To describe and understand who a pilot like Johnny Rea is, the best thing is perhaps to invest 19 euros of your hard-earned cash and buy his Italian autobiography, entitled "In Testa." Flipping through the pages of the book, kindly lent to me by my friend Stefano Calzavara on the Doha-Melbourne flight, you feel like Johnny is sitting in the seat next to the plane, as if he himself is speaking and telling his story.
Tools and studs: a race toward passion
The fact remains that Johnny Rea's is for all intents and purposes a story of tenacity, heart, resilience, and courage. A mix of ingredients that have accompanied him throughout his long career, starting when as a teenager he found himself in the mud of Matterley Basin struggling with his dirt bike, after hours and hours of driving together with his father to chase his great passion.
A passion Johnny never wanted to give up, despite the bullying he suffered and that knife held to his chin by a former classmate in his high school days who wanted to show him who he was. Perhaps, even tougher, was when doctors told him in 2004 that his career would end there, after his brakes failed him at Knockhill. At just 17 years old, the youngster found himself with a price to pay too steep for anyone: his femur was fractured enough to cost him a bone graft and four surgeries.
The epic period in Kawasaki: against all and sundry
Johnny's real strength has always been that he has never known the word surrender. He understood this by braving the pain and at the same time on the track, riding that Honda that looked like some sort of bolted horse. Repaying him for everything, however, was the fairy tale with Kawasaki, that is, the green machine with which he wrote history, becoming in effect the legend of Superbike.
Johnny took no prisoners with all those who tried to question his reign, even getting the better of Dorna, which in those years decided to thwart him by cutting engine revs.
The World Championship won in 2019 remains to this day a feat written in history and of human and sporting value. Bautista and the Ducati V4 won straight off 11 races in a row. After 3 rounds, the World Championship seemed to be nipped in the bud, and for any rider it would have been too much of a blow to get back up. Not for Johnny, who used his head and wrist to overturn a World Championship that for everyone was already written at the start.
A feat that I have often wanted to remind him of with esteem and great admiration: "More than sporting, for me Johnny the World Championship you won in 2019 is a message of life, which is to try to never give up in difficulties, to keep fighting, even when everything looks black in front of your eyes."
The passing of the baton toward the last race
On the human side Johnny Rea has always retained a kind of magical aura within the paddock. A rider who chose to simply be himself, who never liked to act the part or ape others' behavior, having to come across as likeable. Ready for a joke and to respond in kind with his unmistakable style, like the time at Magny-Cours in 2019, to hide his superiority on race pace, he replied, "You say I have the best pace? Maybe I'd better change the computer, Riccardo." And at the same time, a true gentleman, able to put his interlocutor at ease, avoiding at all costs the use of catch phrases of his native language, in favor of understanding and clarity.
Meanwhile, on the battlefield, a new character was emerging, and in his heart Johnny Rea perhaps understood that soon the baton would have to pass into someone else's hands. The name was that of Toprak Razgatlioglu, the taciturn boy who grew up under his advice in Kawasaki and effectively ended his epic period.
The rest is modern-day history with the move to Yamaha and a marriage that never took off, peppered with difficulties and injuries. Johnny Rea's absence was beginning to be felt and in recent times it seemed to have become a kind of bitter normality, to which it was, however, difficult to get used.
Johnny needed a new challenge, something to rekindle the fuse. Precisely for this reason, on the Thursday of Most I caught up with him in the paddock and privately told him looking him in the eyes, "You are Johnny Rea, the legend of Superbike, you can't end up like this, this is not the ending you deserve! Call Zambenedetti or Denis (Sacchetti) and ask him for a fucking Ducati. Everyone would like to see you at least once on the Panigale." Johnny looked at me and smiled, thanking me for the words and taking his leave with a pat on the back.
Of course, he did everything he could to look for a Rossa, sounding out the paths of Aruba, Go Eleven until the last talks with Barni. He tried every which way, but that call he so longed for never came.
With his eyes on his body and mind, as he himself stated in the video released earlier this week, the choice to retire was inevitable. A conscious choice, perhaps setting him free, without being fooled by any nostalgia for "what could have been."
Nothing else could have been, otherwise it would have been.