The motorcycling world lost an extremely talented and charismatic racer today when 24-year-old Marco Simoncelli died following a tragic accident at the Sepang round of the MotoGP championship.
Having watched Senna recently, I wrote about the weird feeling of seeing the events again after watching them live so many years ago. But in that situation, it was the culmination of a documentary which followed the career of one of the greatest drivers in history.
Whereas most media channels have pulled any replays of the events today, as you’d expect, Youtube is full of clips of the frankly horrific accident, which involved two other riders colliding with Simoncelli. And there’s the occasional website which has decided to post the footage, such as Jalopnik, who claim they are doing it to show the risks of motorsport – despite the fact they’re a car website which has written about MotoGP racing roughly twice this year.
I’m torn between valuing the benefits of self-publishing, and the despairing at the people who abuse that opportunity for the sake of page views and noteriety.
And I’m torn within myself – when writing about Senna, I did look at footage on Youtube of the Ratzenberger crash earlier the same weekend, and also the footage of the accidents which claimed the lives of Shoya Tomizawa in Moto2 in 2010, and Daijiro Kato in MotpGP in 2003.
So should I be decrying the actions of others? Or accepting that a televised sport in which risk plays a large part of the attraction for both competitors and audiences will be instantly reproduced?
Perhaps my distaste comes from the fact that Simoncelli was easily my favourite rider from the current season, showing the same kind of talent and attitude that people like Kevin Schwantz displayed – winning or crashing with barely anything in between, and providing some interest in a year utterly dominated by the Repsol Honda team. It’s compounded by the fact that I was a huge fan of Kato, who had looked likely to become the first Japanese MotoGP champion prior to his death.
About the only certainties are that what appears to have been a freak accident has claimed a very talented individual. And that racers will still be competing against each other, and themselves next weekend and on into the future.
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