Silence is (not) Golden.

The sport of motocross is a strange one to be sure, often times you can watch and baseball or hockey game and feel pretty confident that you can review a players performance fairly and accurately. But...

What you see out on the field is what it is, meaning either the player hits the ball, scores a goal or he doesn’t. If the player is hurt and battling something significant, the announcers let us in on it and we cut him some slack for his performance or think that he is awesome for fighting through something.

Not so in motocross. We don’t have extensive media coverage and the teams are not an open book for all of us to read. We don’t know what the riders going through with his body, we don’t know if the bike wasn’t working or was on the verge of breaking. We in the media have to guesstimate what we think is going on with a rider or team. Think about this, how many one on one interviews do you see on ESPN.com? Yet you click on any moto site you want and there is the athlete telling us the fans what is going on with him and his bike, season-whatever. We have to just believe him when he says he’s hurt, there’s no team physician or whatever telling us what is up with a rider. And the flip side is true also, if no one tracks down a rider then we don’t know the reason for his big fade or even worse, no show.

For example if you went to Toronto and watched the 450 main event, you saw Andrew Short grab third place and stay there for about half the race before fading badly to the back. It was a performance that you wouldn’t normally see out of Andrew and had to have made some of the 30,000+ fans questioning what in the hell was wrong with Andrew. I can guarantee you that some fans thought he was out of shape, some thought he had no heart and was just riding for a paycheck while some others were sure that he just didn’t have it on this night. Actually, none of those are true as during the first practice, Andrew tore his tricep muscle and was in pain the whole night. When he got into third, he knew he couldn’t sustain it and was hoping to limit the damage the best he could. After all, he was in third in the supercross series and there’s a nice bonus for that. He had to race, it was that simple.

How many people knew that in the stands and even in the media? I can guarantee you not very many. If you follow the message boards, there was a little blurb on there but it was relegated to the second page very quickly. There was Jason Lawrence and conspiracy theories to talk about people! My point isn’t to toot my own horn because I did some digging and wrote about it in my “Observations” column, the real point is that it’s too bad our sport isn’t more open and forthcoming in its information. The riders don’t want to show any weakness and the teams often times are kept in the dark by the rider because A-he doesn’t want to miss races and not get that contract next year or B- The trainer tells him to keep it quiet because it’s none of the teams business. There is a prominent 450 rider right now that is in and out of the races because he’s battling an injury. He really shouldn’t be out there and his results show it, but his team is pressuring him to ride and he needs a deal for next year. After all if you pull out, the team will not want to hire a pussy to ride for them next season.

We get our information about the riders from the riders themselves and that seems a little backwards to me. We should have an open and honest flow of communication from the teams about what the riders tested that week, what’s hurting and how everything is going with the team. More information is power to the media and makes them want to write about what is going on. The buzz would escalate and we would see the results that coming weekend. Look at roadracing, they tell you they went for a tire test on a certain day, they tell you what special parts they are trying and when something blows up or a rider is on clearly inferior tires or bike, well they tell the media and nothing happens. There is no burning on the cross of the rider or the tire company, everyone acknowledges it and moves on.

In our sport Bridgestone tires are generally accepted as being a superior tire to anything else out there. That's not me making something up, thats coming off the record from guys that are riding or ridden with them. Look at all the top teams and riders using them and trust me when I say it’s not about the money. Bridgestone’s budget is nothing compared to Dunlops. There’s also Pirelli and they are a ways off in regards to a supercross spec tire. Yet, there is nothing ever said about anything, maybe we should be praising the ride of Ben Coisy of the Motoconcepts team with his Pirelli Honda CRF450 and the fact he’s in fifteenth in the series points with tires that I guarantee you are not as good as the guys to his right and left on the gate. Again, it’s no slam on Pirelli-they have World Championships up the wazoo and make a fine tire for anyone of us, it’s just that at the highest of skill levels, the tires (especially front) are a huge factor. Also Pirelli is new to the game (4 years) and is trying to compete with the years and years their competitiors have on them. If we were roadracing, we’d be saying that Coisy is doing fantastic with a privateer Honda and Pirelli tires. But instead, no one is talking about Ben at all.

I guess what I’m calling for is more transparency from the teams and riders to let the fans and media chatter amongst ourselves about the racers and machines. The old adage that the worse thing people can say about you (or your sport) is nothing at all applies here.