USA Insider No.170: The Next Carmichael

Transmoto’s weekly web-exclusive column, the USA Insider, penned by Jason Weigandt, presented by Ipone.

This sport has been looking for its next Ricky Carmichael ever since it stopped looking for its next Jeremy McGrath. When stars make an impact, they leave a mark every star after gets measured against, fair or not. With Carmichael, comparisons were easy, because you could use the short/red head/Florida/Kawasaki angle right from the start, and we found Ryan Villopoto grabbing three of those four quantities, and indeed ended up being “most Carmichael-like”. Adam Cianciarulo got to gather the hype next, because he hit on all four components. He was small, fast, from Florida, armed with a Kawasaki Team Green and later a Mitch Payton/Pro Circuit ride, and his hair could at least be reasonably argued as red. But now AC has been star crossed with injuries, and he’s also grown at a rapid rate. So much so that a month ago, his mum said she hadn’t seen Adam in a few weeks and when she reunited with him, even she couldn’t believe how much taller he’d gotten. Over the course of a few weeks!

Adam’s become his own person, and while he might someday become dominant the way RC and RV did, he won’t match their persona. Carmichael and Villopoto were ass-kicking machines consumed not by winning, but by not losing. Losing made them very, very angry. Carmichael learned to manage his temper in public in his later years, Villopoto appears set to leave before he bothers to do the same. Cianciarulo is a people’s champion, though, in ways Carmichael and Villopoto were not interested in as teenagers. He’s a competitive SOB, but he’s also a friendly, nice, funny, outgoing guy. RV and RC weren’t about any of those things, they just twisted throttles.

The real next RC is actually at RC’s place right now. Defending 250 National MX champion, Jeremy Martin, has spent his Pro career training at Carmichael’s Farm, and now he’s taken it further by hiring Johnny O’Mara, Carmichael’s original trainer. On the surface, Martin is a nice kid from Minnesota, and he’s not full of piss-and-vinegar like a young Carmichael. He’s short, but he doesn’t ride Kawasakis and he’s as blonde as blonde gets. No red head here.

That’s on the outside though. Inside beats a heart like Carmichael’s. Martin is a training animal, a competitive SOB, someone hell-bent on doing the hard stuff, like winning outdoor titles. O’Mara summed it up over the weekend when he told me, “He’s more like Ricky than anyone I’ve ever worked with”.

In between, O’Mara has worked with plenty, from Ryan Dungey to Ivan Tedesco to Justin Barcia, but there’s something about Martin’s mind-set that reminds him of Carmichael. When he loses, he gets mad, and he works hard. It’s not like Dungey was ever lazy, but he isn’t known for getting angry in the way Carmichael did, a man who was once dubbed “the angry little elf” and had a swear jar in his motorhome, with a fine for each bad word uttered after a loss.

Martin has that kind of edge, but you wouldn’t know it on the outside. He seems docile and friendly, and he is, except for the racing part. After a tough race at High Point, he hammered down something fierce the next week, logging eight 45-minute motos (well, closer to 40s, which is about when the bike runs out of gas) and 25 hard hours of training. O’Mara had to back him down before Budds Creek, but Jeremy snuck in a 20-minute run to “clear his head”. It’s hard to hold down someone who wants it this badly.

O’Mara also says he’ll have to work on Martin with the same stuff he worked with Carmichael. He has a tendency to ride too hard, to hit the rough lines, to not ride smart and efficient because he’s so damned fit. His supercross style needs work. Eventually, Carmichael figured that out and went from dominant to completely unbeatable. That’s a standard too high to measure Martin against, but whatever success he does find, it will be for similar reasons to Carmichael: the dude just wants it more than anyone else.