paprika

valentino at welkom 2004 / sete at assen 2004

….We gave away this possible victory. But I think the team is doing good. It's a difficult year for us. We are having small problems. We're not being too lucky…..

#motogp

[autotranslated from italian; taken from ‘Il Piccolo - Supplemento Sportivo’ - sports supplement of daily newspaper of Trieste (Italy); published on 28 July 2003; link to the original in source]

“Gibernau beats Rossi at the finish line, Valentino no longer knows how to win”

In Germany, Valentino Rossi was pipped at the finish by Gibernau in the MotoGP class. Valentino no longer knows how to win. The world champion chose the wrong line after making his pass at the final corner and was caught out by the Spaniard, who claimed his fourth victory of the season. Rossi admitted: "What a mistake. It makes me furious to throw it away like that." Bayliss's Ducati finished third. In the 125 class, Perugini won; in the 250 class, Rolfo took his first victory.

If regulatory juggling doesn't steal victories from him, he throws them away himself at the final corner because of a banal mistake—one that simply doesn't belong in the vocabulary of a phenomenon. It happens: you can let victory slip away even when you have it in your grasp. But victories are what validate a champion's talent, and Rossi no longer seems to be on speaking terms with them.

This time, however, no one else was to blame for this fourth consecutive race without a win—a negative record that was beginning to weigh on his confidence. The blame belonged to him alone. One wrong line, taken too wide after a moment of magic in overtaking, cost Valentino the victory, which was reduced to a sandcastle right at the finish line. The sad and lonely rider from Pesaro, filled with regrets, will never forget the German GP at the Sachsenring. It was the apotheosis of anger.

Once again, Valentino Rossi was left with a bitter taste in his mouth. Bitter because a victory he had almost savoured slipped away in the closing metres of the German Grand Prix, leaving him empty-handed for the fourth race in a row. By just sixty thousandths of a second.

Spain's Sete Gibernau snatched the win from him in the sprint to the finish line at Sachsenring, helped by a mistake Rossi made in the final corner. It was a bitter Sunday for Rossi—second place, but wearing a sulk as dark as the black moon painted on his helmet. It was even worse for Max Biaggi, who crashed while running third. Meanwhile, Loris Capirossi managed to finish fourth after destroying his best Ducati, which had caught fire following an innocuous crash during the warm-up.

What a pity, because a victory by one of the three Italian riders in the premier class, combined with the wins of Turin's Roberto Rolfo—claiming the first victory of his career—in the 250cc class, and Stefano Perugini of Viterbo in the 125cc class, would have given Italian fans the 13th all-Italian treble in history.

Instead, that milestone remained out of reach. It vanished, just like Valentino Rossi's dream of returning to the top step of a podium where he had once seemed to have put down roots. Along with his proverbial good fortune, victory itself now seemed to have turned its back on him.

And since the Italian GP, ​​held last June 8th at Mugello, he hasn't won. In Barcelona, ​​he missed a couple of corners, leaving the path open for Loris Capirossi's first win with Ducati, then got stuck in the rain at Assen, finishing third behind Gibernau and Biaggi, while at Donington, a prohibited overtaking move demoted him from first to second place. Behind his longtime rival. That very Max Biaggi who snatched pole position from him on the eve of the German race. By a hair. Then, by just as little—as little as a breath—Gibernau beat him in the race at the Sachsenring: the opponent Rossi had never considered a truly dangerous rival in the championship battle.

Valentino tried to break away as the lights went out, but his getaway, which reached a lead of just under two seconds, was swallowed back up by the Spaniard. Rossi played cat and mouse with him, letting Sete take the lead while anticipating the final strike. A sudden move that the "sprite"* unleashed at the bottom of the last downhill section. The Spaniard, however, did a great job staying glued to him and returning the favor to Valentino when the rider from Pesaro went too wide on the final corner.Four victories this year for Gibernau, three for Rossi—a world champion who will have to revise his opinions on his Iberian rival. […]

Valentino: "It was a good race, but I didn't enjoy it because of an unbelievably stupid mistake."

It can all be summed up in a single remark that captures Rossi's mood in the forests around Dresden: "It was a good race, but I didn't enjoy it."

A single sentence that encapsulates all the anger and disappointment of MotoGP's elf king* over a victory that slipped away, frozen forever in those cursed sixty thousandths of a second that shattered his hopes and dreams of returning to winning. He said it first in Italian, then repeated it to the world in his English, conjugated only in the present tense. Even as he looks back on it, the anger only twists into a grimace.

He hasn't won for four races now, and he calls on bad luck. "In the first part of the season," Rossi reflects, "I was a bit unlucky. Between yellow flags, rain stoppages and the regulations, everything that could happen seemed to happen to me. This time, though, luck had nothing to do with it. I made an incredibly stupid mistake because I tried to defend the inside line and shut the door on Gibernau... but I couldn't get the bike stopped in time, so I was forced to run wide and couldn't get back on the throttle until too late." And Sete Gibernau overtook him again—and won.

It was a mistake that, in the philosophy of the Tavullia camp, turned Rossi into the first of the losers. "I tried to break away," Valentino says of his race, "but I couldn't do it. Congratulations to Gibernau—he rode really well." He makes no attempt to hide his anger. "But I'm not angry at Gibernau," he clarifies. "What makes me angry is that I made a mistake."

He hasn't won since Mugello, and he hasn't drawn a perfect Giotto circle in qualifying since Barcelona. He is still leading the championship, with a 29-point advantage over Gibernau, but he is beginning to reassess just how dangerous the Spaniard really is. Until now, he had been regarded as simply a good guy capable of the occasional flash of brilliance. "He's won four races; I've won three. Yes, now I have to say Gibernau is more dangerous than he might have seemed. He surprised me, because I didn't expect him to be this strong."

[note: it is translated as ‘sprite’ and ‘the elf king’ but the original article uses ‘il folletto’ and ‘re folletto’ - a sort of mischievous supernatural being. so, an elf in folkloric sense of the word. or maybe ‘an imp’]

screenshots of original italian articles under the cut for quicker access:

Incredible video! (thxx @bikefuckersoftheworldunite)

This is after Sachsering 2003. He's just lost this race to Sete, on the last lap ... and Vale is pissed! (also incredible Paolo Beltramo clocking Sete Gibernau as the new black beast for Rossi!)

© Tutti i diritti riservati a Mediaset

Valentino and Sete photographed during the race at Sachsenring, 2003

— from ‘グランプリ・イラストレイテッド年鑑 | grand prix illustrated yearbook 2003’

Donington Park in 2005 featured typical weather as torrential rain left the British GP drenched with treacherous standing water. Valentino Rossi left the field in his wake, not without making it too difficult for himself by coming through the pack after a poor start. The celebration over the finish line was a comment towards his best lap time, “I thought it was like a symphony of violins – perfect, so I decided that if I won I would do this celebration across the finish line!”

EDIT: Just to give a little more data to explain his celebration (and to really do his performance in this race justice):  His fastest lap: 1:45.377 - a scarcely believable two seconds faster than the second fastest lap time, by Alex Barros. 

But wait, there’s more. Look at the fastest laps sequence:

When he set the fastest lap of the race (lap 24), he smashed his own prior fastest lap by over 7 tenths.  (Also noteworthy that he set the fastest lap of the race to that point 7 times, twice beating someone’s fastest lap on that same lap)

But wait, there’s even more. So what of that lap 24 time? How were other riders doing when he sat that lap time you ask? Maybe it was just track evolution, and others were just a couple of tenths off.

Nope.

So, Rossi took the lead from Barros on lap 22. As you can see if you peek at the last chart above, laps 22, 23 and 24 were three fastest laps in succession - he was at the front, and ready to dictate the pace. 

Now, as for the actual pace:

Lap 22: 4 tenths faster.       Lap 23: 1.6 seconds faster than the rider behind him. Lap 24: Over 2.5 seconds faster than Barros behind him. 2.2 seconds faster than the second fastest rider.

That’s why he felt his lap was perfect, and why he crossed the finish line to a symphony of violins. 

And all this in torrential rain, that left several centimetres of standing water on the track - pushing so hard that he had several near-crashes, and was the first of only ten finishers.

Donington really set the venue for some of the most phenomenal rain-performances in he past (remember Donington 1993?).