USA Insider No.159: Bercy Supercross

Welcome to our weekly web-exclusive column, Transmoto’s USA Insider presented by Ipone. Penned each week by our man on the ground, Transmoto’s US Correspondent, Jason Weigandt, the USA Insider presents the story-behind-the-stories of the AMA supercross and motocross scene.

The Bercy Supercross isn’t taking place in Bercy this year, as it moves to Lillie, France, while the old stadium undergoes a renovation. Bercy is still Bercy, though, regardless of where it runs. It’s still the biggest and best of the European supercross bunch, and it will still have an atmosphere unmatched by any other.

So the race is still great. It’s not quite the proving ground it once was, though. Back in the day, seemingly every top supercross rider would race Bercy, so the event was not only a way for European fans to catch AMA Supercross riders in person, it also served as sort of a mini-Anaheim preview on the US side. The American riders would always come to the event in different stages of prep, both in their training and their bikes, thus, each was essentially packing an excuse in their luggage, but deep down they knew they were racing the same dudes they’d have to beat for points two months later. And things got heated! What’s funny is that the results rarely indicated what would happen the next season. If someone like Larry Ward or Ryan Hughes ripped it up over there, it appeared like game on for the AMA season, but it didn’t always translate. And when David Vuillemin would go crush everyone, it seemed to strike fear in the hearts of the Americans and joy in the French (but it, seemingly, incited very little emotion in Jeremy McGrath, who could always just laugh this off and come out swinging in the real season).

So what’s changed? Money, of course. These races still pay well, but one good payday in Bercy meant a lot during the 1990s, when the top riders were making, say, a half-million dollars a year in US money via their salaries. Fast forward through economic boom times over here, and the top riders were now banking several million bucks a year in base salary. Salaries literally quadrupled in a short amount of time. But the Bercy stadium and crowd were already filled — the promoter couldn’t simply quadruple every rider’s pay.

For a few years, they switched the event to a 250F format and tried to get the best young talent over there. Vuillemin wisely jumped on a YZ250F one year just to win it again. Later, the 450s came back, but usually with just one huge name on the gate. Ricky Carmichael was scheduled to be there in 2007 before an illness took him out, and James Stewart and Chad Reed did some racing over the next few years. But only one of those guys would come each year, because the event could only afford to pay one of them (their haul for the weekend, by the way, was nearly equivalent to an entire year salary for a good rider a decade earlier).

Today’s field is a hybrid of sorts. There are big names like Justin Barcia, Eli Tomac and Justin Brayton in the field, but we don’t see the likes of Villopoto, Dungey, Stewart or Roczen there. And really, without all of them, even one of them isn’t going to prove anything.

That’s okay, though. Even when the race did pack every major US star, the race was more about the hype and the show than it was an actual preview of next season. Thought of only in that way, it’s still as awesome as ever.