You can read Part I of Reasons vs. Excuses from Jason Weigandt here.
Jeremy Martin isn’t asking for anyone’s sympathy, but it’s hard not to feel bad for him. J-Mart has hung his hat on hard work and fitness, and now his body has betrayed him. Well, we think it has—Martin hasn’t led on too much besides occasionally muttering that he’s not 100 percent. Officially, basically, he’s said he’s just tired and needed to recover.
Surely for a fitness fanatic, it’s counter intuitive to have to rest in order to get fitter. But don’t feel bad for Jeremy—he doesn’t want to make excuses and doesn’t want your sympathy.
“I’m not one to make excuses and say anything and I like to keep things private,” he said after RedBud. “I don’t need to talk about all of it, but I see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
He’s started to feel a little better in the last few weeks, and has ridden better, too. Second-moto crashes at RedBud and Southwick masked his results, but finally, at Millville, he hung on and made it happen, scoring his first victory of the season.
Still, it’s been a tough title defense. While dealing with whatever physical ailments he’s dealing with, he’s also struggled to get his bike set to his liking. I’ve heard more stories of arm pump from Jeremy this year than every other year of his pro career combined. He switched from air forks to spring forks to try to help, but then struggled while trying to get the spring forks figured out. At Millville, in the second moto, he said he finally found a setting that worked. It was by far his best moto of the year.
Oh yeah, there was also that DNF at High Point. Throw that into the pile and it’s pretty clear the champ has had a tough season. Until you realize this:
Cooper Webb started the season with a broken wrist.
Jeremy Martin has avoided using physical issues as an excuse. Cooper Webb has as well. We all knew that Cooper broke his wrist a few weeks before the Monster Energy Supercross finale in Las Vegas, but he kept that quiet to make sure his competitors didn’t suddenly gain some hope and head back to the SX test tracks before the final round. He won the title in pain and then admitted that the wrist was bad. A broken navicular would have been the easiest excuse ever to take a summer off.
Cooper didn’t take the excuse and didn’t take the summer off. Considering the injury, he rode very well at the first few races, but still wasn’t happy until he finally won an overall at Muddy Creek. Even knowing he was hurting, even knowing he was only out there to score points, he couldn’t leave the track happy after getting beat. An excuse—heck a genuine, honest to God reason—was hanging right in front of him, but he wouldn’t take it. At High Point, he simply said that he “rode like shit.”
Third in the points sits Joey Savatgy. Mistakes have cost him a ton of points over the last few rounds, but he’s not asking for sympathy, either. The pivotal part of this championship came during the second moto at Muddy Creek. Savatgy won the first moto, giving him five moto wins in the first nine motos of the season. He crashed twice in moto two, and since then, he’s had his troubles. But on that day at Muddy Creek, he explained his philosophy.
“At the end of the day, I could sit here and say, “Well I made this mistake because of this or that, or I had a bad race because of that.” Well at the end of the day I’m the one riding the bike so it’s on me,” he said. “I should have been mindful of the track and the deteriorating track conditions. There’s really no one else to blame but me, and I have no problems putting it on my own shoulders. I’m trying to get this thing done for Mitch [Payton] and the last thing he wants to hear is me blaming someone else for my problems. I learned a long time ago—at some point you’ve got to man up and blame yourself. Those mistakes were my fault.”
In a dynamic 250MX season, there will be much to talk about. But the riders at the top would rather not.
