Bike Shop

By Clutch Roberts

The Trials of a Pro Racing Career

If you ride dirtbikes, professional off-road motorcycle racing is brutal to the riders. I don't just mean what the riders bodies take as they hit bumps, jumps and berms. I mean it's hard on the rider's ego. At any given supercross or national motocross race there can be as many as 175 riders between the 250 and 450 classes. That's how many people were signed up as national pros with the AMA last year, with about 89 on team rosters.

Looking at pro football, there are 53 players on each of 32 teams for a total of 1,696 players. In football's last 50 years, only seven times has a team lost every game in one season. That is out of about 1,900 games. If the players on the losing teams played the year before or after, they won a few games. Last year, every one of those 1,696 players experienced the thrill of victory.

If you played baseball professionally, the worst team in the last 120 years "only" won 36 games in a season. My point is in professional stick and ball sports, virtually every player is a winner at some point in the season.

At any AMA professional motocross or supercross race there can easily be over 100 riders entered. Out of those 100, only two will be able to say they won. Many riders don't even qualify for the "show", the evening supercross program or one of 40 riders in a motocross national. Imagine driving hundreds or thousands of miles to race, only to have some hotheaded kid ride across your front wheel in qualifying. I have to hand it to anyone who races professionally on a motorcycle.

Winning is fun, believe me. I have won a few amateur motorcycle races, and it felt fabulous. I still savor the memory of crossing the finish line and raising my hand. I thought about going pro when I was young. I had desire and some skill, but costs and injuries prevented it. Yes, racing motorcycles is dangerous and expensive.

So, imagine you choose to turn pro. You dedicate your life to it. You do everything right, get in shape, get faster, get sponsors and go racing. It is possible you may win some local pro races. If you live and race in southern California, you better be really good if you want to win, because there is a lot of talent there. Let's say you did really well locally and moved up to ride nationals. If you did that in 2002 or 2004, you wouldn't win a single moto, unless your name was Ricky Carmichael or in 2008 and your name was James Stewart. Those two riders had perfect seasons, winning every single moto (24) in the series. That had to be brutal for their competitors.

In the 2020 supercross series there were five different winners. That should help those bruised egos. Oh, wait, every winner was a motocross or supercross champion

in a previous year. It's a good thing riding dirt bikes is so fun, because if you race just to satisfy your ego, you will very likely be unsatisfied.