This is all very exciting. It’s always very exciting at the start of any season because we come in with #deepfield and ten guys can win and all that. We do have that again in 2022, but here’s what makes it this much better. We have two completely-impossible-to-predict wild cards in Ryan Dungey and Antonio Cairoli. There’s absolutely no way to know how these guys are going to do. We haven’t seen Dungey race in ages, we haven’t seen either of them in supercross, we haven’t seen Cairoli race any of these races ever before. They could be good, they could be bad, they could be somewhere in between, but the only thing we know is that there’s no definite way to know how they will do. That takes the usual preseason unpredictability to another level.
It just adds to the usual kind of pre-season hype. We could be satisfied, alone, on Dylan Ferrandis versus Eli Tomac. Two titans, two outdoor warriors, two guys who can go absolutely two the wall at the end of a 30-plus two moto. Ferrandis was no doubt the best rider in 2021, but this potential season-long battle has me thinking of a moto at RedBud last year, when Ferrandis brought in his usual Danger Zone late race charge, and Tomac, no scrub, wasn’t going to lay down. They put in the fastest laps of the moto on the final laps. It was an awesome battle of wills. Can we get a bunch of those this summer? Well, now they’re teammates. Supercross would indicate that whatever funk Tomac was in for a lot of 2021 is no longer the case in 2022. In fact, Eli said this week in a press conference that he felt his new Monster Energy Yamaha Star Racing YZ450F actually got up to speed outdoors even more quickly than he did in supercross. Did you know that, when Tomac first swung a leg over that back last fall, he was supposed to do a few weeks of outdoor riding and testing, but after just a few days he said he felt like it was already a bike he could win on, so he just moved to supercross?
There is the lingering story of Eli’s knee injury from supercross, which he estimates is about 90 percent now. Also, Eli is 29, and while he proved in supercross age is just a number, you have to always leave open the possibility that winning both titles in a 29-race grind is just too much to ask. Especially against guys like Ferrandis, who are coming in fresh. There was a time in this sport when winning both titles in the same year was common. We haven’t seen it since 2015 (Dungey, coincidentally).
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Aaron Plessinger Spencer Owens ![Antonio Cairoli]()
Antonio Cairoli Spencer Owens ![Chase Sexton]()
Chase Sexton Spencer Owens ![Dylan Ferrandis]()
Dylan Ferrandis Spencer Owens ![Jason Anderson]()
Jason Anderson Spencer Owens ![Ken Roczen]()
Ken Roczen Spencer Owens ![Ryan Dungey]()
Ryan Dungey Spencer Owens
If you want to talk about Tomac’s renaissance in supercross you have to also mention a similar rise for Jason Anderson with Monster Energy Kawasaki. Of course with Anderson there’s always that stigma of “he’s never even won a national” but he has always been faster than that record indicates. Anderson has won three motos and has 16 overall podiums. He’s been thisclose to that overall win a lot of times. If he is still riding as well as he was last month, the win, or more, will come.
Then there’s all this other stuff. As our man Jason Thomas says, doubt Ken Roczen at your own peril, especially at the start of a season. Ken came into last year’s outdoor campaign saying he was having a tough time “reconnecting” to motocross, and he sounded borderline depressed. Two weeks later he was the points leader. He sounded similarly bummed leading into this year’s supercross season. He won the opener. Ken might have taken time off this year for his health, but he’s proven time and time again that doesn’t matter. He can win at any time, and often when you least expect it.
So many others. Chase Sexton. Aaron Plessinger. The beginning of each season is so fun because you can even sense, in the early laps of those first motos, that even the best riders don’t even know how good they are, or where they stand. Which means those of us that are watching have absolutely no clue.
It’s the Dungey and Cairoli thing that seems so wild, though. There’s zero track record for an athlete taking the kind of time off that Dungey has and reaching previous heights. But Roger De Coster told me when they had Dungey test their bike outdoors last year, he was faster than Cooper Webb and Marvin Musquin. The Man told me Dungey, in a test last fall, was podium speed, absolutely. Everyone who saw Dungey ride at this week’s ride day at Fox Raceway said he looked fast. For some riders, speed is just a start, and they need to put other pieces into place in order to win. But those other pieces are actually Dungey’s strength. If he’s fast enough, do you doubt that he has race craft and fitness?
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Cairoli, by the way, also has that “retirement” word hanging over him, but late last year he was still in the hunt for the FIM Motocross World Championship (MXGP) title. We all know what level those guys are in motocross. While Tony has used the word “fun” much more than serious in talks of this adventure, and he hasn’t even indicated how many races he will actually do, this U.S. plan has not taken him by surprise. The day he announced he was stepping away from full-time racing, he said he’d like to try some races in the U.S. this year. He is 36, yes, but not far removed from top competition. Maybe Tony doesn’t have any indications of a title run, or even doing all 12 rounds. But there’s absolutely no way to know how he will do when he actually is racing. That’s what makes this so intriguing.
There is one other factor to consider in all of this excitement. These stories are great an intriguing. But there is the chance that Ferrandis just does what he did last year, which is take an extinguisher to all this excitement. He was the best rider last year, and when you look back to 2021 as a whole, he really had the whole thing under his control starting at the very first moto of the year. Lots of stories, lots of potential. Can the defending champion just shut all of that down? Coming into any season, you have to accept any and all possibilities.
