- Marc Marquez admits he cannot explain how he kept winning eight world titles in ten seasons, saying the motivation that carried him through those years is something he no longer understands.
- Seven surgeries on his right shoulder and a 1,000-plus day winless stretch between 2021 and 2024 changed how he weighs risk every time he gets on the bike.
- He arrives at Phillip Island two points behind Jorge Martin in the hunt for a tenth world title, while admitting retirement is “closer than yesterday.”
The question Marc Marquez cannot answer about himself
Marc Marquez has won nine world championships and more than one hundred grand prix races. He has been compared to every great rider MotoGP has produced, and he has spent the past several seasons rewriting what a comeback from catastrophic injury is supposed to look like. Ahead of this weekend’s race at Phillip Island, he said there is one part of his own career he still cannot explain: how he did any of it in the first place.
“For me, the most important thing is keep doing,” Marquez said, reflecting on the run of eight titles across ten seasons between 2010 and 2019 that turned him into the dominant figure of his generation. “Maybe because I was 20, I was 21, and the energy was different, but right now I cannot explain. But to do many years in a row and keep going and keep with the same motivation, this is something that I don’t know how I did, I cannot answer.”
It is a rare admission from a rider who built his reputation on certainty, on throwing a motorcycle into corners at angles that looked physically impossible and climbing off unhurt more often than anyone had a right to expect. The young version of Marquez the sport fell in love with did not appear to question himself in public. The version racing this weekend at Phillip Island does, openly, and the gap between those two riders is the story of everything that happened to him in between.
“I felt like a superhero before 2020”
Marquez traces the break in his own story to a single season. “I felt like a superhero before 2020,” he said. “Then 2020 showed me, and I learnt, that we are humans and one day we are here, and another day we can be a different person.” The crash that opened that chapter led to a right arm and shoulder that would not heal cleanly, and a run of operations that stretched across years rather than months. “In the right shoulder I had seven different surgeries and I feel it,” Marquez said. “It’s what it is.”
What followed was the longest drought of his career: more than 1,000 days between race wins, spent first on a Honda that had fallen well behind the rest of the grid and then searching for a motorcycle that could let him ride the way he used to. For a rider who had not gone a full winless season going back to his rookie premier-class year, the silence was its own kind of injury. He has talked before about the toll those seasons took on him away from the track. What he added this week was a clearer sense of how the injuries themselves changed the calculations he makes every time he gets on the bike.
“A rider decides where is the line,” Marquez said. “Now I start to evaluate more the risk, and those risks are those injuries, those crashes.” It is a strange sentence to hear from a rider still fighting for a championship in the season’s final rounds, proof that the calculation has shifted without the results showing it. He is not riding more cautiously in the way casual fans might assume caution looks. He is riding with a fuller understanding of what each crash actually costs him, which is not the same thing as riding scared.
Why he has not walked away yet
Marquez was blunt about what has kept him on the grid through years that would have ended plenty of careers. “I’m here and I’m competing because at the moment I didn’t give up on the mental side,” he said. “I achieved already a lot but still I feel competitive, and I know that if I won I can keep being competitive for some years.” He drew a sharp line between his sport and others where the physical cost of staying at the top is lower. “We are not in a sport like football or tennis, that they are doing their one hundred percent but the risk is much lower,” he said. “So, you need to evaluate many things in MotoGP before your retirement.”
That last line is as close as Marquez has come to publicly measuring an end date. Asked about the timing, he did not pretend the question was years away. “It’s closer than yesterday, yes, but when? I don’t know.” For a sport built on riders who rarely admit uncertainty about anything, it was an unusually honest answer from its most decorated active competitor.
A tenth title still within reach
None of the reflection has slowed Marquez down where it counts most. He arrives at Phillip Island for this weekend’s Australian Grand Prix just two points behind Aprilia’s Jorge Martin in the championship, with his own Ducati Lenovo Team machinery underneath him after years spent coaxing performance out of equipment that could not match his ambition. A tenth world title would arrive sixteen years after his first grand prix championship at Mugello, a gap that spans entire careers for most of the riders he now shares a grid with.
The Phillip Island weekend carries its own emotional charge beyond the points table. The Australian circuit, long regarded by riders as one of the most demanding and rewarding tracks on the calendar, has an uncertain long-term future on the MotoGP schedule, and several veterans have spoken this week about treating the layout with extra appreciation while it remains part of the championship. For a rider who has spent the past two years relearning how much risk he is willing to accept, racing flat out around a track built on fast, committed corners is its own kind of test of everything he says has changed in him after 2020.
His younger brother Alex Marquez has spent much of the past two seasons racing near the same championship conversation, a situation that would have seemed improbable a decade ago when Marc was the family’s only rider at the front of the field. The two have pushed each other through the same injuries, the same equipment changes, and the same questions about how much longer either of them wants to keep doing this at the highest level. That family context adds another layer to Marc’s reflections this week: he is not just measuring his own career against the rider he used to be, he is watching a version of his own apprenticeship play out in real time through his brother’s results.
What makes Marquez’s title push remarkable is not that he is competitive again. It is that he is competitive again while openly admitting he no longer understands the version of himself that made winning look automatic. The rider chasing Martin this weekend has seven shoulder surgeries, a three-year gap in his trophy case, and a retirement clock he describes as running, though he cannot say how much time is left on it. He is also, somehow, still one race away from the championship lead. Whichever version of Marquez shows up at Phillip Island, the one who used to call himself a superhero or the one who has learned the hard way that he is not, the sport will be watching to see if it is enough for a tenth crown.
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