Marquez’s injury hell: “I didn’t smile anymore - I won and started crying”
The full journey of Marquez’s career-threatening fourth arm operation in mid-2022, through the dark moments of self-doubt to ending the year on the MotoGP podium will be laid bare in a new Amazon Prime documentary called ‘Marc Marquez: ALL IN’.
He has admitted a mistake - returning to action too soon after his first major injury suffered in a crash at Jerez in 2020: "If you don't take care of your body, you can't practice your sport,” he told GQ.
Marquez has endured two years of physical torment and explained: “There came a time when suffering outweighed passion, and I said to myself: 'Either I remedy it or it doesn't pay to continue competing'.
“Because I was subtracting a lot of quality of life, it was not only failure after failure, but also a constant pain, and the pain changed my character, I didn't even smile anymore.
"I won and started crying. What I get when I win is to celebrate, celebrate, laugh with my family...
“Well, then it was the other way around and it was because of the pain, the pain that I constantly suffered in my arm, that I could not forget."
Marquez is a six-time MotoGP champion and, he reveals, that members of his family urged him to walk away.
"My grandfather was one of the supporters of me leaving," he said.
“Because he said he had enough to live on, he is very direct about that, and I told him: 'Grandpa, I promise you that [this will be] the last operation, let me try, because there is a solution and they are giving it to me. Let me try it.'
“And, all said and done, I tried it and it's changed the whole movie."
Marquez broke his humerus in a fall at Jerez, and tried to return just days after surgery, but the pain proved too much. He missed the rest of 2020, and the start of 2021. Breathtakingly he won three races until, due to being out of championship contention, he sat out the end of the year because he was still struggling physically.
"Jerez happened because of my mentality and my ambition," Marquez said.
“But everything I achieved from 2013 to 2020 I also achieved because of that mentality and that ambition, so if you take the 10 years together, [it] is balanced.
"Honestly, I don't even know how I managed to win three races in 2021 but I can explain less how I was able to make fourth at Jerez at the beginning of the 2022 season.
“Because I didn't have my head in the competition, neither the head nor the physical.
“There is a moment of the season, when the grands prix of Portimao and Jerez arrived, that I deactivate my head and said: ‘I can not take it anymore’.
“And that's when I went, just before Portimao, to my doctors in Madrid and toldthem: 'Something happens here in this arm, because I'm going backwards. I'm crushing myself in the gym, I'm crushing myself in the physio every day, but this is going backwards, and I'm getting worse and worse, and there are more and more pains’.
“That's when they really start evaluating everything and see that there's 34 degrees of rotation in the humerus."
Against all the physical odds, Marquez claimed a pole position and a podium finish before 2022 was over. He returns this year and only a fool would rule him out of the title hunt.
"Because of my mentality, if I keep competing it's because I see possibilities to get good results and that the work has a compensation,” he vowed.
“The way my sporting career has gone, competing for the sake of competing, competing to fill the starting grid, doesn't make sense to me. I'm not like that.”
James was a sports journalist at Sky Sports for a decade covering everything from American sports, to football, to F1.
