Fast Between The Ears

Okay, folks, HOLY CRAP AM I SORRY.  This has been a mildly fucked-up week and a majorly busy week – far more so than I ever would have expected.  And so I’ve not only fallen down on my writing but also my replying to comments and especially my blog reading.  Y’all don’t be mad, it’s not personal!  I’m gonna come back soon and read everything I’ve missed.  Hopefully next week, as right now, in the distance, it doesn’t look like it should be TOO crazy.  (Of course I thought that about this week, too.)

Meanwhile in the 15 minutes I was able to spend on my motorcycle board this week, I found this hilarious gem posted.  It is FAR too funny not to share.

Before you ask:  well, no, not with the Desmosedici, but if you replace that with the name of any given Japanese 1000cc+ sportbike, then yes.  Motorcyclists hear some version of this speech at least monthly, and the only saving grace of it is that the laws of physics generally prove to be an effective correction to overblown egos.  And when that happens…well, it’s easier to find cheap parts on eBay.

As one of the moto crew says:  “Riding is a constant physics lesson.  Beware the pop quizzes.”

Y’all have a good weekend, and brace for the hurricane of long-winded TB all over your blogs that has been forecast for next week…

He Went Thataway

[crosses his arms in front of his chest, fingers pointed in opposite directions]

I desperately want to comb through all of our MotoGP pictures and give everybody the updates on our totally awesome weekend at Indianapolis…but I am also still reeling from the deaths of Peter and now Shoya and I sort of cringe at the thought of delving back into all of that, too.

Having had physical symptoms due to stress for the first time in I don’t know how long (well, other than weight gain!), I kinda want to blab about it.  But I also want to brood in silence, and simultaneously I want to shift into chuckle-overdrive to laugh and forget all about the shit that’s getting me down.

I’m carving out a little bit of mindspace and doing a little private writing and also watching stupid TV shows and listening to lots of different music – hopefully soon I’ll also pick up my guitar – and all of this is helping me work through what’s bothering me.  More tiny steps through the mire toward the better me, right?

Sometimes this “living” shit irks the fuck out of me.  It’s a pain in the ass.   Still beats the alternative.

Thhbbbppptttt.  That is all.

48

This man won the first Moto2 race.  Ever.  This spring, in Qatar.

His name is Shoya Tomizawa.  I took this photo of him on a warm and gorgeous Friday afternoon at Indianapolis.  Nine days ago.

Shoya Tomizawa

Click on it; you can see the full-size shot.

I made sure to get a good shot of Tomizawa because I knew he was going to be a great one.  Perhaps the next great Japanese motorcycle racer, in a land hungry for one.

Today, Shoya Tomizawa died in Misano, San Marino, Italy from injuries sustained during a race.  He was nineteen years old.

So tell me.  WHO, just six days ago, wrote a defense of the sport?  Saying “it hurts, but one day I’ll watch again?”  Could it be the same guy who, the very next time he watched a race, heard an announcer at the end of it give the news of the death of a competitor?  Yet another teenager?

Today I have no words.

Rest in peace, Shoya.  It was an honor to watch you race.

Triumph and Tragedy

There are some things that you just have to work your way through.  This is my attempt to work through one of those things.

On a bright and glorious Sunday morning at Indianapolis, I watched a young man die.  I didn’t even know what I was seeing until long afterward.

During the warm-up lap of the first race of the day, the USGPRU race featuring 12- to 18-year-old riders, one rider somehow fell off of his bike and was struck by a rider behind him.  13-year-old Peter Lenz sustained serious blunt force trauma and succumbed to his injuries.

Photo courtesy of The Superbike School

I didn’t know what was happening, really.  As often happens at live sports events, I was looking somewhere else, maybe talking to Bill or something, when I heard the “Ohhhh!” from the crowd and looked over to see riders on the ground.  I could tell that it was taking a long time getting him onto a stretcher and into the ambulance, but that sometimes happens for various reasons.  I don’t think there was ever an announcement to the crowd – but I was wearing earplugs for the thunderous noise anyway and might have missed one if it was made.  Not that it necessarily was the right thing to do to the crowd at the track anyway.

Photo courtesy of MotoGP Galleries

It’s a harsh, harsh reminder of the dangerous realities of the sport that I’ve followed avidly for seven years.  It doesn’t happen often – the last time it happened on such a world stage was the tragic death of Daijiro Kato (pictured at right) in 2003 – but riders can and do die doing this thing that I love.  Coming home after a near-ecstatic weekend, checking on the condition of the injured rider, and learning the worst…it’s beyond “sobering.”  It’s an outright shock – a deep, thorough shock to my system.

I will admit that for a few hours last night it cast a pall over the entire weekend in my memory, and in fact made me reconsider my fandom of the sport in general.  The fact that I pay money and cheer for something that resulted in the death of a thirteen year old boy and the utter traumatization of the twelve year old boy that accidentally hit him isn’t something that is easy to digest.  At all.  And I hope it never becomes so, for any of us – that none of us take for granted that people risk their limbs, their health, and their lives not only for money or fame or pure joy of competition, but also for the entertainment of us, the spectators.

As I lay there in the dark of night last night, with the sounds of motorcycles still ringing in my ears, I thought of many things.  Of how tragic it is that a promising young man died doing what he loved;  about the future of the sport; about NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt’s on-track death and the impact upon the sport of the high-profile loss of one of its superstars; but mostly I found myself thinking of Eight Belles.

When Eight Belles was euthanized at trackside at Churchill Downs following her second-place run at the 134th Kentucky Derby, I felt a similar feeling of horror and disbelief – and similarly held my wife as she sobbed.  I also felt that same sort of guilt, that my participation as a spectator (this time on television rather than in person) somehow meant that I shared some portion of the blame for the death of a competitor.  Ultimately, though, I was able to enjoy horse racing again.  I even visited the Downs, the scene of the crime, and was able to enjoy my time spent there.  But not without having that little bit of concern in the back of my mind…the worry that something horrible would happen again.

Peter Lenz’ death is not directly comparable to that of Eight Belles.  Eight Belles, for all her beauty, was an animal and not a human being.  While I’m not an animal hater, I am not a person who places the lives of animals upon a level plane with that of human beings.  But, also, Peter chose to compete in his race of his own free will – he was by all accounts a great young racer, with a bright future ahead of him in the sport, and he loved what he did.  That puts things in another perspective.

His father’s words on Peter’s Facebook page brought some peace to my heart:

He passed doing what he loved and had his go fast face on as he pulled onto the track. The world lost one of its brightest lights today. God Bless Peter and the other rider involved. #45 is on another road we can only hope to reach.

After a while of soul-searching, I’ll go back to Indianapolis again next year and enjoy myself.  And I’ll look back on the fun memories from this weekend without a dark cloud hanging over everything.  I think that’s what Peter’s family wants, and what Peter himself would have wanted.

But I’ll probably let my DVR’ed footage of this weekend’s races sit unwatched for a little while before I can bring myself back to yesterday.

And I’ll never watch another motorcycle race without remembering the name of Peter Lenz.

My thoughts are with Xavier Zayat, the other rider involved in the accident, and his family as well.

And my sincerest condolences to the Lenz family.

Godspeed to Peter, and thanks.

Let’s hear it for Texas!

And by the way…

Texas’ own Ben Spies pulled it out – getting his first career MotoGP pole position for tomorrow’s race!

The Kentucky Kid, Nicky Hayden, will start in third, with the two young Americans sandwiching the championship leader, Jorge Lorenzo of Spain.

It was a tough qualifying session and the times at the top were pretty tight, but Elbowz pulled it out.

Way to go, Ben!

And Your Tour Guide, TB

Okay peoples…

We’ve already done decided to do this here thing again.  The four of us, next year.  We’re gonna renew our tickets and our hotel reservations.  Question is, who else wants in?

Last year I wahoo’ed and renewed and later that afternoon Tiff emailed me saying “Hmm, so how would I go?”  And I went back in and amended my ticket order so we could possibly get seats all together – and we did, how cool is that?!  While it’s not guaranteed to work, IF anyone wants to join us next year, I COULD attempt to do the same thing.  Change it from four tickets to five, or six, or fifteen, whatever.

OR:  general admission tickets to the races this year were $60 for a three day pass.  The first two days are general admission anyway – the only difference would be on race day.  On Friday and Saturday we could all hang together as a big ol’ gaggle if and as long as we so desire.

Is anyone out there actually interested?  If so, speaketh thee up!!

On Location

Oh my dear friends, HOO HOO HOO you have no idea the fun we are having.  I wish I had more time to tell you all, but DUH we’re too busy having MORE fun.  And maybe trying to sleep some of last night off.  At least the wiser of us, unlike yours truly, who woke up thinking “whoa boy I drank too much but WOOHOOHOO I’m gettin’ in the shower, it’s another day at the track!!!!”

We have at least three metric tons of photos between us.  I’m pretty sure Dys and I could delete every photo we took that was the least bit out of focus or had a pole in the way or whatever and still have more than 600 images for yesterday alone.  It is ridiculous.

But Tiff just messaged me from downstairs at the breakfast table, so I’ll have to save for later the story of how I gave one world champion so much shit that he grinned like a Cheshire cat, leading Dys to tell me “thank you for that – look at the smile I got in this photo!  He’s laughing at your dumb ass!! – how I shook hands with another world champion – how Tiff squee’ed when the GP bikes rounded the bend for the first time, but I squee’ed harder (and threw out my voice in two yells) – how sunburned we are – etc.

In the meantime, I leave you with this.  It has been a GREAT WEEKEND so far, peoples.

Monday Music

Hey everybody!  Did anybody know that this week is MOTOGP WEEK!?!?

Oh.  Sorry.

Tough shit.  It’s all motorcycles all the time this week, motherfuckers!  BWAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

Anybody who doesn’t know what’s up, take 3 minutes of your time and watch this video.  If you haven’t already.  (I posted it this time last year as the MM.)

I was listening to my iPod last night while trying to fall asleep and this song came on, and I immediately imagined myself cutting a GP video to this tune.  Winning, losing, falling, getting lower and lower (lean angle)…hey, it’s perfect.  If only I had the time.  And the GP footage, and a good hand at editing.  But wtf, just close your eyes and imagine a bunch of crazy fuckers rubbing their shoulders on the next guy’s tires at 80mph.

Static-X, “The Only”

Now ‘scuse a brother whilst I mosh for a second.

Aah, that’s better.

I get up from my desk at work at 4:30 Eastern on Wednesday, do some housework and final packing until early afternoon on Thursday, and then it’s GO TIME.  After 4:30 on Wednesday, it’s potential dark time for the blog.  Last year I did some blogging from the hotel room after the races.  This year I’m gonna have motherfuckers all up in my shit.  You know, so instead of working on the computer like Dys and I did last year, we’ll likely be out carousing and canoodling and shit with people like Tiff and Marie and Heather and another 100,000 or so crazy motorcycle fans.

If you’re interested…and masochistic…you can watch this space for whatever updates I can scrape the time to throw out.  Here’s some other places to watch for fun stuff from us, although none of them are guaranteed to be updated, at least a few of them probably will.

• My Twitter feed
• Our Flickr photostream
• My Youtube Channel

I’ll also put Tiff’s shit down because they’ll be glued to us for much of each day, and that chick is even more wired than I am. I’m betting her new Crackberry means that her Twitter feed will be the source of much hilarity.

• Tiff’s blog
• Tiff’s Twitter feed
• Tiff’s Flickr photostream

WOOHOOHOO!  I’m telling you, I’m stone cold sober and there are crackheads and meth addicts out there who would get a ROCKIN buzz from a shot of my blood right about now.

It’s on, muhfuggas!

Fun to Come

Holy bejeezus, this project at the office has completely redefined “chaos.”  We had a visitor yesterday (from USC, Kim!) and she literally had to turn sideways to get from one place to another, step over piled extension cords in the hallway, the whole nine yards.  My personal office was completely torn to hell for two full days – I’m back in it now, woohoo!, but we still have probably two or three days of hard work to get things more or less back to normal here.  So expect a little more quiet time from me, but not too much more.

In the meantime, guess what I got in the mail yesterday?

Oh yeah, the party is on.  And I’m looking in your direction, Tiff!

Almost Very Bad

Fook Mi, I just wrote about a 1500-word post on a) this nasty Moto2 crash (rider is OK), b) dumbasses bombing up the inside of turn 1 on a 40-bike grid,  and c) Andrea Iannone getting buttfucked by the weird-ass implementation of a rule.  And I got distracted and thought I hit “publish” before navigating away from the page.

Ker-flush goes my 1500 words.

(“Yay!”  says a bunch of the peanut gallery.  Heh.)

Anyway, I did want to point this out.  It looks a lot more horrible on first glance than I think it actually was – the rider was spotted eating lunch in the medical tent half an hour later when a reporter went to check on him – but still, damn, in all my years of watching motorcycle racing this is probably the scariest crash I’ve seen.

This is the very end of the Moto2 race on Sunday in Barcelona, Spain.  The riders in question are battling for a top-10 finish – American Kenny Noyes on the white #9 bike, and Spaniard Carmelo Morales on the blue #31.  They’re tucked in tight, fighting for a top 10 finish – Morales is in the slipstream, trying to draft up until the last second in order to pass Noyes and nip the spot at the line.

He waited just a hair too long.

Morales’ front tire clips Noyes’ rear.  There’s a puff of smoke and Morales’ bike goes down.  It’s not a hard hit for Morales…until the bike hits a bump and starts cartwheeling at about 140 miles per hour.

What appears to be the bike landing on Morales’ chest looks, on closer inspection, to be the bike hitting him with its spinning momentum just an instant before it hits the ground.  The bike then bounces up, and as the race marshals who are behind the barricade but in front of the fence dive for cover, the damned thing just about clears the fence and goes into the grandstands.

Freak accident, and one that could have been much uglier.  But holy crap.  Antonio Banderas’ (owner of Noyes’ race team) reaction says it all.  “Yay, our guy is gonna beat…Fuck!  FUCK!  Oh my…”  *speechless*

***

All I’ll say about the rest of it:

a)  Alex Debon should be suspended a race for his dumbass attempt to bomb up the inside of turn 1 and thereby crashing himself and 9 other riders, making a dozen others take evasive action, and bringing out the yellow flag;

b)  Andrea Iannone did pass under the yellow and so deserves the punishment, but the system of having the team inform him of that is stupid.  If race direction wants to hand out a punishment, they should inform the riders via the big yellow board.  Period.  (This bit is really complex; I’ll explain if anyone is curious, but the only ones who likely care are Dys and Tiff and they already saw the race in question.)