Steve Cox | May 29, 2019
Cycle News Empire of Dirt
COLUMN
Gate-Flinch-Gate
It was apparent, just with the naked eye, that the gate flinched at the start of the second 250MX moto this past weekend at round two of the 2019 Lucas Oil AMA National Motocross Championship, at Fox Raceway in Pala, California. How was it obvious? Because the majority of racers on both sides of the box jumped and hit the gate.
The riders appear to be slightly more staggered off the gate than usual in the second 250MX moto.
For the uninitiated, sometimes racers jump before the gate drops, and it can have a reactionary effect on the racers around them, so one guy jumping early can cause a bunch of other guys to jump, too, because they see the one guy jump out of their peripheral vision and they react to that. But the guys lined up on the left side of the box can’t see the guys lined up on the right side of the box, so…
After the start of the second moto, I actually didn’t move from my position shooting photos alongside the start straightaway for a couple of laps. That is because I was confident the AMA would restart the race, since the gate very obviously flinched, and there were a lot of mechanics and other team personnel making a similar case from the mechanics’ area, but ultimately, the AMA let the race go on.
I caught the AMA’s Jeff Canfield as he walked away from discussing this issue with some witnesses (pictured) and asked him what the AMA was going to do about the gate-flinch, and he responded by saying (paraphrasing), “Our guy said it didn’t flinch.”
So, I guess I—along with with the couple-dozen racers who hit the gate, and the mechanics who saw it, etc.—shouldn’t believe our lying eyes.
“It was one of those deals where halfway down the start straight I’m thinking to myself, like, ‘All right, they’ve got to red-flag this thing,’ because Chase [Sexton] about took the hinges off the gate next to me,” said eventual winner Adam Cianciarulo. “I hit the gate a little bit, pulled back, and luckily—I was super-late; I mean, the gate was fully on the ground before I left—but somehow my gate was good enough where you kind of got a good drive. And the whole first lap, in the back of my mind, I’m like, ‘All right, do not go crazy and get your heart rate up to like, you know, 190 right away,’ and then I was watching it as we came by the finish line, and I was like, ‘All right, I guess we’re doing it!’”
So, not only did the gate-flinch cause the start of the race to go poorly, but a lot of racers were calculating that it would be restarted, so they weren’t pushing that hard on the opening lap. It’s hard to go from a (not uncommon in the opening laps) 190 BPM heart rate to stopped on the line, ready to do it again. It takes a physical toll, and the racers know they need the energy to last the 30-minute-plus-two-lap race duration.
The AMA could’ve just asked the official in the box—whose job it was to release the gate to fall—if he had to do it twice because that’s what causes the gate to flinch; a failed attempt at falling the gate. Even worse, Justin Cooper said the gate actually flinched before the sighting lap, too.
“Obviously, we all thought it was going to be a red flag, so…” said 250MX second-overall Cooper. “Obviously, you don’t want to let up on the first lap, in case that doesn’t happen, but yeah, I saw the green flag waving [when he went by at the end of the first lap], so I knew the race was on. I was kind of mind-blown by it, honestly, because I thought an AMA official would catch on to it or something. I saw it happen on the sighting lap; it looked like they tried to drop the gate to let everyone out, and it stumbled, and then the gate dropped like two seconds later on the second attempt to drop it. So, that’s exactly what happened again. It looked like he tried to drop it, it flinched, and on the second attempt—which was obviously right after that—it went, so it was like we went, then pulled back, then went again. It was really hard to even get a good start at that point, but I knew it had to happen for everyone else, so we just did the best we could, I guess.”
The AMA’s Canfield has been around this racing thing for a really long time. He knows more about the sport than almost anybody. And frankly, I think he had to know, deep down, that the gate flinched. But if I had to guess—and I can’t prove this, but it’s just a gut feeling—I would guess that the AMA, and promoter MX Sports, are perhaps less concerned about things like a fair start to a moto than they are about sticking to the schedule for television. If they would’ve restarted the race, they’d have lost at least five minutes, and that would’ve nullified fitting post-race interviews and other assets into the TV package. I think if it were a downed rider, meaning that a racer’s safety was at stake, the AMA would have certainly thrown the red flag, but a gate flinch might not meet that same standard of urgency right now.
We could mitigate this in the future if, for example, we changed the outdoor format to a 30-minutes-plus-1-lap affair (rather than the current 30-minutes-plus-2-lap format), as AMA Supercross is working just fine on a 20-minutes-plus-1-lap format, but regardless of the solutions, the fact is that the second 250MX moto at Fox Raceway should have, in my opinion, been restarted. And if I’m right about the reason for that not happening, that’s not good at all. TV broadcast should not take precedence over the fairness of the sport. CN
