Marquez breathes a sigh of relief | The mail

«When they called me on Friday, they gave me the results and all the information, I breathed. I breathed, because there was a possibility that seeing the results they had left open the option for me to decide whether to have the operation or not. But they called me and told me directly: come next week, this is too big, we don’t know what you’re doing now, but you have to stop. And for me the decision was easy. Friday was one of the best days of the year. It was bad news because I have to have surgery, but actually very good news for myself », this is how Marc Márquez expressed himself this Sunday, when he said goodbye to the competition without a deadline to return to the circuits.

This Thursday he will undergo a fourth operation on his arm, in the United States, an intervention that the pilot himself commented would last around two hours, and then another recovery process will begin, initially in Madrid, if the coordination between the doctor who will operate on him in Rochester (Minnesota) and those who treat him regularly allow it. «My first question to the doctors was: Do you trust the operation? And they told me yes, that they trusted. And the second was when am I going to come back. And they answered me: If you come with this mentality, stay home, don’t come », he explained.

On Sunday at Mugello, Márquez crossed the finish line in tenth position, as the second Honda, and a better position than he was on the starting grid. A gray career, although interpreted from the point of view of his physical situation, reaches another dimension. «The race has left me a taste that I am making the right decision, it is the taste that it has left me since in the last laps I was riding the bike and thinking about finishing. I felt very limited, as I did at Le Mans, and it only confirmed that feeling. That I had no doubt, but in case I did. When I got off the bike I thought ‘well, let’s see when we meet again’”, valued the six-time world champion in the highest category.

The pilot himself acknowledged having finished the job that, if he had received the news of the convenience of his operation before Friday, he would not have contested this past Italian Grand Prix. A fact, that of being aware that he was going to have to enter an operating room again, which did not allow him to be mentally one hundred percent in what have so far been the last two days of competition for him. Márquez leaves a bike in crisis that has made his situation even more difficult, although to a certain extent, and following his reasoning, that lack of technical competitiveness has not allowed him to camouflage his condition with results and has left him in no doubt as to whether, sportingly , you are going to sacrifice something.

Strategic plan

“Riding as I am doing now, I could do one more year, two, no more. Because I don’t enjoy it and I suffer a lot. But with this operation I hope that my situation will change. In the last two years my life has not been easy », he confessed. «The victory and the objective of the operation is to try to enjoy riding a motorcycle again, it does not mean having surgery, arriving and winning. That would be a completely wrong mindset. It’s having surgery, going back to a normal life as an athlete, I’m not telling you mine anymore, but as a normal athlete, and enjoying your sport again, so that it’s not a nightmare every time you get on the bike because you know you’ll have pain, because you know it’s going to cost you, ”he continued, in a display of sincerity.

A return for which it is estimated that he will need between three and six months. At the moment Honda will get test rider Stefan Bradl on his bike, while the Japanese firm is preparing a strategic plan to see how they solve the problems of their prototype, so that the new version of Marc Márquez that comes out of this period of sick leave accompanies the best possible tool to meet the objective of the Spanish pilot to be the dominator of the queen category of the sport of two wheels.