Valentino Rossi

On April 18, 2004, at the South African Welkom circuit, Valentino Rossi stopped his blue Yamaha beside the guardrail, sat down on the asphalt and buried his head between his knees. He had just won the season's first race after unilaterally breaking with Honda, the dominant factory that insisted any rider could win on its machine. That image spread through newsrooms around the world as an unassailable statement of authorship.

Rossi understood before anyone else that elite sport needed storylines and conflict to captivate audiences. Behind every celebration in prison uniforms, inflatable dolls or Robin Hood capes was a precisely calculated plan to unsettle the rivals he would face on Sunday. Max Biaggi, Sete Gibernau and Casey Stoner suffered that war of attrition, fought as much in the press room as on the final braking zone.

The documentary Faster, directed by Mark Neale in 2003, captured that side of him with a raw intensity no television broadcast could replicate. The camera showed a ruthless competitor disguised as a teenage jester, capable of psychologically devouring his grid rivals while smiling under the spotlights. Later, the production Hitting the Apex in 2015 again turned the focus on that same cold stare during his generational rivalry with Marc Márquez and Jorge Lorenzo.

No one had calculated the power of the spectacle.

Between 1997 and 2009, he amassed nine world titles across four different classes. He won with two-stroke engines of 125cc, 250cc and 500cc, and kept winning when the premier class moved to four-stroke engines of 990cc and 800cc. He recorded 115 Grand Prix victories and 235 podiums over a professional career that spanned a quarter of a century on two wheels.

Two winters in the mud of Bologna

In the winter of 2010, Rossi signed with Ducati to close the loop on the Italian hero riding a bike from his homeland. The experiment was an unmitigated technical disaster.

The Desmosedici from Borgo Panigale demanded an aggressive riding style that wore out the tires and gave no feedback from the front end. Over two full seasons, he barely managed three isolated podiums and suffered a string of inexplicable crashes that eroded his aura of invincibility on the asphalt. Those two years of total drought proved that even the most refined talent couldn't bend a wrong chassis to its will.

He returned to Yamaha in 2013 to regain his form and fight for the occasional win again. In 2015, he came close to his tenth world crown in a tense campaign that ended with the infamous Sepang penalty and a rally from the last row of the grid at Cheste that wasn't enough.

The plan blew up in his face.

Although he never won another championship, his presence kept filling the grandstands of Europe with yellow flags bearing the number 46 until his official farewell at the Valencia Grand Prix in November 2021.

Four-wheeled asphalt

Far from retiring to his ranch in Tavullia to manage his marketing businesses and his racing team, Rossi jumped into endurance racing on closed circuits. He signed with the Belgian outfit Team WRT to compete in GT3-class sports cars, first behind the wheel of an Audi R8 and later as an official driver for the German brand BMW.

In 2024, he made his debut at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the LMGT3 class, driving a BMW M4 GT3. After running in podium positions through the night in torrential rain, car number 46 retired on lap 109 after his relief driver went off track at the Maison Blanche corners.