Competitiveness in racing.

For years and years competitiveness has played a huge part in any sport ever played. I want to focus on Motocross though, because I specialize in Motorsports. But motocross makes the best example because the want and will to win is worse than in any other sport. When you play a game of basketball, you have a team of winners, could be up to 15 players that get to celebrate a win. When you race motocross, only one person stands atop the podium triumphant at the end of the night.

When you think about fighting in sports there always seems to be a reason, or provoking action. In motocross it happens every race. When you have to spend time with your competition constantly there is going to be “beef” with other riders so the tensions are already high going into race night. But besides the competitive spirit, words, or body parts, can be exchanged after races. I want to focus on that and what might cause that.

Block Passing

When you think about a race, there is 22 riders, pushing as hard as they can to win. When you are in the moment, you must do whatever is necessary to win at any given moment. One thing that the riders might do to pass another rider is a block pass. Where you come into the inside of a corner and block the other rider from making it around the corner like so.

This is an example of a rather clean block pass. Not much contact but it caused number 21 to alter his path and he was not able to stay in front of number 7, who happens to be the fastest rider of all time. But when you are fighting for a victory on any given night, you might be a little too aggressive, looking like this.

If you take a close look at this photo, number 12 is making a block pass in a much more aggressive manner. He has made enough contact to cause number 51’s bike to come off the ground. This was played on live TV and number 51 wasn’t able to regain balance or leverage and he blew off the track and hit a tough block and crashed, which caused him to drop from 2nd, to 9th place. As you could guess, he wasn’t happy with this to say the least.

This is why we get fights in motocross. Because riders fight fight fight to be able to win a race and someone makes a “dirty move” and causes them to fall back in the race. Although to the naked eye it might look dirty, it is far from it. Making a pass that takes another rider out is a fine line between dirty and aggressive. So not much action can be taken. But riders can still get mad over this. This is just the competitiveness in racing.

Right above you can see that these two riders aren’t happy with each other at this given moment. In this instance, Bradshaw, number 8, was not happy that number 15 made a pass that caused him to get pushed off the track. But Bradshaw thought that his pass was legit and clean. Which causes a little bit of an exchange in words between the two of them that was entertaining to watch at the least.

Here you see number 28, Peick, throwing a punch at another rider. This caused both of the riders consequences, but throughout the race you could seriously tell that there was some underlying hate going on during all of this. Number 55 had taken out number 28 many times that night. It was almost as if he had a target and all he wanted to do was sabotage Peick. After a couple times of this happening, Peick was fed up and he decided that he wasn’t taking this anymore. So he decided to throw a couple of hay makers at number 55 to get his point across.

In conclusion

Competing in sports has been around for centuries. Most of which you see in sports like football, or basketball, and conditional sports like that, but people don’t get to see competitiveness in racing much.