Steve Cox | September 6, 2017
COLUMN
Don’t Fret, Eli Tomac Fans
As I’ve pointed out before in this space, there’s a massive difference between believing you can do something and knowing you can. Prior to 2017, Monster Energy Kawasaki’s Eli Tomac had won races in the 450 class—many times in completely dominant form—but he had never actually managed to win a championship. He believed that he could, but there’s no way to know he could until after he did it.
Eli Tomac handled the pressure and came away with his first 450MX title. PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROB KOY
The supercross series started rough for Tomac this year, but after he sorted out his motorcycle’s settings prior to round four, he was absolutely dominant, winning two races, then suffering his first of two front-brake failures of 2017 (one at the Arlington Supercross, then one at the Glen Helen National), but over the course of the next nine races, he won seven—including five in a row—and finished second in the other two after bad starts and crashes. In both of the races where he finished second, he put in the fastest laptimes by far.
After he got the points lead all to himself with two rounds to go, though, he had a race in New Jersey that was just inexplicably bad. He looked bad all day that day. His riding position looked awkward, and he simply wasn’t attacking anything on the track. Without any other explanation, it’s pretty obvious that nerves got to him that day. He tried to pull it together in the main event, and he took the early lead, but then an awkward fall in a rutted turn—not the kind of mistake he would normally make—followed by what seemed to be a lack of urgency to get back going again, got Tomac back up and running in 15th.
At the end of the race, it was obvious that the Red Bull KTM team used team tactics to hand the race win over to Ryan Dungey after Marvin Musquin led most of the race, and while that’s technically against the rules (although it shouldn’t be), the three points that Dungey gained paled in comparison to the points lost by Tomac’s uncharacteristic eighth-place finish.
Ultimately, any number of things could’ve changed that supercross championship for Tomac: He could’ve gotten his bike setup sorted out earlier, or could’ve avoided a few crashes, including the one that may have caused his front-brake master cylinder to malfunction in Texas, or he could’ve not had that bad race in New Jersey. But if he had a time machine and could go back to New Jersey and do it over, I bet he’d do it differently. There’s no reason he shouldn’t have won the New Jersey race, but even finishing third that day would’ve added seven points to his championship total. He lost by five in the end.
And outdoors this year, he had some rough times, too. Unlike in supercross, Tomac was favored to win the title outdoors from the start, and he dominated at Hangtown—something he’s done many times in the past—had his front-brake malfunction again at Glen Helen, struggled at his home race in Colorado, and again in moto one at High Point, then went on a winning streak for a while before hitting the slide again late in the series as it seemed like he was trying to protect his points lead.
Eli Tomac is like a lot of really great racers in that he’s basically unstoppable as long as he’s attacking, meaning his focus is 100-percent forward on the task immediately at hand. Where he (and many other great racers) tends to falter is where he starts thinking about points, or really anything other than what’s in front of him.
So it’s not simple enough to just say, “He can’t handle the pressure.” The problem is that the pressure causes him to lose focus on what he’s doing on the racetrack, not that the pressure causes him to “buckle” or something like that. For some racers, championship pressure gives them extra focus, but those racers are rare. Most racers simply have to learn how to put the championship out of their mind and focus on the immediate task at hand. That’s why you hear racers talking so often about, “We just have to take it one race at a time.” That’s a strategy to avoid losing focus due to thinking about the championship.
And it’s also not fair to say that allowing championship pressures to influence their focus makes a racer “soft” somehow. In fact, that might be the opposite of the truth. The only reason championship pressures, or any pressures, really, cause racers to lose focus is because they want to win so bad it’s all they can think about. These men aren’t soft. They’re gnarly. They’re the kinds of people you don’t want to compete against at anything.
Kind of ironically, there’s another guy who used to have this problem maybe even worse than Eli Tomac: 2017 450 Supercross Champion Ryan Dungey. Early in his career, about 10 years ago, he folded up bad in a 250 title chase against Jason Lawrence.
“I was young…” Dungey said this past May at his retirement announcement. “[That year, against Lawrence] I’m trying to learn all this stuff. I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to win a race one year and the next year how I’m going to win the championship!? So boom, boom, it just escalated from one to the other and here we are in the thick of it. There’s an opportunity [at a title]. It’s the first one, and you want to hang onto it. You do everything you can. I didn’t handle it the right way, mentally…”
But here’s the thing: It’s all about how you handle your failures. That’s really what life is about, not just racing. And Dungey sorted it out.
“I will say, that was one of the best years for me in my career,” Dungey said. “Although I crumpled under the pressure, I failed and this and that…I don’t even like to call it a failure—it was just a learning experience. That forever, for the rest of my career, mentally just put me in a better place and made me stronger. That was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. It sucked at the moment, but hindsight is 20/20…”
So, yes, Tomac has struggled a bit, but you’d be a sucker to think he’s going to keep doing it. If anything, getting the monkey off his back with this outdoor title might be the thing that makes him almost unstoppable for the perceivable future. CN
