Marc Márquez: ‘Always attack, never defend: this is my killer mentality’

“I continue fighting because, in the end, my passion for racing is more than what I was suffering,” Marc Márquez says as he explains his long, slow comeback from a terrible series of injuries which, a year ago this month, saw him face a fourth surgery on his upper right arm which included a 30-degree rotation of his humerus bone. Márquez has won six MotoGP world titles, but he has had many more horrific crashes.

His operation last year, at the renowned Mayo Clinic in the US, was a final chance for his surgeon to save him from early retirement. As the opening of a vivid behind-the-scenes five-part documentary series on him reveals on Red Bull TV, Márquez came close to quitting before surgery. “Is it worth it or not?” Márquez said, his mouth crumpled as he struggled to contain his tears. “This suffering isn’t necessary.”

Márquez looks up now as, at home in Madrid, he remembers that painful low when he spoke on camera while crying. “I have been lucky all my career and I’ve had many different reports on me winning, always winning,” he says. “So it’s difficult when I opened my house, and my personal life [to the film-makers]. When you have these difficult moments the natural reaction is close in and don’t show people what you are feeling. Some people see us like heroes but we are humans and have difficult moments. We have doubts. We started the documentary thinking I will come back to the top. But then the situation changed a lot in the middle of the documentary and I was very close to retirement.”

How does Márquez feel when he watches himself being so upset on screen? “I recognised myself,” he says, “and the people around me recognised again how I was feeling back then.”

It’s still rare to witness such dark moments in the