Last September 28, after clinching his seventh MotoGP world title, Marc Marquez expressed a single, desperate wish: “The last five races? I don’t care what will happen, but I don’t want to get hurt”. As the saying goes, luck is blind but bad luck sees perfectly well. Just 7 days later, Marquez was innocently crashed into by Bezzecchi in Thailand: fractured scapula and ligament damage to the right shoulder. Conservative therapy didn’t work and after a week he went under the knife.
In short, what shouldn’t have happened, happened. A slow, painful recovery. A return to the track where Marquez didn’t seem like the real Marquez or at least the 2025 version of Marquez. He had flashes of talent, but a clear difficulty in maintaining consistency in lap times.
He spoke of lack of explosiveness and strength in the arm, even went as far as to say the problem wasn’t the bike, but him. He pointed out how other riders with the same bike were faster, talked about needing to understand how to ride this Ducati, about new limits to find after the disastrous Mandalika injury.
After Jerez at the end of April, he took stock: two Sprint wins, not even a podium in 4 Sunday GPs. Doubt strongly crept into his mind: what if the problem is me? A simple question, a huge ghost: am I no longer the same as before? A potential game over.
It was clear from Marquez’s words yesterday: “After Jerez I realized something wasn’t working, I thought I had a mental block. I had a strange feeling: at home I was fine, I came to the track and it went badly”. The decision to let his doctors turn him upside down: “So I tried to find the problem and they found it. Sometimes you go to doctors and they say they don’t see anything. But they found the problem and it was related to the position on the MotoGP bike. It was a very strange issue, when doing motocross I was fine.”
So there was an explanation: one of the screws in his shoulder was touching the radial nerve. Paradoxically, good news.
“It wasn’t a mental block,” Marquez emphasized, suddenly wiping away all doubts about himself: “This made me inconsistent and caused unexpected crashes. This problem showed up when I least expected it.”
Before the disastrous crash yesterday at Le Mans, Marquez had surgically planned to race in France and Catalonia and use the two-week break to operate on his shoulder and remove the cursed screw. A sign of not wanting to leave anything to chance, perhaps also with a desperate world championship chase already in 2026 in mind. The plan failed, when he returns he will be over 100 points behind the leader. Too many? Recoverable for a 2025 version Marquez?
But if there’s one thing Marquez has learned over these years it’s to not rush the comeback: however, on his return he could miss between 14 and 16 races. Time for a crazy idea?
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