Driving up to San Francisco for the Supercross in the Vital MX Toyota (yep, I love road trips), I was thinking a bit about the concept of 100 percent. What constitutes 100 percent? How do you determine a percentage? And how do some riders actually give 110 percent?
Coming into the season, I’d interviewed James Stewart at Kawasaki’s Supercross Kickoff event at their corporate headquarters. At the time I’d asked him the standard question of whether he was 100 percent coming into the season. It’s not a question I really like asking, because I’ve seen riders get queried with that so many times in press conferences that you often just get an inevitable eye roll for an answer. But given that he was just coming off a previous knee injury that caused him to miss the end of the outdoor season, as well as the U.S. Open, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Obviously we now know that James had an additional pre-season injury to his left knee, and that he was trying to keep it quiet. None of the top athletes ever like to show any sort of weakness that their competitors can latch onto, and James is no exception. Ricky Carmichael was also pretty adept at hiding injuries during his career. So while I’m not crazy about putting James in the position of having to smile, nod, and say, “Yeah, I’m 100 percent, and training’s been going great,” when in fact he hadn’t been able to train, I can at least sort of understand it.
And how you figure a percentage? Most of these guys have had so many injuries over the years, 100 percent is a concept that’s probably somewhat foreign to them. After a while they have injuries that are, for lack of a better term, just…there. We’d guess a lot of the riders have a certain level of pain that they deal with all the time, and they just work around it. It’s part of the job. They may also have some injuries that hinder them in some way, but they’ve adapted and found ways to work around it. So does that mean they can never make it back to the 100 percent they had on their best day ever?
Often you’ll hear guys who say they’ll give back from an injury when they’re 100 percent…or that they don’t want to race because they can’t give 100 percent. I guess that if they’re out there, they want to be on top of their game, and also be safe…and who can blame them? But generally, I think even when they’re hurt, the top guys bring 100 percent of what they’ve got to the track on a given day. Is that their full potential? Maybe not. But it’s their 100 percent at the time.
And finally, we come to the dreaded over-100 percent number that someone inevitably busts out with on the podium. The only possible reasoning I can give for that one is if they felt like they overachieved on that day; or though a mix of talent, luck, and karma, they rode to way beyond even their own expectations. But I also think that should be their new high water mark that they shoot for the next time they hit the track.
Now that I’m wrapping this up, as far as the San Francisco weekend goes, the only thing I’m 100 percent certain of is that there’s going to be a whole lot of mud in AT&T Park on Saturday, it should make for some very interesting racing, and at the end of the night, you’ll be able to look at the results and figure out who gave 100 percent.
Coming into the season, I’d interviewed James Stewart at Kawasaki’s Supercross Kickoff event at their corporate headquarters. At the time I’d asked him the standard question of whether he was 100 percent coming into the season. It’s not a question I really like asking, because I’ve seen riders get queried with that so many times in press conferences that you often just get an inevitable eye roll for an answer. But given that he was just coming off a previous knee injury that caused him to miss the end of the outdoor season, as well as the U.S. Open, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Obviously we now know that James had an additional pre-season injury to his left knee, and that he was trying to keep it quiet. None of the top athletes ever like to show any sort of weakness that their competitors can latch onto, and James is no exception. Ricky Carmichael was also pretty adept at hiding injuries during his career. So while I’m not crazy about putting James in the position of having to smile, nod, and say, “Yeah, I’m 100 percent, and training’s been going great,” when in fact he hadn’t been able to train, I can at least sort of understand it.
And how you figure a percentage? Most of these guys have had so many injuries over the years, 100 percent is a concept that’s probably somewhat foreign to them. After a while they have injuries that are, for lack of a better term, just…there. We’d guess a lot of the riders have a certain level of pain that they deal with all the time, and they just work around it. It’s part of the job. They may also have some injuries that hinder them in some way, but they’ve adapted and found ways to work around it. So does that mean they can never make it back to the 100 percent they had on their best day ever?
Often you’ll hear guys who say they’ll give back from an injury when they’re 100 percent…or that they don’t want to race because they can’t give 100 percent. I guess that if they’re out there, they want to be on top of their game, and also be safe…and who can blame them? But generally, I think even when they’re hurt, the top guys bring 100 percent of what they’ve got to the track on a given day. Is that their full potential? Maybe not. But it’s their 100 percent at the time.
And finally, we come to the dreaded over-100 percent number that someone inevitably busts out with on the podium. The only possible reasoning I can give for that one is if they felt like they overachieved on that day; or though a mix of talent, luck, and karma, they rode to way beyond even their own expectations. But I also think that should be their new high water mark that they shoot for the next time they hit the track.
Now that I’m wrapping this up, as far as the San Francisco weekend goes, the only thing I’m 100 percent certain of is that there’s going to be a whole lot of mud in AT&T Park on Saturday, it should make for some very interesting racing, and at the end of the night, you’ll be able to look at the results and figure out who gave 100 percent.
1/25/2008 5:48pm
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