You belong to the 99.9% of parents of athletes who will not achieve the dream of becoming an elite athlete
‘Your son can be a crack’, Jaime Alguersuari
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“The epic, the epic!” – insists Jaime Alguersuari (72).
He likes that word, in general he really likes words (in his day he had been at the helm of a conglomerate of sports magazines, with Solo Moto as the axis), and that is why he repeats some of them:
“Epic,” he says.
And it also says:
-Swain.
And mixing both, he describes his new myth, the epic young man Pedro Acosta.
Pedro Acosta is from Murcia, from Mazarrón, and he is 18 years old and right now he has a broken leg and a world motorcycling title, the Moto 3 title that he had won in 2021, when he was 17 years old.
Pedro Acosta also has a 183-page portrait: Pedro Acosta, the 17-year-old world champion (RBA), the book Jaime Alguersuari has dedicated to him.
“Well, I’ve never never seen anyone like Pedro Acosta,” he tells me.
I have sat down to talk with Jaime Alguersuari at his house. The windows extend over Barcelona. I feel like a hawk when I contemplate the city from above. I think about it while Alguersuari poses for César Rangel on the back of his 1968 Ossa monocoque, displayed in the hall.
(Acosta had lifted that same Ossa for the cover of the book)
It is early in the morning and the host offers me a potato omelette, toasted bread and a coffee. At that same table, he tells me, Crivillé, Checa, Sete Gibernau, Sito Pons or Aspar have sat, and after dinner all of them have dedicated themselves to composing verses and rhyming.
He shows me with a video.
Right, pilots rhyme!
–We are the last of the Philippines! –Vocea Alguersuari, and he defends the role of the paper press, and that of the paper book–. We are heroes of the 20th century!
And that is why he likes to write books: he writes them by dictating to a writer, he writes while he speaks, and that is how the book sounds, as if the author were speaking to us.
In one of them he told us about his son: Your son can be a crack (Planeta), in the bookstores in 2012, he reviewed the career of Jaume Alguersuari, former F-1 driver, today converted into Squire, dj and musical creator .
So far: we have not come to talk about the son, but about the myth Pedro Acosta, the young man from Mazarrón.
(…)
What does Acosta have that others don’t?
Jaime Alguersuari leans back, crosses his palms behind his neck, catches his breath.
-What’s wrong with it…? –She answers asking her, in the Galician way–: I discovered him last year. Eight years had passed since Márquez won his first MotoGP World Championship at the first attempt. He was twenty years old.
-Y…?
–Then, the majority of Spanish journalists were dedicated Rossistas. Valentino Rossi charmed them. Rossi let himself be touched, he let himself be loved. Márquez arrived, put his hand on Rossi’s chest and threw him against the wall, and the journalists did not like it, and that was from his house!
-Y…?
-The same is happening with Pedro Acosta. Look, in his first race in Moto 3, at night in Qatar, he finished second. It’s true: he was second. But he was 16 years old and had just arrived. So, he says to me: ‘what’s coming now?’ And I saw that he was coming a world champion. At the second race, also in Qatar, he went and won. And I predicted that he was going to be world champion that same year. And he messed up.
-Why?
-They told me that no one had done that in their debut. And I insisted. And yes, at the end of the course he was the Moto 3 world champion.
-And so?
-Then I went to meet Mazarrón, him and his family, fishermen in a 23-meter boat. The grandfather was called Pedro and his father, too. And traveling through that desert land I felt in an imaginary territory, like in a Tarantino movie, and while I was talking with them, in my mind I was already writing the book. Do you know what the boy told me then?
–¿…?
-He told me: ‘Jaime, I don’t want to stay in Moto 3. Here, the bike doesn’t run, it doesn’t accelerate, and you go from one ass to another to overtake. I want to be the best when others shit on braking, when they see San Pedro and I don’t.
(This year, Acosta is already in Moto 2)
