Hanny.

The sport of motocross can be cruel and unforgiving, if you are a up and coming hot rider and have a couple of bad breaks (literally) soon you will be watching some other rider be granted your ‘can’t miss kid’ status. The window is small and the odds of attaining success very steep, that’s why when you see somebody that has it all and can’t seem to keep it together, it can be frustrating for everyone involved.

   Josh Hansen was released from Joe Gibb’s Racing and although he may yet attain success in our sport, it will never be with another top team. This was Hansen’s last shot at motocross stardom and he, once again, couldn’t make it happen for whatever reason. By all accounts, he was presented with a top team and all the advantages it gives a rider, an almost factory bike, a test track, top notch personnel to look after his every need. All he needed to do when he woke up in the morning was think about how to become a better motorcross racer.  It’s a ride that many riders would’ve given everything they had to get, but Josh couldn’t even give it 100%. If you want to look at the reasons he hasn’t gotten to where he should be, you first have to look back.

In fact you have to go all the way back to the 1999 Mini Olympics which are held in Gainesville Florida every year at thanksgiving. I was there wrenching for another kid that “couldn’t miss” Ryan Morais (Ryan is finally starting to show promise after years of injury) and we were gathered for dinner one night with Josh and his family. Josh’s father Donnie just happens to be the 1982 Supercross and National champion, a member of the mighty Honda teams before a crash in Europe ended his career prematurely.  So we’re at dinner and a teenaged Josh just stole the show, being goofy and outgoing about everything. I remember thinking that this kid was so charismatic at such a young age, he had a pedigree second to none and had just finished up doing very well in all his classes that week. He was speaking about his career and telling the table that the fact that the riders at the time winning (Jeremy McGrath and Jeff Emig) were alleged to be doing a lot of partying and that he and Ryan were going to do it different. It just struck me as a very mature thing to say from a kid that was acting immature at the time. I just chalked it up to teenager talk and filed it away in my memory banks.

Josh, a very natural talented rider who really looks the part of a professional racer, first broke into the pro ranks at the end of 2002. It’s funny that something that what would end up become a big part of his undoing was his strength early on-Josh earned a ride at the powerful Yamaha of Troy team because of his outdoor try-out at the end of 2002. In 2003, Hansen was an up and coming kid that everybody had high hopes for. I would know as I was on the Factory Yamaha team then and I know that everybody at Yamaha closely followed Josh’s progress and had his best interests in mind. The 2003 season ended with some potential being shown at least indoors. It was sometime during this season that Josh sought out Factory Yamaha rider Tim Ferry and tried to find someone to emulate and to look to in how to become a professional racer. Ferry, at this point a 11 year pro gladly took Josh under his wing and showed him some tricks and offered some friendly advice on how to further your career and stay in the game as long as possible. It was a smart thing to do for a young rider. It also might’ve been the last smart thing he did for his career.

The 2004 season was one that saw Hansen reach even greater heights with his first ever Supercross win at Indianapolis but it was during this time, with his upcoming free agency no doubt in his mind that the simple act of competing in the outdoors became a chore and something that Josh wasn’t inclined to do. There were sporadic decent finishes but more and more he just didn’t want to put the work in at succeeding in this area of the sport. Motocross takes incredible amount of strength, endurance and fortitude from a rider and the YOT members heard all about how he considered himself a supercross rider and that, in his next deal he was going to try to race indoors only. There were also the “mystery” problems with his bike that YOT couldn’t figure out. So fresh off his breakout season he was courted by KTM and signed what was rumored to be a three year over one million dollar deal. The orange team needed some riders and Hansen fit the bill, he was young, had a win under his belt and was at the end of the day still a very talented rider. The interview where he said that he “didn’t want to do(outdoors)” obviously slipping KTM’s mind.

His first half year at KTM produced the kind of results that both he and the team were looking for, he was a contender in the championship hunt, winning 2 races and tying for the title but getting second in the tie breaking formula. But it was the beginning of the end for the number 100 as he started showing no interest in the outdoor portion of the schedule despite not really proving himself worthy to have a SX only contract like Jeremy McGrath and others.  Fairly or not, Josh was the poster child for what was wrong in the sport. It was too much money, too much ego at too young of an age. Who knows what each of you reading this would do if you were in the shoes of a young talented athlete with a lot of money? What we know Josh did was most certainly alienate fans and sponsors alike, basically flaunting his wealth on some “cribs”-like TV shows, giving an interview where he stated that he “came from nothing” when in fact, by all accounts he had at least a middle class upbringing in Colorado. And of course some injuries and the fact that he just couldn’t seem to bother to do any outdoor motocross races. Yet he always seemed to be able to make the casual Surfercross race each summer despite being injured. By his last year at KTM, the orange team told him in fact to not bother with the Nationals, the team just didn’t have any faith in him to do anything. They saw what we all saw, yet I think some of the blame for Josh’s downfalls have to come onto KTM-who were they bidding against to give Hansen so much money? Nobody I talked to back then, that’s for sure.

So 2008 rolled around and the only guy that really believed in Josh, championship wining mechanic turned team manager Jeremy Albrecht was instrumental in signing Hanny to a Gibb’s Yamaha contract. Everybody and I mean everybody shook their head at Gibb’s for signing such a risky rider but the upside was still there. It’s like a left-handed pitcher in baseball, throw it in somewhere over the plate and somebody will hire you, in this case have a beautiful riding style with some wins and they’ll be somebody who thinks they can turn you around. The results weren’t there save for a couple of eighths and more and more the grind of a series was getting Josh down. He was hurt again, he had some rumored off track incidents and when he actually rode, he would just take riders out for no apparent reason. There were more missed main events than finishes. Frustration boiled over on both sides and we know the rest. What’s going to happen now? Well, a rumored attempt to race the few remaining supercrosses on a Suzuki but Josh is right back to where he started, no outdoor season for him yet again.

Every agent out there that represents a young rider should drill the Hansen career path into their client’s heads as an example of how NOT to act with money and fame. We should remember that these are kids that are being given money and left to their own devices, we should remember that race wins shouldn’t mean that we all just look away and accept what is going on. I feel for Josh, yes he made his own bed and has to lie in it but was he mature enough to realize that the bed was his and his only? I suppose that one day there’s going to be a young man out there that is going to wake up one day when he’s forty and realize that he had the world at his feet but couldn’t keep his head out of the clouds to see it.