In the grand scheme, losing a champion from a series isn’t a good thing, but hard core fans can get excited over such things. I remember Sunday morning at the 2007 Unadilla National. Ricky Carmichael had slipped into partial retirement, and this would be the first national in ten years without him in it. Things seemed stable, though, because James Stewart was the heir apparent. No one else had challenged them through the previous ten motos.
So Stewart was expected to romp at Unadilla, own the second half of the season, and take the championship. Then he crashed hard in practice, and the team announced he was out for the day. It was like aliens had landed! Suddenly, for the first time since the 1990s, we really had no idea who was going to win a 450 national! To mark this momentous occasion, we grabbed a video camera and waded into the fans to get some opinions.
Ricky and James were out. Who was going to win?
We got answers like Ferry, Windham, Short, Alessi, and Langston. This was great! Everyone had different answers, and what’s more, no one really knew for sure! In the end, Windham won the overall—which means the winner was still someone we’d seen win plenty before. But there was a battle all day long, and it was refreshing to really, truly, completely have no idea what would come next.
It didn’t last.
This suddenly wide-open field started to whittle down as Langston took control of the series and won three straight to end the year. No matter how crazy the field looks at the start, someone always takes control. If there were ten more nationals that year, Langston would have just used them to further extend his points lead.
So when we entered this Monster Energy AMA Supercross, an FIM World Championship, without Ryan Villopoto, we knew the potential champion’s list was long. As awesome as it would be, we knew we wouldn’t have eight guys still in the points hunt come Las Vegas. The real action was going to see who would make it all the way until the end, and how the others would be eliminated. Then came the standard clichés: The cream will always rise to the top. The series begins when it goes east. The series begins at Daytona.
While so much of that is cliché, there’s some truth there. When the official RV news hit, you could count the following riders in as title contenders: Ryan Dungey, Ken Roczen, Chad Reed, Davi Millsaps, Justin Barcia, Eli Tomac, Trey Canard, and James Stewart. You also had a capable rookie crop with Dean Wilson, Cole Seely, and Jason Anderson, as wildcards (Blake Baggett was also a rookie, but no one was counting on him to do what he’s doing right now).
The list began to dwindle quickly. Stewart was declared ineligible. Reed has been unable to find his 2014 magic, and then a black-flag DQ eliminated all chance as far as points were concerned. Barcia couldn’t find the podium; then a big crash took him out altogether. Something was wrong with Millsaps all along—an illness—and soon he was facing a massive points hole. Recently, Davi revealed to me that even while working the Anaheim 1 media circus and trying to say the right things, he knew he was too sick to put in full motos during the week, and he’d probably struggle at the first few races. Then a few mistakes made things worse, and now he’s back nearly 100 points.
Anderson started the year carrying the flag to the front for the rookie crop, but he’s been every bit a rookie since then—still fast and good, but often in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anderson and Seely have shown the outright speed to match the establishment, but they’re not consistent with it, yet. It really makes you appreciate how difficult it is to finish near the box each week.
Reed, Stewart, Barcia, Millsaps, and the rookies are out of contention. Very quickly it broke down to just four—Roczen, Dungey, Canard, and Tomac. Now Tomac’s status is in jeopardy. A crash and a seventh-place finish in Arlington put him a whopping 38 points down on Dungey. Two weeks ago, Tomac was down 23, and I thought that gap was bridgeable. A quick win streak could chop that down to size, and Tomac is capable of such. But 38 points? That’s huge. As good as Tomac is, I’m starting to think him missing so many races last year has hurt him. In some ways, his year is beginning to resemble a rookie season. He’s got all the skills, but executing every single time seems to be something that comes with experience.
"Last year was my first on the big bikes but I missed some races with injury, so I didn't get the experience of what it's like to work so hard for so many weeks in a row,” said Tomac today in a team statement. “I'm figuring that out now and learning from it. I want to be back on the podium this weekend, so I'm going to do everything I can to make that happen."
"The points are the farthest thing from my mind right now," Tomac said. "I'm thinking about the next race, the next practice session. I need podium finishes every weekend. If I get enough of those, then we'll be in the running for the championship at the end of the season. For now, I just want to win races.”
So here we are watching cliché’s like “cream always rises” or “the series begins when we go east” materializing right before our eyes. We started with eight—or potentially ten—contenders, and we’re very likely down to three, and even Canard is in a 23-point hole. Just as Monster Energy Supercross hits its first race truly in the East, the championship picture is suddenly much different than it was a few weeks ago.
