Motocross was one of the few obstacles for the Spanish sport. Until yesterday. Until the very young Jorge Prado García (Lugo, 22 years old) went bankrupt, a story full of emigration, sacrifice and precocity ended with a victory and a title. The Galician pilot, a real talent, left Spain with his entire family when he was only 11 years old. I was chasing a dream. And he fulfilled it yesterday. With a victory in the first round of the MXGP of Italy. The absence of his great rival for the title, the Frenchman Romain Febvre, paved the way for him. And when Prado crossed the finish line, he was surprised by his loved ones and his team. I didn’t realize I had achieved it. The flag festival and the overwhelming joy made him burst with joy too.
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The tears came and the group of hugs with their loved ones came. There was his father Jesús, who bought him his first motorcycle and followed him everywhere; his mother Cristina, who left her comfort zone in Galicia to enable her son to pursue a sports career; his sister Cecilia, who, at just eight years old, gave the final yes to the decision that changed the lives of all four. They left everything behind in the middle of the brick crisis and moved to Lommel, a town in northern Belgium where life revolves around motocross. There the only certainty they had was that little Jorge, European Champion and 65cc World Champion at the age of 10, would retain a contract with KTM until he was 16, in an unprecedented commitment to his development. The father moved from the bank to a factory and weekend jobs in the summer, and the mother left the law to work in an ice cream parlor.
“It’s been a long journey, it’s been a dream since I was a child,” said the great protagonist a few minutes after crossing the finish line. The first dedication was to his people. “I have a great family behind me,” she stammered, unable to hold back her tears. The sacrifices were worth it. Prado rode a GasGas, a Spanish brand that has been part of KTM since 2019, and confirmed that the change was good for everyone. In the championship’s more than 70-year history, no Spaniard had reached the top of MXGP. It was he who had already started breaking barriers when he became champion of MX2, the intermediate category of the competition, in 2018 and 2019, and then took the big leap and started competing with the best in the world.
When everything seemed to make sense, disaster struck. In his first year with the big teams he suffered broken femurs and collarbones, then Covid-19 hit him hard. “There are moments when you wonder if it makes sense. We were faced with many difficulties. Here we have no friends or family, nothing to hold on to,” reflected the father in an interview with EL PAÍS. Pneumonia forced his son to miss the final four tests of 2020, when he was third in the championship. The after-effects of her pneumonia have continued ever since, with more than one bout of fever occurring at crucial moments. The specter of physical problems reared its head again this year, in Holland and Turkey, in the two tests before his coronation in Italy, with another virus appearing out of nowhere.
How can Prado’s talent be explained in a few words? “It’s like Messi playing football or Márquez driving a MotoGP,” Ruben Tureluren, one of his mechanics, summed it up better than anyone in a Robinson report dedicated to the prodigy. His exquisite throttle feel, a gift inherited from his first trials adventures when he was still a whipper, allows him to be the strongest at the start. On the hundred slopes across Holland, to which he traveled every day from neighboring Lommel during his childhood, the Lugo native specialized in sandy terrain and perfected his technique in order to be competitive in all circumstances. Talent obviously did the rest. “There are children who have to explain things to them once, twice and three times. “Jorge sees it and already knows how to do it,” said Stefan Everts, ten-time world champion and most successful rider in the discipline.
Prado’s milestone underlines the long history of Spanish motocross, a discipline that has many practitioners despite its harshness as it requires total dedication for meager benefits. Toni Elías Sr., Jonathan Barragán, José Antonio Butrón and Javi García Vico, who became the first rider to reach the premier class podium in 1999, are some of those who paved the way. Carlos Campano was the first world champion in 2010 in the defunct MX3. The future of sport, which is in very good hands these days, is also being written by women. Girls like Daniela Guillén, a 17-year-old Catalan rider who was crowned WMX world runner-up this season.
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