The accident that almost ended Jorge Martín's career

Upon his arrival in the MotoGP category, Jorge Martín had a thunderous debut, taking a pole and a podium in his second race, after spending 18 laps in the lead. However, on the third weekend, the dream almost came to an end when a violent fall sent him to the hospital.

For 43 days, we were not going to see him on the track again. His daily life then became that of the seriously injured, forced to undergo three operations and a long rehabilitation to treat eight fractures to the hand, ankle and knee, on the right and left. With four impacts recorded at more than 25 gMartín also suffered a blow to the head which also caused him to lose consciousness and memory.

And then, there was the moral backlash after an accident of such violence and faced with the mountain to climb that this accumulation of injuries represented. Jorge Martín, then 23 years old, almost threw in the towel. “I thought about stopping because I told myself that maybe it wasn’t worth it to have so much pain and suffer so much to be on a motorcycle,” he explained a few weeks later, describing both his despondency and his fears of not fully recovering.

“I said in an interview that I even thought about stopping because I went through some really hard times,” he explained later that year, speaking for the official MotoGP podcast, as a spectator himself of these thoughts he had to face.

“It's better not to know this moment. It's not good, because if you think about it for even a second it's because a part of you wants to stop. When you're at your lowest, you don't think about winning or celebrating anything, we just tell ourselves that we're in pain and we don't want to stay in this pain. Then, when it gets better, we want to come back and start training again. get back on the bike But at that moment it was very. difficult.”

A real rebirth afterwards, like “a phoenix”

Once reassured about his physical condition, Jorge Martín tried to learn lessons from this ordeal. First, it taught him to better understand fresh tires in the category. “It was a crash that happened when leaving the pits because these new tires are normally shiny and you have to 'clean' them. However, I didn't know it at that time because I was a rookie, with two MotoGP races under my belt”, he explained more recently in a portrait produced by Red Bull.

“Now, when I go out on track and the tires are shiny like that, I always try to be very smooth and clean, and then push. But if we push while they have that shiny surface, then it's Shit!”

And then, he sought to draw new mental strength from what he experienced. “I am a rider who recovers very quickly from injuries, but in Moto3 and MotoGP it is clearly not the same thing. The bike is bigger, the riders are better, we are at the highest level. When I am hurt [à Portimão]I said to myself 'it's okay, I made the podium in Qatar, I can get back to a good level', but it was much easier in Moto3”, he noted in 2021, referring to the injury from which he quickly recovered four years earlier: “I remember coming back to Austria and getting on the podium. In MotoGP everything is more difficult, including coming back from injury.”

After this accident in Portugal, Austria was another important step, because it was there that he won his first victory, less than four months later. “The hardest thing to overcome was the pain in my back. I had problems, including when I won in Austria,” he admitted however.

Over the past year, several events have brought him back to what he felt during that accident. Winning the Portuguese GP, in particular, gave him the feeling of rebirth: “I have had a big phoenix on my back since Portimão 2021. Coming back to this position and winning, I felt like a phoenix [renaissant de ses cendres].”

The psychological traces of the fall, however, remain palpable. So, in November, when he won the title, his ultimate goal in MotoGP, this memory resurfaced once again. “After the race, I was emotional, but really in shock. When I went to bed, I started crying a lot in my bed, alone,” he said at the time.

“Maria [sa compagne] was sleeping and I started crying. I remembered a lot about the difficult times, how difficult it was. What's important is that I never gave up. In my bed, I remembered my eight injuries in Portimão. For a month, I couldn't even walk. And here I am today so it’s crazy.”

With Vincent Lalanne-Sicaud