Profile of a Champion: Valentino Rossi
MotoGP is a very exciting sport with fast bikes and fast people. One of the greatest champions of the sport is Valentino Rossi. With an amazing record in racing and an amazing personality he currently rules the sport. One of the best aspects of his racing history is the fact that at the top of his career he decided to move from Honda after a winning season to the lowest ranked team; Yamaha. This move just showed how crazy the man is and how daring his plans were.
Rossi started out racing go-karts instead of bikes because his mother was afraid for his safety. Rossi's father was also a motorcycle racer and his son got his racing genes from his father. His racing career started out very slowly and progressed gradually until 2000, when he was given a chance to race with Honda. Honda proved to be the best proving ground of Rossi's talents, which saw him winning 5 championships with the manufacturer.
The interesting aspect of Rossi's career is the fact that when he was at the top of his game with Honda, winning championship after championship, he left them to join the lowest ranked manufacturer of them all. Yamaha had been at the bottom of the pile for a long time, last winning a championship in 1992. This factor of Rossi's temperament was severely tested because by joining the lowest ranked team he had to show his own racing skills. He had to show that it was his own skills that had won the races as opposed to the bikes that were the reason for winning. Rossi wanted to prove that Yamaha was a great racing team and he could work with them to get them back to the top.
The year he joined Yamaha, Rossi proved that the impossible was very much possible. He won the championship on the Yamaha bike one year after winning it on a Honda bike. He became the first rider in history to achieve this fact and it is a feat that has not been repeated since. This just went on to show that he was one of the world's best riders on a motorcycle and by winning back to back races with two different teams proved that it was his skills as a racer more than the bike itself that won him the championships. The even stranger aspect of the winning of the second race was that Yamaha's motorcycles were no mechanical match for Honda's bikes. Honda's bikes were very technologically advanced and Yamaha's bikes were lowest of the pack technically ranked.
Rossi is believed by many to be the greatest motorcycle rider of the last decade. All of the young riders of the sport look to him as an icon and as a mentor. This is a very interesting aspect about Rossi. In probably only a few other sports is it possible that a current player is looked at in awe and wonder by other players in the same sport. This probably happened in the sport of basketball when Michael Jordan played. Other players in the NBA were probably in awe and this aspect of being in awe made some players play worse and some people play better to try and dethrone the leader.
In the end of 2009, Rossi was involved in a horrific crash that led to him being severely injured. He was ruled out of racing for the 2010 season. This left the field open for others that were in the shadows for many years. Even though Yamaha hastily replaced Rossi with the talented Wataru Yoshikwa for the 2010 season, the field was still open and Jorge Lorenzo came out as the season favourite. Before Rossi returned, Lorenzo wanted to get as much of a lead over is rivals as he could.
Valentino Rossi is one of the best racers to emerge from the field of Motorcycle Racing in the last ten years. It will take an extremely talented rider to take the top position from Rossi. Until then though Rossi will rule the roost and claim the throne of MotoGP for many years to come.
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