, 2015
The issue is a controversial one. A quick spin around YouTube will show you plenty of dirt bike riders doing stunts on city streets, and it’s a hot-button issue. Some think the videos are cool, but many know that a lot of those bikes are stolen bikes, and stealing a dirt bike is horrible. As the comments on Catanzaro’s Instagram post grew, most of them bagging on it all, a strange thing happened.
“All these Bike Life people started commenting on the page trying to defend themselves,” he says. #BikeLife is a social phenomenon of people riding in streets of cities across America.
“I get a couple direct messages from these guys, saying give me a call,” says AJ, who then made that call. “I guess a lot of them are doing the right thing and buying their bikes and doing it for fun. And then you have other guys going out and ruining their reputation. I’ve been on and off the phone with these guys… at first I was like, ‘We’re never getting these bikes back.’ But since the whole social networking thing has blown up and I’ve talked with some of them it seems inevitable the bikes will pop up somewhere.”
AJ has his bike back already, but his mechanic Konnor is still without his. Some of the Bike Life folks said they’re going to try to find it, but that won’t be easy. We’ll see. In the meantime, AJ and his brother have set up a GoFundMe account to help Konnor get a new bike if his can’t be found. You can donate here.