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For World Superbike ace Jonathan Rea, racing motorbikes is all about… peaceWords: Declan Quigley Photograph: Dan Wilton If World Superbike stardom starts to pall a little for Jonathan Rea, he could always consider a career in the medical profession. The ease with which the seven-time world superbike series race winner regurgitates the complicated terminology of his various physical traumas is a dead giveaway that he’s spent as much time around hospitals as race tracks lately. “With a broken radius, you’ve a 70 per cent chance you’ve ruptured the scapholunate ligament,” he says. “There’s five bones, two here and three in here but when you tear this one your wrist collapses. It’s got no stability.” He’s calm – as if explaining a patient’s plight to a worried parent. The vocabulary of The Lancet has clearly rubbed off on him, as, indeed, has the asphalt of many a famous race track. “I’ve had a compound fracture of my femur that took four operations to get it right. A broken metatarsal, broken tibia and fibula from the motocross days, separated AC joint in my shoulder, broken collarbone, and I’ve had two anterior cruciate ligament reconstructions and a medial collateral ligament one. “Oh, and I broke an ankle ’cause I had screws in here at the same time as I broke my femur.” This year’s tally includes the wrist injury at Misano, a cracked vertebra and a YouTube favourite from Phillip Island in Australia after which he was just about allowed out of hospital for the opening WSB event of the year. Needless to say his health insurer is less than impressed. “They’re not liking me at the minute,” he admits in his soft Antrim accent. “I’ve maxed out my physiotherapy allowance so I’m having to pay for that myself.” But Rea’s far from feeling sorry for himself when The Red Bulletin speaks to him a few days ahead of his comeback to racing action, following a three-month layoff. He’s tested his badly damaged right wrist on track and he knows it’s ready for the demands of a 200bhp motorcycle. Indeed, and akin to most top bike racers who seem to regard injury layoffs as the inevitable punctuation of their on-track exploits, Rea is upbeat about his travails. If he was going to feel depressed, it would have been during the long rehabilitation back at the neat, modern home he shares with his Australian-born fiancée, Tatia, in the small borough of Castletown, Isle of Man.  Instead, Rea busies himself with the important task of getting an entry to a low-key beach race on motocross bikes that evening. Torn between a racer’s need for speed and the inevitable restrictions a full-time athlete faces, Rea is anxious to ascertain the safety of the event, but there’s no doubt that for a competitive soul it would be infinitely preferable to going out solo on his dirt bike. It’s a happy quandary.His wrist is healed at last, he’s finalised a deal for another season at Castrol Honda in the World Superbike series and tomorrow he flies to Germany to resume his racing career. All is serene. The Isle of Man offers financial efficiency for a man with a very short timespan of large income potential but it’s clearly much more than just a tax haven for Rea. With its flotilla of tiny yachts, Castletown harbour looks more Margate than Monaco but you can see the attraction for a man who gets as much glamour and good weather as he needs on the World Superbike circuit and on end-of-year training retreats to Tatia’s home town of Melbourne. It’s Manx Grand Prix week on ‘the island’, the second of the two annual road racing festivals, and the sleepy little town is throbbing with motorcycle activity. There’s no racing on the day we visit, but fans are milling around and Rea nods at the aficionados who pick him out as he heads across to the local pub for lunch. He’s never raced on the Isle of Man (apart from walk up beach races) and he has no intention to, but the island is in his veins. His earliest memories are of family trips to watch his father, Johnny, pit his skills against the best of a golden generation of road racers. His father’s victory in the 1989 Junior TT among a host of other successes shows that Jonathan didn’t just ‘lick it off the road’ but when Johnny’s eldest son decided to try his hand, motocross fitted the bill. “I was brought up around racing paddocks because my dad raced, but he was more of a specialist in Isle of Man TT s and North West 200s and whatever. From two years old, holidays were the Isle of Man for two weeks and the natural thing was that I wanted a bike. I got a 50cc bike just before my third birthday.” A bad wrist injury during warm-up at Imola last year pushed Rea out of the top three in the series, but he began the current campaign full of hope, despite the spectacular spill at Phillip Island. Rea admits his unwillingness to accept second best contributed to the crash in Misano, Italy, in June that smashed his wrist: “The trouble started with the bike. I felt like it just wasn’t up to scratch and, me being me and being in the position I was in during the last two years, last year challenging for the title until I got hurt, I couldn’t accept finishing fifth and sixth, so I was compensating by riding on the limit constantly just to compete. ” The recall of minute detail is total. The description takes longer than the event. But then he’s had three months to go over the specifics. Heading into one of the fastest corners on the track flat out in fifth gear, Rea’s constant flirtations with the limit bit him hard as he ran wide by the tiniest of margins.  “I ran off the kerb by millimetres and hit the astroturf. It was morning warm up and the weekend had been terrible to that point anyway. I got into the gravel and there was a long, long tarmac run off but then there was like a lip before the gravel started and I just hit that andit was like hitting a motocross jump. I remember thinking ‘just keep my wrists in’, but I was going so fast that I had to slow down before the tyre wall. I saw it coming, panicked and tried to slow down. Then, obviously, that’s when the wrist went.” He was airlifted to an Italian hospital where he battled the language barrier to discover that his medical assessment was already ahead of the white coats even if he didn’t yet have the terminology to describe his ruptured ligament. “They basically saw that I had a broken radius and I thought, ‘I’m sure that’s not just a break because I know what broken bones should feel like and this thing was clunkin’ and bangin’ and whatever.” A quick call to his regular surgeon, Mike Horton, ensued and, as a result, he hotfooted it to London for a complicated procedure involving much metalwork. Rea then resumed consultation with Darren Roberts, the fitness guru of his long-time backer Red Bull, for the long haul back to the grid. Any doubts that he might have about his comeback have been reserved for another phase of his life. He’s intelligent enough to understand the perils of his profession, but young and talented enough to put them aside for now. “When you start thinking about that danger and that struggle to come back, it’s over. Forget about it, because the enjoyment’s gone. For me the enjoyment is still there and the will to win, the excitement of doing well is still there. “I do understand why people think ‘you’re mad’ and stuff or, like, ‘this is a big injury’ and ‘are you OK’. If you actually look at it like that.” But Rea is also racing in a significantly safer era. “Yeah, for sure – 100 per cent. The biggest safety improvement is in the rider equipment, the helmets, etc. “It was doing 153mph on the data at Misano and I didn’t get knocked out. That’s 150 miles an hour on your head and no loss of consciousness, no bad skin burns or anything like that.” Want to know, then, why Jonathan Rea races? It’s not the money, the fame or the glamour – though they are surely all welcome. It’s the peace. “I remember at Assen, at the test, I forgot how good it was. You put your earplugs in and your helmet on. You go out and you’re a bit nervous, but when you’re on the bike everything happens in slow motion. Everything’s quiet inside your helmet. It’s just you and the track. “I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it. I’d be doing it without the money. Probably not this road racing because it costs too much, but I’d probably buy myself a motocross bike and do national championship level. “That’s dangerous as well, but where do you stop?” His comeback at the Nürburgring, a few days after our first conversation, proved extraordinary and wrote another chapter in the fast-developing Jonathan Rea legend. After finishing a subdued 10th with an ill-handling bike in race one, Rea faced some of the worst rain that any rider could ever be asked to race in for race two and turned it into an opportunity. He burst through the spray to challenge for the lead at the first turn, then shrugged off a clutch problem to run in a fine fourth position for much of the race. Then shortly before the race was stopped by the organisers, Rea lost control of his Honda Fireblade and slid towards the barrier at well over 100mph. Amazingly, and with barely a moment’s hesitation, he remounted the bike and went on to finish fourth. Misano is already a distant memory. Check him out at www.jonathan-rea.com  World Superbikes versus MotoGPFor many bike racers the MotoGP series remains the pinnacle of the sport but Jonathan Rea has rejected “two offers” to move next season so that he can continue to pitch for a maiden World Superbike crown. With uncertainty around new engine rules for 2012 and dwindling grids in MotoGP, Rea is unwilling to make the move, preferring to stay with the Ten Kate-run Castrol Honda squad.“It needs two years to settle down, just to see what’s going on,” he says of MotoGP where manufacturers are working on 1,000cc bikes. For Rea there is less appeal in starting a race with a guaranteed three-tenths-of-a-second deficit to Casey Stoner, than challenging for wins in the World Superbike series. Especially as continuing loyalty to Honda would make him an ideal candidate for a ride with them in MotoGP should a vacancy arise. “I feel I’ve got unfinished business in the World Superbike paddock. Contract time is fun, it’s cool!” TrainingLike most top bike racers, Jonathan Rea has a dedicated training regimen centred around regular gym visits and extra-mural cardio training but, surprisingly, building arm muscles isn’t part of it. Blessed with forearms like Popeye and susceptible to the dreaded ‘arm pump’ – a muscle-locking condition known and feared by bike racers – Rea confines his gym work to core stability conditioning interspersed with at least three long rides each week on his push bike. Cycling is, he says, the latest “fashion training” for motorcyclists but Rea has embraced it with a passion.The Isle of Man has a giddy array of top cyclists and Rea joins the regular morning chaingangs that include top Team Sky Giro d’Italia star Peter Kennaugh. He had to cut out running since badly damaging his knee ligaments while motocross racing. “During the season, training isn’t too bad, but in the off-season it’s really hard,” he says of his twice-a-day sessions under the tutelage of Red Bull Athlete Performance Manager Darren Roberts. “Training here is better because so many professional athletes live here,” he says. Articel source: Article reproduced with kind permission of The Red Bulletin
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