Steve Cox | February 21, 2019
Cycle News Empire of Dirt
COLUMN
Changing of the Guard?
Champions aren’t always the outright fastest guys. Look at the Damon Bradshaw years, for example; he was almost always the fastest guy, but he never won a national title. James Stewart was almost always the fastest guy, but how many titles did he take from Ricky Carmichael?
Cooper Webb is for real.
Obviously, speed helps, and is necessary to a degree, but champions are usually determined by two things: belief and will.
Anybody who has had any level of racing success, even at the local level, likely understands nerves, but for those who don’t, here’s what it’s like:
You’ve been working for months, or even years, to win whatever class at whatever track, and you’re on the track, in the lead. Maybe you’ve led before, and maybe you haven’t, but as the laps count down, all of that time you’ve spent striving toward your goal all of a sudden starts flooding back into you. It’s not necessarily cognitive thought, but more a rush of emotion, and it only gets worse as more laps go by. You become acutely aware of every sound your motorcycle is making, and every sound from your competitors behind you, and you start getting more and more nervous, to the point that as you get the white flag, you can feel your hands start to tremble, and you just hope that you can hold it together for another lap.
If you manage to do it, and you take the checkered flag, there’s an adrenaline rush of elation as you celebrate, and you realize the reason for all your hard work, followed by an adrenaline dump, leaving you completely emotionally spent.
Now, try to imagine this at the very top of our sport, in the 450cc Supercross Series, after spending the better part of two decades hoping to achieve exactly that goal of winning a 450cc supercross main event, and add in the crowd, the money, the pressure of riding for a factory team, and all the rest. What separates elite-level champions from one-time champions, and one-time champions from winners, and winners from factory racers, and factory racers from privateers, and privateers from local racers, etc., is mostly how well they handle their nerves.
Most racers, even at the factory level at the top of the sport, can become overwhelmed under these circumstances, and they end up getting “tight” and getting arm-pump, or they make an unforced error and fall. But there is a rare breed of racer who thrives under these circumstances. The elite-level champions like Ricky Carmichael, Jeremy McGrath, Ricky Johnson, and Ryan Villopoto, can control the nerves, rather than having their nerves control them. Even proven winners at the top level of our sport are often running scared even when they win; they have the speed that day, a good start, and even the confidence to know they can win, but from lap one through the checkered flag, they’re running scared. The elite-level champions—the guys who later had eras named after them—weren’t running scared. They were calm, cool and collected as they led and won the bulk of their races and titles. They simply knew they would win (“belief”) and were going to do whatever it took to make sure it happened (“will”).
And that, in a nutshell, is Cooper Webb.
Webb has done this throughout his racing life, from the amateurs through the 250cc class. He had some difficulties in the early days of his 450cc career, but some people tend to forget a few things about this early time on the big bikes: First, he was actually improving really quickly during his first 450cc season in 2017 and had grabbed his first podium finish at round five in Oakland, behind Eli Tomac and Ryan Dungey. Only two races later, he and Dean Wilson collided in midair soon after the start of their heat race and Webb went down, destroying his left shoulder, and that started him down a path of struggling for most of the rest of his two years on the Yamaha factory 450cc team. But he was on the right track even then.
And the second thing people forget is that, at the end of 2016 as he was going to transition to the 450cc class, he took the number-2 as his permanent number knowing full-well that it was associated with two of the greatest champions in the history of our sport: Jeremy McGrath and Ryan Villopoto. And he wasn’t nervous about it.
“Ultimately I made the decision just because of how dominant that number’s been,” Webb said at the time. “I think maybe it adds a bit of pressure, and it makes you feel like you kind of have to live up to it. To me, everything I do is about finding something to motivate me, and I think that’s something [the number 2] that through my career will do that.”
Most guys even at the factory level of our sport would see the weight of a number like that and see it as a potential burden. Webb looked at Jeremy McGrath and Ryan Villopoto and thought, “That’s about right for me.” That’s the same thing Villopoto did when he chose 2. It seemed to work out fine for him, too.
Some of us knew what we were looking at when Webb won Anaheim 2 this year. He pressured Ken Roczen into a mistake on the final lap of the first main event of the Triple Crown, taking his first-ever win, then immediately followed that with a holeshot and another win, then another good start and a calm race to bring home the overall. He had nerves, but they didn’t overwhelm him. Then he went out and did it again a week later in Oakland, made a mistake in the mud at San Diego, then went out and won again in Minneapolis. This isn’t temporary.
Now, anything can happen in this sport, that’s for sure, so there are unforeseen circumstances that can crop up and derail Webb’s season, like injuries, or even another racer catching absolute fire, but the more wins he racks up, the less likely it will be that anybody else will stop him.
Despite sharing trainers, factory-level equipment, riding gear, and myriad other things with people who are lining up against him, I think Webb has something nobody else has, and it’s between his ears.
Cooper Webb has arrived, and 2019 may be known in the future as the beginning of the Cooper Webb era. CN
