Clinica Mobile


	October 22, 2009

	GP - MICK DOOHAN VISITS THE CLINICA MOBILE

	During the Australian Grand Prix, the Clinica Mobile received a special visitor in the shape of Mick Doohan, a great former champion and a friend of mine. He was with his lovely wife Selina and their two gorgeous children Allexis and Jack. When I met him, my heart was warmed by the memory of our incredible story, remembering a dimension where friendship was a reciprocal gift. The emotion of the meeting reminded me of the words I wrote about Mick in my recent book, Grand Prix College: “His drive was gigantic, pure adrenalin, a search for an “undefined interior image”, as he once said in an interview, something unknown to most people. Perhaps Doohan simply raced against himself. Perhaps, like Faust, he’d made a pact with Mephistopheles, the devil who’d never be able to satisfy him. A bet that Mick always honoured and won, because Mephistopheles was unable to quench his burning desire to break through all the barriers. This outstanding rider sought the impossible in order to feel an overwhelming enthusiasm, a feeling that placed him with not with the devil, but the gods. That’s why I love Doohan. I love him because I distracted him from his quest for the absurd that would have led him to further injury. I made him virtuous. I was his moderation and a moderated Doohan was invincible. When, in 1998, I stood alongside him on the podium and he presented me to an applauding Australian crowd, hugging me and raising my arm as if we’d won together, I failed to realise that it was a farewell. Blinded by the joy and glory, I simply didn’t understand. Never again would I play the role of moderator as I had for five long years. Without even realising it, Doohan was telling me that he was about to roar back onto the road of the infinite, abandon himself again to marvellous folly. His five world titles allowed him to say to himself: “Now I can get back on the path I left in ’92 and briefly touched again in ’95”. What actually happened was that, after establishing a track record, he slammed into a trackside billboard in Jerez… That day the circuit was treacherous. All the riders had remained in the paddocks. But not Doohan: he took pole position and was a full second faster than his closest rivals. He put his tyres on the white line that marks the outside of a bend and the bike slid sideways yet stayed under control. Later, he again laid his tyres on that same white line, this time at a higher speed; the side-slide now proved to be uncontrollable and he crucified himself on the billboard, its metal brackets puncturing his chest, just missing his heart. It was 7th May 1999: the day his story came to a close. Doohan had once again been gripped by his fury, challenged those inner phantoms that are nothing less than the promise of eternity. He wasn’t seeking an everyday kind of truth, because that was simply the banality of bare victory. He was looking for the absolute.”
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