Jeff Emig, now a Monster Energy Supercross analyst for Fox Sports as well as the 1997 AMA Supercross Champion, has spent his entire life around the sport. He knows all about the annual ritual that takes place as the season opener approaches, where everyone declares this the most stacked field ever and foresees a thrilling season ahead.
We caught up with Emig last week and he gives some hard insights into how racing has evolved—and stayed the same—through the years.
Racer X: Every year we say it’s the most stacked field ever. Is that the case this year? Are you fired up?
Jeff Emig: I do think that we have a quote, “very deep field.” When you look at the Monster Energy Supercross Championship it’s a product of the preparation and the type of grooming that we have. The farm system, if you will, and the type of work that the race teams are putting in to better prepare these kids making the transition from amateur to pro. You look at the knowledge that’s available to make sure that the slackers are getting motivated where they can. If they need information about training and preparation there’s leadership there as far as former riders, champions, things like that that are involved with teams. So that’s why when we get to this point in the season we have so much hope and optimism about there being multiple riders that can win the title. I think 2015 was a bit of an anomaly in that [Ryan] Dungey was in firm control of the title and we weren’t even halfway through it. So my expectations are that that’s not going to happen again. That’s what’s so exciting about being at the beginning of a championship—you just never know what can happen.
It’s interesting what you’re talking about, how everyone has these programs and good guidance and all that. When you were racing it seemed like everyone was doing everything they possibly could, but compare the programs that you and your peers to what the guys have now. It seems like it’s ramped up. It seems like there’s more trainers and coaches and ex-riders helping out than there were twenty years ago.
I think it’s a collective effort. I don’t think it’s just the riders. There has to be somebody there to influence that. There has to be people there to pay the bills. You look at a team like a GEICO Honda that has the leadership of Mike LaRocco in place and what he can offer with his experience. It wasn’t that long ago that this wasn’t really in place. When I decided to ride my first supercross it was 1989, my dad and I showed up in our own box van as a Team Green rider. Just a few months before that I had ridden my first pro national. I show up to Anaheim, I go wire to wire in the first heat race of the year. I get the holeshot and lead 11 of 15 laps of the main event. I crashed after [Jeff] Matiasevich passed me and I wanted to pass him back and I went over the berm in the turn, but I finished seventh. I’m not bragging about myself, I’m trying to put it into perspective that I was a rider that was fast enough and talented enough to do that, yet I had no connection with the factory team yet at all. I had not even talked to anyone on a pro team. So then you get to a point where in James Stewart’s first year we knew he was getting a deal done with Kawasaki. But I heard that Yamaha and Keith McCarty and those guys, they’d never even seen him ride and yet he was months away from becoming a pro. It’s like, really? So now you fast forward to where we’re at now, I personally know that there were race teams that had been speaking with Austin Forkner for a year and a half on a weekly basis. So that’s why we have better prepared riders at every level now. Who had a trainer back in my day?
That’s what I was going to ask. You guys trained, but who told you what to do? Or did you just guess?
The ability for a guy like Adam Cianciarulo to go train with Aldon Baker, or what Johnny Louch is doing at the Rockwell training facility…you look at that place on a daily basis and look at how many athletes are there. We didn’t have that stuff in our day. And that’s why whether it’s the 250 Regional Championship or the Monster Energy Supercross title, when we’re in December we’re like, yeah, dude, there’s like six guys that can win this, or I think there’s ten guys that can win this, whatever the case is.
We no longer use effort as the big difference maker. We used to say things like “This guy’s known as a slacker and he might not be in shape.” I don’t think that’s even a thing anymore. Everyone’s in shape, everyone’s ready. There’s not like a line in the sand of who trains and who doesn’t.
There certainly is going to be a difference in the workload, but I think there was a big difference in our day between the guy that won and the guy that was last in the main event. Or maybe the guy between first and tenth. Now there’s a pretty good amount of effort and hard work being put in by everyone. I see three digit privateer guys that are on limited sponsorships that I feel like are putting in a pretty good effort. And that’s why when you get into the semi qualifying races and the last chance qualifiers in Monster Energy Supercross that we see some pretty exciting racing.
When you were training enough to win races and even win this title, was it just guesswork or did you actually have some people in your corner you would get advice from?
No, for me it was completely different. I really didn’t know anything about any serious cardio training until probably the second year as a pro. And even then I just knew that the harder I worked the better my results would be. So even compared to what I know now or what riders do now, there was no strategy to it. There was no expertise and no knowledge put to it. It was just, “Hey, somebody said to go put your running shoes on and run 20 minutes that way and then 20 minutes back.”
Even in your peak days as a 250 rider, it didn’t seem like a lot of guys had trainers.
No, but what I needed to focus on specifically—and every rider’s different—for me strength training was really important. So I worked with a guy by the name of John Hall out of Redlands, California. He and I were very, very close. What’s interesting about this trainer aspect is that for me John was a confidant. He’s still a dear friend to this day. The time that we spent in the gym lifting weights and building strength, there was an equal amount of conversation that was life-coaching and motivation and sports psychology and things like that. So bench pressing and squats and yadda yadda, that was one thing, but what I think is overlooked with a lot of trainers and why certain trainers work for certain guys is the sports psychology aspect that they bring to it and the mindset. It’s literally the most powerful part of it.
If a guy has trouble late in the race people immediately are like, “I guess his trainer isn’t training him hard enough.” But like you’re saying, the same exact trainer could get completely different results with a different rider. It’s not just like a robot where you program him and say “do this” and it works for everybody.
There’s life-coaching wrapped up into there too. Like, you’re at that age where maybe you’re having problems with a girlfriend or you’re at that point where you’re making a separation from your parents and now you’re living on your own, or you’ve got a relationship issue with someone on the race team or something like that. So to me I feel very fortunate that my guy John Hall had that wisdom and we had that great connection. That was as important as any physical strength training that we were doing at the time.
It’s okay to start the year saying I just want to play it cool. It’s only an issue when somebody starts the championship like McGrath did where he wins the first five races and you’re like “uh oh!”
I’ve heard people say one of the hardest things for riders to figure out is who to trust. You mentioned all the elements. You can have your parents or your girlfriend or your wife, and then you've got all these other people who are either paying you or they want you to pay them. It gets really confusing for riders to know who to put their faith in. Agents are involved too. You’re going to get a lot of advice. Who do you trust? Who do you listen to?
I feel like that’s one of the issues that Ken Roczen had been going through in the last year. I’m not close enough to him to know if that’s been sorted, but to kind of look at it from a different standpoint is, every now and then I talk to Marvin Musquin and his wife. The role that she plays in Marvin’s career is maybe more important than what anybody knows. The friendship that they have and their marriage and how dedicated she is to being at the track with him and motivating him and how well they work together. I think that’s a really interesting story that hasn’t been told loud enough. I think that that’s pretty cool. Whether it’s your dad that’s still backing you, if it’s your mom that’s your support… like with Ricky Carmichael, Jeannie [the mother] was kind of the driving force and dad was kind of the support where I would say that in the majority of the families it’s probably the dad that is more outspoken and the mom is there to kind of back you up and lift you up when you’re beat down. So wherever that support comes from that element is really, really important.
It’s hard to know though. Is the trainer going to always give you the right answer? Is the agent? Should I just stick with my parents? Then eventually you have wives and girlfriends involved. It’s hard to know who will give the best answers to the questions you have.
I think that the sport agent gets a bad rap at times. I also believe that they create some of the issues because of the nature of their business and what they’re trying to accomplish. But at times an agent can be your best friend.
We really thought last year would be wide open, and it really should have been since the champ, Ryan Villopoto, wasn’t there. But Dungey pulled out from everybody pretty clearly. Now Dungey seems like he’s in that place right now. Everyone around him is pulling in the same direction. There’s no confusion. He just seems like he’s in such a good place on that side.
Yeah. Barring any injuries or something that I don’t know about, I would say that Ryan Dungey is the guy to beat. You look at how he executes each championship each year of his career, you pretty much know what you’re going to get. You look at guys like Roczen and Canard, Cole Seeley, Tomac, they could do it. But we don’t really know for sure what we’re going to get. It’s like Bruce Stjernstrom from Kawasaki always used to preach to me: “The first thing you have to do is figure out how to ride every race. Once you’ve got that figured out then you need to figure out how to win those races.” And I think those races, most every guy, most every team, they strategize how many races is it going to take to win. Because Jeff Stanton won three races in 1992 and won the title. But he rode every race and didn’t DNF any races. He was the most consistent, and in the end is it more important to win Anaheim or is it more important to win the Monster Energy Supercross Championship? I would say the latter.
It’s hard. We get all pumped. We’re counting the days to Anaheim 1. Everybody can’t wait for the opener. It’s hard to get out of that mode of just thinking about one race.
It’s okay to start the year saying I just want to play it cool. It’s only an issue when somebody starts the championship like McGrath did where he wins the first five races and you’re like “uh oh!”
So you think it’s going to be closer than it was last year?
Well, I think it’s going to be closer than it was in 1996! [Laughs] I don’t know about last year.
[Laughs] Yeah, let’s hope someone doesn’t win thirteen straight to start it off! You know in ‘96 you did make all the races. You did that part right.
[Laughs] But I got disqualified from Indianapolis for illegal fuel. So even though I finished second I technically got a DNQ.
Anyone else stand out? You mentioned Roczen and it started out great for him last year. What do you think of him this year?
All that I know from Roczen is what I learn from my conversations with Ricky Carmichael. I certainly feel like they’re in a much different place than what they were last year. I feel like Roczen’s in a different place. But when it comes down to a lot of these guys, I’m not just talking about Roczen here, but there’s a lot to deal with during the championship. So much happens in such a short time because we race every Saturday night. So for me it has to do with character and it has to do with the mindset. How well can a rider manage the up and downs of the championship? There’s a lot of other factors there. There’s a lot of unknowns with a guy like Tomac who’s now moved from GEICO Honda to Monster Energy Kawasaki. I talked to him last week at the Sunrise Ford event that we did and he feels like even though he’s going through these double shoulder surgeries from his injury, he feels like the bike is everything that he wants it to be. Making a brand switch is never easy, but he feels like it’s been completely easy and he is stoked on the bike. So that’s a good thing. He said 20 laps are not an issue. So that’s good but switching brands is always kind of an unknown factor, there’s a lot that goes into it. You just never know if you’re going to see a breakout season by one of these guys. The only thing that you can count on going into the championship is that Dungey’s going to be the guy to beat.
So you can tell yourself, just make it through the races, you don’t have to win every one. But it still has to be pretty nerve-wracking if you’re getting solid finishes but someone else is winning.
For me I was thinking, “Try to win every one of these.” But I was a pretty smart rider for the most part. I didn’t really throw a lot of races away like that. But during the early part of my supercross career McGrath was so successful, there was no other goal on the weekend except to try to win the race. Looking back now I can’t say that that was wrong; I just know that that’s how we approached it—just trying to win and try to figure out if we can win the race what sort of confidence is that going to give me and the team. So there was a lot of searching going on. There were a lot of bad trips home from the stadium back in those early ‘90s.
Do you look now at the support group these guys have now, all the trainers and coaches, and think, I wish I could have had that?
I don’t do too much dwelling on the past like that. It is what it is. Everyone gets tired of you saying that but that’s kind of my mindset to a lot of things. My hope is that the riders that are coming through these days have the people that can support them properly. And I’m not saying that I didn’t have the proper support. What I had is what I had and I did the best I could while I was there. But whether it’s the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000s, or now, the basic formula for winning is the same. What Pierre Karsmakers and Jimmy Weinert did or Dungey now, there’s an element of hard work. There’s an element of focus. There’s an element of preparation. That is still the same. It’s not like that’s any different than what it was.
Jeff recently launched a new website, emig47.com, that features products and cool stories from around the industry.
