American Idols

Lionized by teens and big-name athletes alike, motocross stars like Ricky Carmichael draw NFL-sized crowds for a roaring, soaring spectacle

Only 23, Carmichael already has 26 supercross victories and two championships.  Bo Bridges

Ten o'clock on Saturday night in the flatlands of Anaheim. RVs, acres of RVs, in every direction, pitched like so many aluminum tents on the asphalt outside Edison Field. There's no one in the parking lot, but the echoes of the warm January day remain: the girls in tube tops, the coolers planted deep with Bud bottles, the teenage boys drag-racing scooters, the discordant hum of a thousand CDs fed through a thousand driver's-side speakers.

The action now is inside the stadium, where 45,000 people are on their feet and roaring at a supercross spectacle that is part stock car race, part rock concert, part prizefight. Or at least you think they're roaring. It's impossible to tell over the sound of the nearly two dozen 250-cc motorcycles being primed and revved and primed again, the din like the buzzing of a toppled hornets' nest. The bikes quiver as a thousand flashbulbs wink and the man on the P.A. does his best Michael Buffer and the sticky-sweet smell of spilled beer rises into the California night. And then they're off, knobby tires digging over the three-quarter-mile track, 1.5 million pounds of brown earth that was hauled in by semis and laid down in waves and hills and cattle-grate ridges. Skidding out of the first turn, the riders take the crest and launch into the air, flying 15, 20, 30 feet -- three stories! -- above the ground, a fleet of Evel Knievels twisting into the sky.

One figure peaks higher than the rest -- or maybe it just seems that way because you, like everyone else in this baseball stadium that feels nothing like a baseball stadium, are watching Ricky Carmichael on his red number 4 Honda CR250R. You are waiting for him to take the lead, as he did almost unfailingly en route to winning the last two winter supercross championships, and did without exception during the 2002 summer motocross season, in which he not only won all 12 American Motocross Association (AMA) events but also every qualifying heat to boot, going a perfect 24 for 24 over the milelong outdoor tracks. To call Ricky Carmichael the Michael Jordan of motocross would be a disservice, for even when Jordan was still lord of basketball, he never dominated his sport the way this 23-year-old from Havana, Fla., does.

For a better analogy, picture a tennis player so good that he wins not only every tournament of the year but also every set. And then remember that Carmichael does his magic aboard a 200-pound piece of machinery that if he lands wrong off a jump, could snap his spine like a carrot stick. One must only scan the second deck of the stadium to see the cautionary tales, dozens of former racers and wannabes, young men in wheelchairs with all the trappings of youth -- their hats wedged backward and tattoos curling up their forearms -- but none of the freedom.

So you watch Carmichael expectantly, waiting for the burst, but then you blink and something unexpected has happened. Coming around a turn on the second of the 20 laps, Carmichael has toppled off his bike, suddenly looking human and even smaller than his five feet four. Two ... five ... seven riders pass him, and still he fumbles to remount. In the stands disbelief turns to delirium -- the King is down! -- and these West Coast fans, who begrudge the Floridian for winning, for displacing their local heroes, for treating this as a job rather than a party, begin to cheer. Then, one lap later, Carmichael goes down again, and by the time he is back on his bike, a $100,000 machine that a team of mechanics and engineers has spent months engineering to NASA-like standards, he is dead last, stranded behind 19 other bikes. A man in the seats below you revels. "He's done," he shouts above the growling cacophony, pumping his arms. "He ain't even gonna finish in the top half!"

In 1965 Tom Wolfe wrote that stock car racing is "a wildly horrendous spectacle such as no other sport approaches." If that is the case, then supercross is NASCAR unhinged, stripped of the metal cage and the chassis and given wings. It is an Xbox game come to life, full of impossible jumps and crackling crashes and contorted, concocted terrain. Indeed, the kids play MX Superfly Featuring Ricky Carmichael and Jeremy McGrath Supercross and beg Dad to take them to the track so they can see their digital heroes in the flesh. The turnout is measured in small armies, an average of 49,556 for the 16 AMA supercross events last season. It's an all-day experience: For a "treadhead" ticket that runs $30 for adults and one-third that for kids, fans can show up at 12:30 in the afternoon and stay until midnight, watching the practices and qualifiers in the stadium and wandering through the fenced-in pit area outside it. Amid this little village, the bike manufacturers erect tents and deejays spin records and all the big racers sit down for an hour to scribble autographs and pose, next to strangers, for snapshots that will one day be framed like diplomas and mounted in dens.

Were it not for the racing suits, it might be impossible to tell rider from fan, so young and virile and gelled are both. Carmichael is 23, but many of the other racers, like 19-year-old X Games freestyle champion and crowd favorite Travis Pastrana, are younger. Compact yet thin, they look like surfers without the tans and have the same effect on the opposite sex, attracting hordes of beautiful women with silicon figures who in turn attract herds of male teenage fans.

So in the same way kids rejected their parents' skis in favor of snowboards, today's bypass NASCAR for supercross. That's why you see people like Ken Griffey Jr. and pro surfer Sunny Garcia, wannabe motoheads both, tooling around backyard tracks; why Troy Glaus and Troy Percival of the world champion Angels are in attendance in Anaheim; and why every other pro skateboarder says his real dream is to catch big air on a 250-cc cycle. The TV isn't there yet, relegated as supercross is to taped appearances on ESPN2, but the riders and the Honda people and the agents assure you that it's only a matter of time before this sport blows up. Then they quickly correct themselves to remind you that, of course, it already has.

Only three decades ago there was no supercross, only motocross, and that was dominated by Europeans like Roger DeCoster, the great Belgian rider who rode a leaden Czech bike called the Jawa 250 to his first title. Imported to the U.S. in 1972, the sport was quickly Americanized, squeezed into stadium bowls with artificial jumps and hyped up with the name supercross. It attracted the kids who'd never liked sticks and balls, the ones who would rather do wheelies than listen to a coach with a whistle, and those kids in turn grew up and bought bikes and became the next generation of stars.

They partied as hard as they raced, and the brightest of them was a kid from Murrieta, Calif., named Jeremy McGrath. Brash, talented and personable, he became the Tony Hawk of his sport, winning seven supercross titles from 1993 through 2000 while introducing to the sport a BMX flair, full of one-leg-off-the-bike "nac nacs" and midair finger points and ain't-it-fun-to-be-young passion. He did Leno, he made the first video games, he inspired the now-popular freestyle motoX, in which riders compete not based on time but on who can do the sickest flips and spins and aerial gymnastics.

Naturally, then, the sport went into mourning two weeks ago when the 31-year-old McGrath announced that he was retiring, only days before the 2003 American supercross series was to begin. Only months removed from a four-hour surgery during which doctors wedged his hip back into place, he felt old in a young man's game. And so the torch was officially passed to Carmichael. "Now," McGrath said last week, "let's just hope he's ready for it."

On a bright December day, just north of Tallahassee, Carmichael arrives in his jacked-up Ford F-250 truck and steps down and extends a hand to a visitor. He is scruffy and impish-looking, with cocked-out ears, a face full of freckles and a thicket of red curls with blond streaks that sprouts from under a backward baseball cap. He grins and nods a lot and, in a Southern twang, uses terms like buddy and main man and brothaman.

He heads just north of the Georgia border to show off his 96-acre ranch and practice course, a renovated tobacco farm full of barns and sheds and stables. Just past the main house, like a small city of clay erected amid the rolling grasslands, one of Carmichael's three tracks is visible. Dirtwurx, the company that creates stadium courses, built it in 1999. Now Carmichael uses a bulldozer and a 2,000-gallon water truck to maintain it at competition level.

Ricky got his first bike, a Yamaha 50 Tri-Zinger, when he was five years old, encouraged by his mother, Jeannie, and his father, Big Rick, an electrician who is as laid-back as his wife is driven. Ruddy-cheeked, short and pudgy, Ricky liked baseball but didn't always fit in at school. Racing drew him in. Powered not by his legs but by an engine, he was suddenly as big as the other kids, and far braver. By 16 he'd amassed a roomful of amateur trophies.

When he went pro, in 1996, he won rookie of the year despite entering only the final race of the season. He broke all the records in the 125-cc class -- the minor leagues of motocross -- before moving up to race heavier, more powerful bikes in the 250-cc class in '99. But something failed to translate. He finished 16th in his first season in supercross and fifth in his second. For a kid accustomed to podiums, who says he becomes "a real a------" if he doesn't win, it was vexing. So at his mom's urging, he hired a trainer, a former mountain-bike racer from South Africa named Aldon Baker, to turn him from a 170-pound "pudge ball" (Carmichael's term) into the fittest rider on tour. Baker placed a restraining order on McDonald's and KFC and steered Carmichael toward more healthful choices like turkey sandwiches and grilled vegetables. "It's the hardest thing in my training," Carmichael says. "The biking, the running, the practice -- that's cake. The dieting, though.... Sometimes it's just so convenient to eat bad."

But it worked. Carmichael is now 150 pounds and cut. Daily hourlong bike rides, running (he recently covered 10 miles in 1:13), weight work and hours of practice riding in the off-season allow him to outlast the competition. His opponents may keep pace from Laps 1 to 5, like sprinters running the first part of a marathon, but from Laps 5 to 20 no one can keep up with Carmichael, who keeps churning out 59-second laps because no one else trains like him. Supercross may not sound that difficult, but you try it. Try to withstand 20 minutes of your heart doing a techno beat in your chest; of your forearms swelling with blood so that you can hardly make a fist around the handlebars; of smoke and oil and dirt and the knowledge that you can't turn your attention away for a second or you're going headfirst toward an embankment.

Do this every day for two decades, and you'll understand why, at 23, Carmichael is already looking ahead. It's not that he needs the money or the accolades; with endorsements, top riders make more than $5 million a year. Now he has a wife too, and Ursula Carmichael has made it clear she doesn't want to spend her life with a husband in a wheelchair. One need only talk to Jeremy McGrath's sister, Tracy, to understand. "To not have to worry every time Jeremy goes to the starting gate is such a relief," Tracy said after her brother's retirement. "Jeremy saw so many of his friends get paralyzed."

There are so many ways to land in the ER. Sometimes it doesn't matter how well you "tuck and roll" -- the riders' safety credo -- you still end up on a stretcher, as Carmichael did last January when he did an "endo" in the season's first race, his back tire flying up over him and sending him into a tumble. He fractured a bone in his right hand but still made it back the next week. The worst injuries, though, the ones the riders don't like to talk about, come on the landings. Time one wrong and the impact travels straight up your spinal column like an electric shock.

Broken backs, riders doing flips -- this is what the general public knows of supercross. "It's sad because a lot of people see this and say, These guys are crazy," says David Bailey, 41, a four-time AMA champion who is now a commentator for ESPN2. It's an hour before the qualifying heats in Anaheim, and Bailey is looking down on the track from the broadcast booth. "I look at bungee jumping and skydiving and say, 'That's kind of crazy.' But these guys? To get to this point, they've spent the last 10 years of their lives working on their skills. Yet all the people see is the daredevil aspect of it." He's interrupted and called for a prerace run-through. "Gotta go," he says, then smiles, shakes hands and wheels himself out the door. In an adjoining studio he ascends a wooden ramp to appear at the same height as his play-by-play partner.

Bailey's racing career ended in January 1987, when he flipped over the handlebars during a practice lap in Fresno, fracturing his fourth and fifth vertebrae. Though he was left paralyzed from the chest down, he never thought of leaving, much less blaming, the sport. It gets in your blood. Just listen to Carmichael talk of his biggest fear. "It's not the crashing but the losing, because when I lose, I'll retire," he says, fingering his ball cap, unconsciously adjusting it. "And that scares me. I've been doing this since I was five years old. What the hell are you going to do next?"

It doesn't seem possible. But there he is, with six laps to go, in fourth place and closing fast. With four laps to go Carmichael takes third, then second! The same fans who jeered him earlier are now behind him. It's hard not to be. You start to hope, to think he can pull off a miracle, but then he runs out of track.

Afterward, walking out the tunnel to where his trailer is parked in the pit, he talks of how it's a long season and how he made a good effort. But then the facade crumbles. "F---, man, I hate losing," he says, the practiced joviality of brothaman and buddy gone now. "Especially when I know I've worked so much harder than the other guys out there, that I've been training while they've been partying." He reaches the trailer and is enveloped by family and friends. They pat him on the shoulder, congratulate him on the stirring comeback. Carmichael doesn't care, though; second is second, and he wants no part of it. "I could have killed him, absolutely killed him, had I started better," he says of winner Chad Reed, shaking his head.

Carmichael sighs and pulls off his racing jacket. Though it is almost midnight, there are still fans lined up around the waist-high gates that encircle the trailer. Spotting a young boy with his mother, Carmichael walks out and tosses him his jersey. The kid reaches up, snags it out of the air and holds it aloft, beaming as if he's speared a home run ball. And then the two head off in opposite directions, a young man fast becoming a legend and a boy who wants to be just like him.

Issue date: January 20, 2003

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