Where we were? The gravel trap at Turn 3 in Jerez. 2020. The searing heat of high summer and empty grandstands as the sport raced behind closed doors due to Covid. A completely life- and career-changing moment for a rider who had won six of the last seven MotoGP championships.
Marc Marquez’s incredible comeback from the back of the field, and the resulting crash as he pushed to the limit and then over it, left him with a fractured right humerus. Painful but in some ways seemingly innocuous enough. Incredibly, he tried to make his comeback only a week later at the Andalucia GP, at the same Circuito de Jerez-Angel Nieto. But he only started the weekend – he didn’t complete it, pulling out on Saturday.
His recovery at home then encountered another hurdle as he hurt the arm again. That one crash turned out to be the start of a four-season long stint of injury hell and comebacks, surgeries, and questions over his future. It included four operations on the same arm, three of which were in 2020 when the plate from the first surgery broke, resulting in a second operation – before a third was required after the bone became infected and wouldn’t heal.
Marquez made his first comeback in 2021. He won three Grands Prix of the 14 he raced in. And then he suffered another different injury, or more a reoccurrence of a different injury. That final part of the 2011 Moto2™ season is when Marquez had first been sidelined with diplopia, aka double vision, and then he’d needed surgery to save his career – before he even debuted in MotoGP. This time around, after a training crash, he was sidelined from the final two rounds of 2021, a whole decade later.
For 2022, he was ready to get back on the grid. First time out he took fifth before yet another moment of horrendous luck went the way of the #93 – a huge highside in Indonesia. The diplopia came back, he underwent more surgery, and made another comeback, this time in Austin. But behind the scenes there was much more to the story and it still centered on his right arm injured two years earlier in Jerez.
In a dramatic press conference in Mugello, joined on stage by Repsol Honda Team manager Alberto Puig, Marquez announced he was stepping away from the sport again – this time for a true make or break surgery. This was about getting back to 100%, not learning to ride around a problem. No compromises. All in.
The surgery was specialist and Marquez travelled to the Mayo Clinic in the US for the pivotal operation. There, the arm was re-broken and rotated into the position it should have been in before it was stabilised with a new plate and screws. To the outside world, Marquez missed six rounds. The documentary series All In tells every twist of the tale.
A return at Aragon saw him tangle early on with Fabio Quartararo and Takaaki Nakagami, but the drama calmed down for the rest of the season. A highlight of second place at Phillip Island saw Marquez back on the podium, but more importantly his arm was on the way to being fully, truly, back at 100%, ready for 2023. Miguel Oliveira saw Marquez break a bone in his hand. He missed three more races. Aside from that, nothing was clicking as Honda started to suffer their own tougher form – and it all seemed to come to a head at the German GP.
At one of his most emblematic venues, the #93 crashed five times – and that’s before race day, because he pulled out of the event. He withdrew from the Dutch GP the following weekend too. Perhaps most telling of all, however, was the middle finger aimed down at his bike caught by the onboard camera at the Sachsenring.
The rumour mill lit up about the #93 and the iconic Repsol Honda team with whom he’d already redefined much of the sport. But Marquez remained tight lipped even as the season went on and the pairing remained locked in that tougher spell of form. But at Honda’s home round at Motegi, he was on the podium in the rain for a fairytale final podium with the factory – although that wasn’t confirmed at the time. A week and a half later, it was.
At the Indonesian GP it was confirmed: Marquez was leaving Honda, and he was going to the Gresini team to race a one-year old Ducati. Not only was he leaving the incredible paycheck, he was reportedly not even going to replace it with one. He wanted the bike that was winning. And he wanted to win.
That was October 2023. The trophy for that final podium with Honda is the only one Marquez has displayed alongside his MotoGP World Championship trophies. Since then, he’s added that seventh MotoGP crown – which we’ll pick up in Chapter 3 – but that symbol remains strong.
Between his final win with Honda in Germany in 2021, there were 1043 days until he won again in Aragon 2024. In Gresini colours, he made the bet pay off – for the team who waited to see if he was available, and for himself as he got his hands on a Ducati. In 2024, he was back on the podium in Jerez, where he duelled Pecco Bagnaia to the wire. In France it was a three-way showdown for glory and he came second. He took a podium in Barcelona and then a podium in Germany from well down the grid. Marquez was back at the front, but not back on top until that 1043 day marker in Aragon. Then, in San Marino, he made it back to back wins. In Australia, he added another.
And amongst all that, he played the perfect game of off-track chess as the Ducati Lenovo Team mulled over their options to pair Bagnaia in 2025. Marquez said he would not go to Pramac. Jorge Martin said he would not wait any longer for a decision. In what felt like hours, the dominoes all fell. Another new era would begin in 2025 with Marc Marquez as a factory rider once again. And this time, in red...