MXGP Insider No.31: It’s All Over

Welcome to our weekly web-exclusive column, Transmoto‘s MXGP Insider. Penned each week by Vurbmoto’s David Bulmer, the MXGP Insider will present the story-behind-the-stories of the European motocross scene.

Wow… What a crazy ending to the 2014 FIM Motocross World Championship! Sure, the MXGP was wrapped up the week before in Brazil (although in truth it was wrapped up when Desalle got injured earlier in the year) but that almost made it better because then all the focus was on the MX2 class.

Before we get into all the action though, I want to give a shout-out to the Mexican organisation, media and fans that went to the event and made it all happen. While it is obviously a shame that the champions weren’t crowned in front of their home fans in Europe somewhere, the people that did attend were great and I’m sure with the amount of mainstream press (multiple national newspapers ran stories) generated, that number will grow if we continue to go back there.

To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve got the room to go too in-depth into this but suffice to say that the events that unfolded were truly incredible. Going into the race, all the talk was about how fit Herlings was, with the opinions being divided from “good to go, he looked okay in videos” to “he’s stupid for even trying”. I was pretty much sitting on the fence but hoped that Herlings would be able to give it his best shot. As it turned out, he gave it more than anyone could possibly have imagined after the opening moto.

After that race, Tixier’s win combined with Herlings’ 14^th meant the gap had closed from 23 points to 5 points and pretty much all hope for the Dutch prodigy was over. He was in obvious pain and when he spent almost the entire race sitting behind Anton Lundgren, you knew things weren’t right. In fact the only reason he got 14^th was because Anstie and Charlier both pulled off near the end, giving him a couple more spots.

Anyway, it all looked pretty bleak as somehow Herlings would have to stay within 2-5 positions of the Frenchmen. In fact during the break, there was talk he might not even complete more than a couple of laps if Tixier was doing well, so as not to do himself more damage. That all went out the window within one lap after a freak incident involving Aleksandr Tonkov who got caught up in the French rider’s bike. Immediately eyebrows were raised as Tonkov is a good friend of Herlings and a photographer’s pictures showed what looked like him holding onto the bike as Tixier tried to restart. Thankfully videos showed nothing was amiss but for a few minutes there were some heated discussions among the French journalists. Well that all meant that Herlings overtook his rival for a brief period of time and gave him a glimmer of hope. For the next 27 minutes, Herlings was doing enough, somehow staying in front of Charlier and Seewer despite immense pain while Tixier tried to get past Coldenhoff and Lieber. Of course it didn’t end up staying this way and the history books will show Tixier as champion, but hopefully no one will forget the effort Herlings put into this race and indeed this year. Even afterwards he said and did all the right things despite the obvious disappointment and while he’ll now take the next couple of months off, you know he’ll come out swinging at the start of 2015. Unfortunately we won’t see either Herlings or Tixier at the Motocross of Nations, so the next time they’ll line up together in anger should be at Qatar with the #1 plate firmly affixed to Tixier’s CLS Kawasaki.