"Best of Both Worlds" is featured in the February 2019 issue of Racer X Illustrated. Subscribe now to read the entire article in full. You can pick up the digital edition and read this story right now—and the cost is just $9.98 for the whole year.

To fully understand where Jeffrey Herlings currently sits in the global motocross hierarchy, you must first split that globe in half. One side is pure motocross, the other heavily diluted with supercross. Herlings rules the former, which we know as MXGP. He just watches the other, which is the AMA split of wintertime supercross and summertime motocross. He tried supercross once, some years ago, for about a month. It did not go well.

Much more successful was his one and only visit to an AMA Pro Motocross National, a statement win at the last round of the ’17 season at Indiana’s Ironman National. That’s where his ascent to the top of the pure motocross world began to rapidly accelerate. By beating the best on the AMA circuit at one of their own tracks, then going back to MXGP for a remarkable run to the FIM crown, the 24-year-old could declare himself “the fastest man on the planet,” which he did, on Instagram. After some grief from haters, he took it down. He should have left it up, though maybe with this one tweak: Jeffrey Herlings is the fastest man on the planet right now, so long as the sun is out.