Two brothers, one title dream – MotoGP’s high stakes sibling rivalry

Two brothers, one title dream – MotoGP’s high stakes sibling rivalry

World class sporting siblings may not be unheard of, but with the notable exception of Serena and Venus Williams in tennis, they are rarely in direct competition for the same big prize.

Rarer still is a story with as many twists and turns as that of Marc and Álex Márquez, two brothers from the tiny town of Cervera in Spain’s northeastern region of Catalonia. Currently lying first and second in the MotoGP standings, they are vying for a world title at speeds of over 220 mph (354 kph) as the Formula One of motorcycle racing approaches the halfway point of the season.

Coming back from injury

Undoubtedly among the greatest ever motorcycle racers, Marc Márquez is seeking his first premier class crown since 2019, after overcoming a series of horrendous injuries, a debilitating eye condition – diplopia – that left him seeing double, and parting company with Repsol Honda, the team for which he had won six premier class titles. Now riding a factory Ducati, MotoGP’s glamorous equivalent of F1’s Ferrari, the 32-year-old is seeking his seventh crown. No one, however, expected his younger brother, Álex, to be snapping at his heels.

‘When you’re enjoying it and you’re fast, it’s easy’

“This bike was easy from the first moment, it’s good for my riding style, so I didn’t need to change a lot,” Álex explains. “Me and Marc were coming from a 2023 bike that was really difficult to ride … last year’s bike was a nightmare on corner entry.

“When you’re on a bike and you’re thinking a lot, you’re slow; when you’re on a bike and you don’t need to change your riding style a lot and you can just build speed, you’re really fast, and this is what the 2024 bike has given to me, it’s better in all the areas, so it’s much easier for me. When you’re enjoying it and you’re fast, it’s easy.”

Álex knows no one expected his ascent this term and says he can feel the shifting dynamic of competing at the very top. “It’s more pressure, but in a super nice situation,” he tells CNN Sports. “Because, at the beginning of this season, nobody was waiting for us and suddenly we are there fighting with Marc. You know everybody was expecting the fight between Marc and (two-time MotoGP world champion) Pecco (Bagnaia), not me, but we are there.”

‘Do you need to win? Yes or yes’

Marc was also riding for the Gresini team last season, before the switch up to the pressure cooker of the factory team this year. Álex believes the additional expectation Marc has taken on might weigh the elder sibling down.

“We have nothing to lose, they have many things to lose because, in an official team, do you need to win? Yes or yes. When you’re in an independent team, you have last year’s bike, the goal always is to make some podiums, try to win some races, but fighting for the championship is difficult because we don’t have the official bike.”

While Álex can draw on his own experience of winning world titles, he says the tricky times he endured in his first few years in MotoGP, on struggling teams, have taught him more about racing and life.

“When I won a world championship, everything came quite – not easy – but in an automatic way. I won the second year, I saw my brother winning every year, you think that the normal thing is to win. No, the normal thing in the sport is to lose. You lose more than you win, it’s like this,” he explains.

“So those years that I passed that were really difficult for me and really frustrating, gave to me the lesson like: OK, when you have a good moment – a pole position, or a top five, or a podium – enjoy it like it’s the last one because the sport is like this. One year, you are up there; the next day, you are down here. So when you are up there enjoy, when you are down here, work. This is the lesson I learned during bad years.”

‘He was like another person, angry with everybody’

While Álex has had lows, none compare to those his brother has faced. A badly broken right arm during the 2020 season needed seemingly endless surgeries after Marc attempted to return to racing too soon and aggravated the injury. Along with numerous other broken bones, as well as the psychological and physiological trauma of his recurring episodes of diplopia, his entire career looked to be in jeopardy.

Álex had a front row seat to all of this, and the brothers continue to be extraordinarily close, sharing a motorhome at the track, a house in Madrid, and training together each day. The strain on Marc was clear in those dark times, Álex recalls to CNN Sports.

“For sure, if he wins this championship, he will deserve it. Everything that he passed, I don’t know how many surgeries… In that situation, it was difficult for the people who were close to him. He was like another person, another character, he was angry with everybody. We said one day, ‘Why are you angry with the people who are on your side?’”

When Marc decided to have further surgery on his arm, it was partly to save his career, but also simply to enable him to live with less pain, Álex says.

“He came back a little bit in that mood that he was Marc, making jokes, being nice with people and all that because he was sharing all that pain that he had in his body with the people that were really close, family and friends and all that. After everything he has (gone through), he deserves it, to be there.”

The fact that the two are vying for the title might reasonably have driven a wedge between the brothers. Instead, the opposite has happened, Álex says.

“When you’re in this situation you have two options: you can come away and separate a bit, or you can be closer. Naturally, we have that protective side from your brother, and we are more close, we talk more than ever, we share things more than ever, we are every day together, training with the bicycle, in the gym and all that, so it’s nice to have that.”