He admitted the situation had given him sleepless nights. He’d lost a 24-point advantage in the space of the previous week through a DNF and two race crashes where he received the sportsmanship of Tony Cairoli (in the end Herlings did not need those two points). Herlings trailed Febvre by three points at the start of the day. Gajser was also in the game with a 3-2 but he’d lacked the starts and had also paid for errors. Rather they were slowy eroded by two rather static and cagey motos that seemed to sum-up the season: Herlings was the fastest rider in 2021 (his 1-1 at Mantova was a ninth GP victory from the 17 rounds he made, seven more than Febvre, five more than Gajser and he totalled 15 motos wins, more than double of the next nearest who was Gajser), Febvre was almost equally quick but the crash that dropped him away from Herlings while holding second in the second moto was not the first costly mistake he has made in 2021. The nerves and the tension would not be dispelled by surprise or shock. Like every great or anticipated sporting occasion, the Grand Prix Citta di Mantova was an anti-climax. MX2 became insignificant, and even the majority of the spectators who’d come to cheer and send-off Tony Cairoli were aware of the gravity of the situation in terms of its importance in the 2021 story of MXGP, at least judging by the cheers that greeted the few incidents between the trio that came to pass. Mantova was defined by the thick atmosphere and the implications of every bump, mistake, and move by Jeffrey Herlings, Romain Febvre, and Tim Gajser. There’s a line in Bennett Miller’s seminal sports flick Moneyball when the Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt says, “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Two-thousand-twenty-one MXGP was a contest of 18 rounds and a possible total of 900 points and the top three riders were split by just 20: it’s also tough not to get gushy about motorsport when it delivers on this level. The calendar was victim to four separate revisions as the pandemic continued to influence international travel and public events but when Grands Prix started it delivered a train of action, parity, and incidents that kept rolling and rolling and rolling. The 2021 FIM Motocross World Championship (MXGP) had been delayed twice and stumbled from a February launch to June.
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