A night at the races


After Spanish tonight, I bumbled around until I found a taxi, then rushed home to eat a smoked cheese sandwich. (If you had an organic smoked low fat cheese sandwich, would it taste good and not kill you, or would it just have all the joy squeezed out of it?) I was rushing home not just to see my wife but also because it was time to put another motorcycle race on the television.

Tonight we watched Sunday’s Argentinian MotoGP race, about 40 hours after it happened. I’ve been studiously avoiding the usual websites in the meantime, for fear of having my surprise spoiled. For the last two years, it’s felt like all the races have been won by Marc Marquez, and although it’s incredible to watch somebody who is just at the top of their game, it makes for less interesting races than when three different people are battling for the top spot.

As has happened so many times before, Marquez went off at the front and left everyone else in his dust. Three laps in and he was three seconds up on everyone else. I was resigned to another processional race where he got further and further away in the distance.

But then, with about twelve laps to go, he began to lose some pace; his tyres were wearing out and Valentino Rossi behind him was beginning to close the gap. In one lap he lost 0.4 of a second, and at the time I thought that it would be the kind of frustrating race where if Rossi had had twenty more laps, he could close the gap, but he’d never win. But with each lap the gap dropped, until two laps from the end Rossi took the lead… and then Marquez miscalculated a move, went into the back of Rossi’s bike and crashed, while Rossi cleared off and won the race. The wife and I were both yelling at the screen in disbelief: in a few minutes the race had gone from predictably dull to incredibly exciting.

Or maybe it was all the sugar in the cupcakes my wife had made today.

The only bad things about this is tha the adrenalin mames it harder to sleep now, and also watching this race may inspire me to get the half-built plastic motorcycle kit out and start messing around with polystyrene cement again. Well, I have to do something with my copious spare time, don’t I?


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