Happy New Year! Let’s keep with the annual New Year’s Resolution, which is to believe this year’s Anaheim 1 and Monster Energy AMA Supercross will be the year of years. The clash of eras. #deepfield and “this is the year where 12 guys can win.” Plus, 2024 packs the stats to back up the talk. Take last year’s A1 450 field, remove Marvin Musquin, but add Jett and Hunter Lawrence, Justin Cooper and Jorge Prado. Wow! That’s deep. But I’ll always hold firm that 2005 was the most hyped Anaheim ever, not because the field was deeper, but because of a magical combination of timing, luck and career intersection. A1 2005 marked the first time Ricky Carmichael and James Stewart were on the same starting gate. Ever. Somehow, even though they were both Floridians, they were just far apart enough in age to never cross paths until the premiere class in supercross. That made A1 2005 one of those ultimate sporting events where one could only speculate and guess what would happen, but no one had any real data, including the competitors themselves.
No one could really predict what would happen. Add in defending AMA Supercross Champion Chad Reed, and a returning-from-hiatus Jeremy McGrath and Travis Pastrana, and you certainly had the most star power ever lined up on a supercross gate. Then it rained and Kevin Windham won the race in the mud. I always joked that A1 2005 was just too crazy, so the heavens opened to try to calm everything down. A week later, Stewart got hurt in practice, and by the time he was back McGrath had slipped away in a part-time schedule. Yes, 2005 was the only race ever with the Reed/Carmichael/Stewart/Pastrana/McGrath combo.
The Supercross Gods have gifted us something similar to the hype of Anaheim 1, 2005. Through luck and circumstance, this will mark the first real race between Eli Tomac and Jett Lawrence. (They were on the same gate for one moto at the Red Bud Motocross of Nations in 2022, if you want to get technical about it. By then, Tomac had already won a moto and just cruised through Moto 3 with a sixth-place finish to help Team USA lock up the Chamberlain.)
Tomac versus Lawrence would have been big at any time, but it’s bigger now. Last year’s Pro Motocross opener at Pala was supposed to be the first match, but Tomac was injured and out. The hype is bigger now. Pala last year would only have been billed as a Tomac versus Chase Sexton rematch, with Jett in the “rookie learning year” mode. Maybe Jett could have gone out and won that race, but on that morning at Pala, the anticipation wouldn’t have been as high as it will be on the morning of Anaheim. Now Jett packs a 22-0 rookie MX season and the SMX Championship, and Tomac carries the intrigue of returning after a huge injury. Circumstances make this night more mysterious and harder to predict. At some point early, they’ll be on the track together, and every eyeball and camera will be watching.
Of course, they are not the only ones to watch. Sexton stars in that ’05 Chad Reed role. James versus Ricky/Jett versus Eli have hype, but the number-one plate is someone else’s. It’s not that Tomac versus Jett is the only battle to watch this year, it’s just that it’s the only one we have not seen yet. Sexton, of course, could be better than both of them, just like Reed hoped to be better than RC and Stew back then.
There’s much unknown to Sexton, too, since he’s switching brands and teams. We have not heard the typical “flying at the test track” talk about Sexton this off-season. This has been a real transition, sources tell us, and he’s working hard to get comfortable on the KTM. There will be a lot of judgement going once he gets that bike onto a racetrack, and not just from the outsiders.
Then you have Cooper Webb, who is never a “flying at the test track” guy so he never really registers…until the lights come on and the AMA starts handing out points. Do not take anything you saw at the Paris Supercross and read into it with Webb. Was he fast enough to win Paris this year? Nope. But he raced Paris last year and was even further off. By Anaheim, he was better than anyone not named Tomac, and a few weeks later he had worked his way into the points lead. Heck, before the 2019 season he was apparently struggling so badly that Aldon Baker had to sit him down a few weeks before the season. The fire lit, and at Anaheim 1 he had the fastest lap of the night. A few weeks later he won a race, and then he claimed the championship. You only see Webb’s best during the 20 + 1 of a main event.
The list goes on. And on. But deep fields are normal. What 2024 packs is something at an even higher level. The 2023 season made a sacrifice: over a two-weekend span in Nashville and Denver, Webb, Tomac and several other contenders went down. Into the void stepped Sexton, who was already so darned close to doing it on his own, and then Jett, who also might have romped in Pro Motocross if everyone was healthy… but they weren’t so there’s no way to know for sure. Building confidence is key, and it’s easier to do that when Tomac is gone, and Sexton says he’s dealing with the Supercross Championship Hangover. Whatever. This is all just conjecture and bench-racing and guessing. What we really want are real answers, and that will only come when all of these guys are healthy and ready on the same gate. We finally get to say we saw Eli Tomac and Jett Lawrence race. And everyone else, too. We’re ready and they’re ready. Let’s go.
