Marco Bezzecchi
Marc Marquez had not long completed the comeback of all sporting comebacks before he found himself facing another in 2025.
MotoGP’s newly crowned champion has been recovering all winter, in a bid to be ready to kick his title defence off at the Thailand Grand Prix, as close to 100% fitness as possible.
He’s yet to announce a new deal with Ducati, but it feels imminent, given the level of success that the two have enjoyed together.
The wisest move Marquez can make is stick with what has been and is working. There’s no point in joining another team when his current project is going well.
Marc Marquez’s new Ducati contract looks a done deal 👀 but who should be his teammate in 2027?
Ducati were told to keep Marquez switched on when he joined them, and he has managed to keep himself very occupied over the last 12 months.
Marquez was ‘unbeatable’ at Honda right up until his horrific crash at the 2020 Spanish Grand Prix. It set him back years and will have lasting effects for a long time.
READ MORE: Andrea Dovizioso explains how he stumbled upon the ‘only way’ to beat Marc Marquez
Marc Marquez says Alex Marquez competing saved him from a MotoGP ‘black hole’
Marquez made a ‘very bad’ decision to return from his accident at Jerez in 2020 early. He was nowhere near ready to compete, less than seven days after his crash, but he tried.
The Spaniard would sit out of the rest of the season – a wise move, and would only manage a comeback in 2021, but the damage had already been done.
It would take him years to recover physically, and now he has detailed in Mat Oxley’s Marc The Magnificent biography how his brother, Alex, kept him going throughout the process.
“I was in a black hole,” he said. “I was going into that big black hole, but I was never completely inside, because my brother helped me a lot, he was there.
“If I had disconnected from MotoGP during that time, then I would’ve been in a black hole, but my brother was racing and I kept following MotoGP, so I still had the adrenaline. It’s not good if you’re injured and you don’t follow your sport.
“A good example is chocolate. I love chocolate. If I eat chocolate every day, I like to eat chocolate. But if I don’t eat chocolate for one month, then I forget the taste of chocolate, and I won’t want to eat chocolate, so my brother helped in many ways.”
READ MORE: Marc Marquez has now ‘changed’ his view on ‘dangerous’ clash with Valentino Rossi in 2018
How Alex Marquez could end up being Marc’s closest rival in 2026
Looking at how they finished in 2025, Marc and Alex were the lead riders in the MotoGP title fight. For the first time in history, two brothers had conquered the premier class entirely.
Armed with a factory bike for 2026, Alex could be a far more potent threat to his brother, still not quite 100% from his collarbone break, sustained at last year’s Indonesian Grand Prix.
If Aprilia’s winter development doesn’t go as well as anticipated, leaving them behind the front-runners, this season could end up being a carbon copy of last year.
It all depends on what version of Marc turns up, and how many risks he is prepared to take to reach the top of the ladder again.
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