THE FOREVER RIVALS
In the summer of 1966, Sports Illustrated magazine sent journalist Bob Ottum to spend some time with Giacomo Agostini, multiple motorcycle world champion, part-time movie star and full-time Italian heartthrob. At the end of his visit Ottum surmised Ago’s job thus: ‘to race and skid and crash and then make love and drink wine.’
All those decades ago, top bike racers didn’t usually have steady girlfriends. They lived on the edge of death and behaved like it, celebrating each Sunday survival by boozing and chasing women, or “birding it up,” as 1967 125cc world champion Bill Ivy so charmingly put it.
More than half a century later, MotoGP is a cold, hard science. The motorcycles are ruled by algorithms and the riders are ruled by pitiless training regimes that leave no room for fun and frolics. Most of the MotoGP grid is teetotal, almost a quarter have children with their partners and others admit their results improved once they started thinking about torque-demand maps, instead of, well…
Of course, there’s always one exception that proves the rule.
“I had the same girlfriend for three years – now every week I change!” grins Spaniard Jorge Martin, 24, one of the brightest stars of MotoGP’s new generation, who
