Rennie Scaysbrook | January 11, 2023
Cycle News Lowside
COLUMN
The Art of Supercross
Anaheim Stadium is one of those special places in sport where good things happen.
The home of the ridiculously named Los Angeles Angels (which, if you don’t know, translates to The Angels Angels—seriously), the place has an aura about it that’s hard to replicate and it is the envy of many a sports stadium across this fine country.
Baseball can get jammed for all I care. What I’m more concerned with, as I’m sure you are, too, if you’re reading this, is what Anaheim Stadium is used for on the first weekend in January each year.
The opening round of the 2023 Monster Energy AMA Supercross season, permanently embedded at Anaheim, brings with it all the good vibes of a new year. The renewed optimism that only January 1 of each year brings is felt throughout the paddock, everyone chomping at the bit to see the very best riders on the planet take on a track that is plain scary to me—and I raced the Isle of Man TT.
A sellout Anaheim crowd watched Eli Tomac take a thrilling win. Photo: Kit Palmer
This year was slightly different, as A1 coincided with the start of the new Super Moto Cross (sic) World Championship that combines the motocross and supercross series into one 31-round behemoth championship. After the briefest of searches, the only series that I could find that had more rounds was NASCAR, which tops out at an exhaustive 41 rounds for 2023. This new championship structure puts even more of a premium on not getting hurt, which, unfortunately, is an inevitable part of the game.
It’s hard not think this new championship isn’t a dig at the recently held three-race World Supercross Championship, won by Ken Roczen in his last ride on a Honda. And it’s also interesting to note this is a world championship in name only, not an official world championship as sanctioned by the sport’s governing body in the FIM.
I brought this rather touchy subject up to Feld Entertainment’s Sean Brennan, Senior PR Manager and the point of contact for all the journalists who wish to write anything on this championship.
“The best riders in the world compete here, that’s the bottom line,” Brennan said emphatically. “Yes, you can go and visit many countries and be a geographical tour, that’s one way to look at it. But here in America, we’re blessed that we have a 50-year history of crowning champions in this sport. That’s been built over time. It’s been earned. Kids all over the world have posters of Ken Roczen and Chase Sexton and Eli Tomac on their walls. If you ask Marvin Musquin, he grew up with posters in his bedroom, dreaming about coming to America. We’re fortunate to be in that position, but that’s been earned.
“We’re not affiliated with the FIM anymore. Nobody owns the words ‘world championship.’ The FIM certainly owns the term “FIM World Championship,” but no one owns those words. If you ask the winners of the Superbowl, are they world champions? The same as Major League Baseball. From our standpoint, the best athletes in the world compete here, therefore, it’s a world championship.”
It’s hard to argue with Brennan on that one.
Brennan’s optimism in this new venture was clearly shared by the fans who turned out in droves for the start of the season. I’ve been lucky enough to go to A1 seven times since arriving here in America, and I’ve never seen the parking lot so completely rammed as it was at 5 p.m. on race day. The place was so packed that our own Ryan Nitzen couldn’t get his fiancée a ticket, and he’s the guy who writes the race reports.
The however many people that rocked up to Anaheim were treated to one of the best main events in recent memory. The rain that flocked down over SoCal in the lead-up to the race thankfully stayed away and allowed the world’s best to put on a clinic of just how to ride a knobby-tire motorbike.
Supercross is one of the most beautiful and brutal sports out there—Austin Forkner’s bone-jarring crash off the start of the 250 main was in direct contrast to the performance of Jett Lawrence, the Aussie who seemed to dance his way around the roughly 5500 cubic yards of dirt that made up the A1 track.
The however many people that rocked up to Anaheim were treated to one of the best main events in recent memory.
But the man of the night was in no doubt Eli Tomac. I love it when a rider wears the number one and does stuff on the motorcycle deserving of it. The way he decimated the best riders in the world after his get-off over the bridge jump was reminiscent of Valentino Rossi’s legendary fightback at Phillip Island in 2003 when he got docked 10 seconds for passing under a yellow flag. In that encounter, Rossi not only recovered the 10 seconds but kept the fire lit and jammed an extra five seconds on top just to hammer home his superiority. This was vintage Tomac, as he delivered the kind of fightback we’d seen him do so many times when he was on the factory Kawasaki.
Judging from that first bout, you’d be a brave man not to put your money on Tomac retaining that number-one plate for Supercross and maybe that will be enough to get him to reconsider his planned retirement at the end of the Supercross season and aim to add the first SuperMotocross World Champion title to his long list of accomplishments. With Tomac’s performance, the atmosphere inside Angel Stadium and the new direction the sport is going in, things are looking up for already the best show on dirt. If it’s been years since your last supercross, or if you’ve never been, it might be time to get your backside trackside and get reinfected with a love of stadium racing. CN
