Let the Right One In

The first time I got an inkling it had gone right, not left, was when a woman cloaked head to toe in MAGA gear boarded the bus on my ride home. I’ll leave aside the notable aspect that this was a bus in downtown Chicago after 11 at night: Sat alone all the way up front, I happened to notice over her shoulder from rows back that she was glued to her phone watching a map of projections that had the country awash in red. At such a remove and with my eyesight not exactly up to the task, it was impossible for me to tell which channel she was streaming, but to make the rest of my long ride home from Thalia Hall less mentally taxing — and taking in some very conspicuous context clues — I figured it was Newsmax.

The talk as I walked into Thalia was generally upbeat, but the anxiety of having to relive 2016 all over again lent an air of caution to the wind. I wanted nothing to do with that, having voted early, so I actively partook in the loudest show in town on the night. It was a mood of contrasts: On one hand, nobody wanted to be in this moment; everybody wanted the election to be over already. On the other hand, we were here to see Porcelain (as fine an Unwound imitation as I’ve ever heard), Agriculture (conservation-minded black metal from Los Angeles, which: sure, why not?) and Chat Pile (turns out we didn’t need another Jesus Lizard record this year but got one anyway), so nobody wanted to leave this moment; everybody wanted the show to go on forever.

The bill delivered on its promise amid the regal confines of a space modeled on the Prague concert hall circa 1892. Porcelain ripped through their numbers, Agriculture greatly surprised with a melodic turn at one point that may as well have been a solo singer-songwriter set, and Chat Pile did their usual abrasive post-hardcore + movie trivia thing. It was cathartic. At one point, the Chat Pile moshpit was big enough to have been the size of the venue I last saw them play over a year ago. I had a great Tuesday night.

I was also the only person I know who had a great Tuesday night. After we spilled onto the streets in Chat Pile’s wake and after the bus ride home and after I’d climbed into bed sometime just shy of midnight, I got a message from a friend saying, simply, “Your approach to tonight was the correct approach.” I plugged my phone into my bedside charger, turned the face down and went straight to sleep not quite aware of the reality that we were going to have to live this grift again. The week before, I’d been squeezed into the back of a Toyota RAV4 careening through the Scottish countryside from one distillery to another saying sure it was possible, I just couldn’t see it actually happening. Maybe I was just talking myself into it, maybe I was in denial; either way, we died on a bunch of pedantic hills to confirm we actually are this stupid and lazy. The right one won.

– – –

In the days after, a grimly resigned shrug was the default response for most everyone I saw. I’m a little tired writing this even now, honestly. The daze was less pronounced than it was in 2016, though, and we were more adept at finding comfort than we used to be, more maturely numb, less cloying and lachrymatory this time around. I spent the entirety of my Wednesday locked in an office conference room overhearing debates on cars. A few days after that, I was back in Charlotte visiting my family and oldest friends and watching my younger, not youngest, brother get married. The leaves outside were finally turning the way they were supposed to, the idle grayness of later autumn finally taking hold. I read angsty, critically acclaimed books about troubled young men and watched movies in languages I don’t understand. There was football, hockey and basketball on everywhere all the time. There was the end of the racing season.

Everything that bothers me about MotoGP carried over from 2023 to the 2024. I still think 40 races and 20 rounds is too many; I still think the tires are too good, the aero too much; and I still think the best riders are not on the best bikes. But the cream always rises, sometimes in spite of itself, and in the modern format, the results suggest it’s clear who the two best riders have been over the past two years. There they sat atop the standings after Qatar back in March, Francesco Bagnaia and noted New York Rangers fan Jorge Martin, renewing their rivalry from the year prior. It was like 2023 never ended and the winter break had never happened.

Befitting my suspicions and the very nature of such a grueling race schedule, both riders made plenty of mistakes; hell, at one point before we left Europe for the flyaway races, some journalists were still entertaining the thought of a title threat from Enea Bastianini or Marc Marquez. But all year, I’d felt it was going to be down to Bagnaia and Martin, and my gut told me that given history both immediate and distant — the last satellite rider to win a world championship was Eddie Lawson on a Kanemoto Honda in 1989, eight years before Bagnaia was even born — it was all Pecco’s to lose. You have to imagine Ducati management felt the same way for how much they paid him to stay on, not to mention how swiftly they resorted to signing Marc and letting Jorge defect to Aprilia.

Here’s the moment I knew they were wrong: Jorge had been dueling with Pecco ruthlessly through the first five laps at Malaysia. It was clear he was trying to pressure the frazzled Bagnaia into a mistake, which has always been a weak point in Pecco’s form — the guy needs his bike to be perfect, and if it isn’t, he struggles, gets distracted, makes mistakes, can’t fight back. For the past couple of years, that hasn’t been as much of a problem because he’s gotten it perfect enough to put away his rivals, who either were worse or riding worse bikes.

But Martin looked different this year, still doing his Saturday sprint thing but also (mostly) staying on the bike come the full Sunday races. And on this Sunday at Sepang, after unsuccessfully trying to unsettle Pecco, Jorge gave it a lap to breathe, reassessed the situation and rode out the remainder of the race to finish second. He didn’t really need to fight Bagnaia at the start, but the fact that he had the awareness to not keep pushing was when I realized he actually, finally did have the more mature head on his shoulders everyone in the paddock had been talking about all season. All he had to do was ride out the laps in Valencia, not doing anything that would get him into trouble, and it was all his.

On one side of November 8th, the steady normalcy of the past four years; on the other, worlds upended. We got an election, we got flooding in Valencia that meant MotoGP would actually finish out the year in a hastily assembled round at Barcelona where the surface needs repaving. We got disasters, sure, life- and livelihood-threatening ones the likes of which we already know and some of which we can only sort of understand the implications of for now, and blahblahblah … but we also got solace and triumph. Look here, look closer, hang on a minute: Chat Pile still slays live. Cars have been voted on, awards cast. Brian is married. Reading Rob Doyle still clears the mind. If all you’re doing is watching them, sports are a balm. And a satellite MotoGP rider beat the monolithic might of the factory and his greatest rival on his way out the door, taking the #1 plate and two fingers flipped up in reverse on his way out the door.

It isn’t nothing. And it doesn’t matter what happens to Jorge Martin at Aprilia, really; for the rest of his life, he can live with the satisfaction of proving he deserved that second factory seat at Ducati every bit as much as Marc Marquez does. It wasn’t just a twist of schadenfreude and it wasn’t a mere moral victory. The right one won.