MotoGP | Rossi, 2015 still hurts: “Never anyone as dirty as Marc”

Almost ten years have passed since that famous 2015 world championship, but Valentino Rossi’s wound still burns as if it happened yesterday. It has never healed, it has always hurt and continues to do so. The tenth title for the Doctor he disappeared in 2015 and never had the chance to “come home”. Valentino saw him slip out of his hands and, even today, he never misses the opportunity to remember the pain of not being able to consecrate himself with double figures.

The opportunity was served to him on a silver platter by Andrea Migno, who invited Rossi to his podcast “Mig Babol”. A long and sincere interview, that of Doctorin which he retraces all the stages of his career, from the beginning to the glory, passing through the now historic rivalries to the moments of difficulty. The presence of the one who is still his most bitter enemy could not be missed: Marc Marquez.

“We started from Qatar and I knew that the main opponents to win the World Championship were Marquez and Lorenzo,” Valentino Rossi began, speaking about how the real rivalry with Marc was born and how it evolved. “During the race, at the first corner, Marc goes straight. You know when you feel… It’s a signal, like when Elias knocked me down in Jerez. Then I’m very superstitious. But when I saw this I thought ‘we’re starting well’. Then everything’s fine, we arrive in Argentina and there the quarrel with Marquez begins”.

Termas de Rio Hondo was the scene of the real explosion of a rivalry that, if until that moment he considered healthy, became a war: “It all started in Argentina. Marquez started with the medium, I with the hard. Marc went away, but I knew I was doing well with the hard, because the hard Bridgestone with the Yamaha flew if you brought it up to temperature well. So in the second part of the race I started to recover… I got into a tough rhythm and started to do fast laps. I saw him getting closer and I thought ‘I’ll catch him’. I got there and I was stronger than him. For me it was a formality to pass him. I took his slipstream on the straight and I passed him under braking, I was coming strong. Up until that moment Marc and I were getting along well. But I took the right turn and he came at me because he thought that the only chance he had of stopping me was to come at me. He tried to take me down straight away even though I was in front. He did it on purpose to try to bring me down because he didn’t want to lose. So I got back in my line, we touched and he fell. But from there our relationship fell apart. He still kept pretending to get along with me, kissing my ass.”

“Then we got to Assen,” Rossi recalls. Holland is one of his “temples,” and it was there that another chapter of their rivalry began. “We had a great race going away, he was tough and wouldn’t let go of me. We got to the last lap, the last S, and I thought he would definitely try. I would have come in as hard as possible, and that’s what I did, I threw it in and I didn’t even know if I was going to be able to. But he, despite this exaggerated braking, came at me again, because he comes at you. He threw me out, but as soon as I felt him coming at me, I went straight. I cut the S and won. I had braked at the limit, you brake just to come at me, you throw me out, but luckily there’s an S, I cut it, I win and that’s it. I stayed standing, I won’t say by a miracle, but not easily. In the parc fermé he was pissed off, I’d never seen him like that. “Ah, it’s easy to win like this, you cut!” he said. I replied, “Sorry, it’s normal that I cut. You came at me. What should I do? You tell me. You have to be objective. If you come at me and throw me into the gravel, should I let you win?”. From there it was over.”

But the war wasn’t limited to the track, as Valentino says: “However, I later learned that they were going around the paddock, especially Alzamora, saying ‘we won’t win the world championship anymore, but he won’t win it either’. They said it to Spanish people, who then told it to some of my Spanish friends who came to tell me ‘be careful in the last races…’. Uccio was there too and kept telling me that. Then in Australia, he was so much superior that first he raced on me and then he even won. It’s not a hypothesis, we’re telling the facts”.

From Phillip Island it’s… History. That story we all know and that we still talk about: “We arrived in Malaysia, I gave him a lift in the press conference because I tried to at least disgrace him by saying in front of everyone what he’s doing. Maybe he would have thought I had caught him and would have let it go. Let’s remember that Marc had nothing to do with it there, the World Championship was between me and Lorenzo. The point is this: if you fight, OK, but if you have nothing to do with it, you have to have the respect to not piss others off. You have to try to win, period. Who would make you get involved in something like that? Mind your own business! Besides, it was a beautiful World Championship, a great fight between me and Lorenzo!”.

Valentino Rossi, Yamaha Factory Racing, Marc Marquez, Repsol Honda Team

Photo credit: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

“However, in Malaysia he damaged me and bothered me for the whole race. He tried to make me fall 3 or 4 times. Then, in the long right-hand bend, I got close to him like when you argue on the street. I looked him in the face as if to say ‘enough, what are you doing?!’. Then we touched, but I have a lot of doubts about that contact because he never falls. I don’t know, in reality his brake handle got stuck in my knee… I didn’t want to knock him down, but he fell,” explains Rossi.

Then came Valencia, which consecrated Jorge Lorenzo with his fifth world title. For Rossi it was over, as he himself had already thought in Malaysia: “In the end he made me lose the world championship. After the Sepang race they called me to Race Direction, where there were Mike Webb, Carmelo Ezpeleta, Marquez and Alzamora. I was with Meregalli from Yamaha. I arrived and told them ‘well done, great race’. He replied ‘well, you too… you knocked me down’. Alzamora started insulting me and I asked him why he was there. He was really pissed off, a bit of a scuffle with Emilio… In the end, Mike Webb told me that they had decided that in Valencia I would start last. Normally I would have had to do a ride through, but there in Malaysia during the race. Instead of third, I would have finished fifth. Instead they invented that I had to start last, which meant cutting my legs off. I had lost the world championship. My blood ran cold because I realized I had lost the world championship. But my first reaction was to look at Marquez. He had his head down, we had argued because I had told him he would carry this with him for his entire career. It’s a disgusting thing to make someone else lose. So he had his ears down, but the moment they told me I would start last, he actually raised his head, looked at Alzamora and smiled, nodding as if to say ‘we did it’”.

“I have to say, Marquez is a very strong rider, a champion. He has always been a very aggressive one. But that time, in 2015, he really went too far. There are many bad, aggressive, almost dirty ones. I could give many examples, but no one among the champions of motorsport has ever fought to make another rider lose. This is what marks the line. Those who have done it in the past, did it for themselves, because they wanted to win, to be superior. But no one has ever been so dirty for someone else”, concludes Rossi speaking of Marc Marquez.