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Austin Lindberg, Senior Editor
In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the United States ruled MotoGP.
Between 1978 and 1993, American riders won 13 of 16 world championships. Kenny Roberts won three in a row between 1978 and 1980; Freddie Spencer and Eddie Lawson traded titles between 1983 and 1986; and Lawson, Wayne Rainey and Kevin Schwantz claimed six straight crowns between 1988 and 1993.
And since?
Kenny Roberts Jr. won the championship in 2000 and the late Nicky Hayden did the same in 2006. He was the last American champion, though.
No rider from the U.S. has won a MotoGP race since 2011. An American hasn’t even held a full-time ride in the series since 2015.
Roberts Sr.’s technique, honed on the dirt tracks of California, paved the way for his fellow Americans. He opened a school in Barcelona to teach the Old World his ways. Seven-time champion Valentino Rossi of Italy was one of his pupils. That dirt-track style has been a cornerstone of the career of six-time champion Marc Márquez of Spain.
While talents from southern Europe have reaped the rewards, the pipeline of riders draped in stars and stripes has dried up. The beginning of the end coincided with the global financial crisis of 2008.
Before global economies were decimated, the U.S. was home to the strongest domestic road-racing championship in the world. Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki and Ducati all had factory efforts in what was then known as AMA Superbike, each paying multimillion-dollar contracts to their riders.
As belts tightened, brands reevaluated their non-essential spending, and the number of corporations who view racing as essential can be counted on two hands. It was a reckoning in motorsport. Honda pulled out of Formula One. Kawasaki pulled out of MotoGP.
That same year, AMA Superbike was sold to Daytona Motorsports Group, an outfit co-led by NASCAR CEO Jim France. The rulebook was turned on its head, and with sport bike sales in decline and the American series no longer aligned with the interests of the manufacturers and the rest of the road-racing world, factories scaled back spending or pulled out entirely.
There was a far more cost-effective means of going racing: supercross and motocross. Go to any supercross or motocross race today and you’ll see trailers and hospitality units representing the factory efforts of Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Suzuki, KTM and Husqvarna. Triumph will join the fold this season and Ducati announced in October it is embarking on a motocross program of its own.
With factory support comes factory money. One source ESPN spoke to suggested that the brightest 16- and 17-year-olds are being signed by these brands for between $300,000 and $400,000 a season, with the promise of millions more should they progress to become race winners and title contenders.
“[Kids] see Jett Lawrence or Haiden Deegan flying on private jets or going to these really crazy places, they see all the money and they’re like, ‘I want to do that,'” the source said.
On the asphalt, however, the series now known as MotoAmerica has only one factory team left: Yamaha. Yamaha fields two bikes, each seat paying less than $250,000 a season.
With more than a dozen rides offering million-dollar salaries in supercross and motocross, and likely two to three times that number paying low-to-mid six figures, it’s not hard to understand why any preteen with a passion for motorcycle racing would opt for that route.
“There is no shortage of talent on two wheels in America,” John Hopkins, who rode for Red Bull Yamaha, Suzuki and Monster Energy Kawasaki in MotoGP between 2002 and 2008 and is now race director for American Racing, told ESPN. “If we can just convert some of those extremely talented kids from the motocross world and bring them onto [mini road bikes], I think that’s going to have a huge impact on racing.”
Rainey is trying to do just that. The three-time MotoGP world champion is now president of MotoAmerica, embarking on his 10th year of saving road racing in the U.S. The series introduced the Junior Cup, designed for riders 14 and older, in 2018 and the Mini Cup, available to riders between the ages of 5 and 16, in 2020.
“Some of these racers show up in a car seat,” Rainey said to ESPN. “This is how young they are.”
The standout riders in the more senior levels of the Junior Cup are selected to participate in a runoff event against competition from around the world at each year’s MotoGP finale in Valencia, Spain. In the past 25 years, Spain has become the most dominant market in motorcycle racing, and it’s there that America’s brightest young talents can showcase their skills in front of the sport’s most influential personalities.
The best memories ✨
This is how we want to remember Nicky Hayden on the day his number 69 is retired from #MotoGP 🏁#RideOnKentuckyKid pic.twitter.com/GQNWqFzZfD
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) April 12, 2019
“We have opportunities in place with Dorna, which own MotoGP, and we have a close relationship with them,” Rainey said. “So if we see a young talent, we try to plug them into the Spanish championship. We’ve had kids in there, but at the moment, they just haven’t gotten that next step, but we’re still feeding it, we’re still working it.”
Madrid-headquartered Dorna has overseen a significant shift in MotoGP. When it became the series’ organizer in 1991, it began securing significant sponsorship from Spanish companies in the sport’s teams and riders. It also set about investing in infrastructure to create a pipeline of Spanish talents, creating a peerless domestic championship where the country’s young riders could develop.
In 1991, no Spaniard had ever won the MotoGP world championship. That changed in 1999, with Àlex Crivillé, and now 10 of the past 13 champions have hailed from Spain.
With every person ESPN spoke to for this story, the question of where young American riders could develop on a path toward MotoGP yielded the same answer: Spain.
“I mean at the age of 12, 13, these [American] kids are literally packing up with their parents, with their families, and then spending six to eight months in Spain,” Hopkins said. “They ride the same bikes that the Spanish kids are riding, ride in the same coaching classes.”
Packing up an entire family and moving an ocean away is a sacrifice, although that’s the name of the game in racing in every corner of the world. Teenagers with visions of a future in MotoGP are often asked to come up with $100,000 to secure a seat in one of the Spanish championship’s junior categories. While that’s an eye-watering sum, it’s not uncommon.
One source told ESPN that the average teenage motocross prospect would need to spend between $40,000 and $80,000 a year on equipment and travel costs. If that rider was especially crash prone, repair bills would see that figure rise even further. That $100,000 figure in Spain is all-in; cut the team a check and it will take care of the rest.
“Unfortunately, that’s the only way to go,” Hopkins said.
The trail from the U.S. to Spain has already been blazed. Joe Roberts, now 26 and of no relation to the Roberts family of world champions, spent one season in the Spanish championship’s Moto2 class, a stepping-stone formula on the road to MotoGP. He finished on the podium three times in eleven races in 2017, earning him a ride in the Moto2 world championship in 2018. In his nearly six full seasons in the world championship’s intermediate class, he’s scored one win and four podiums.
And there are more Americans following in his footsteps.
The Spanish championship now boasts four riders from the U.S. among its ranks. Britanni Belladonna (17), Julian Correa (15) and Kristian Daniel Jr. (14) are competing in the country’s European Talent Cup, which offers its best riders each season a seat in the Moto3 world championship the following year; while Max Toth (18) is in Spain’s Moto2 class.
“For the sport to grow, it needs to be international, and the only way you can do that is you have to have international riders, so it’s important to Dorna. They are always asking, ‘Where’s the next American?’ So they understand that they need it,” Rainey said. “Now, if a young American was to go over there and race in those national championships or race in Moto3 or Moto2 and he gets the results, I think he’ll get to the top quicker than maybe a Spanish rider would because there’s so many Spanish riders that a hot American right now I think would supersede all that.
“With the talent that we’ve got and some of the young riders that are currently racing in our championship, it won’t be long.”