Fastest Man on the Planet

This year, like many others, the message boards are buzzing with “fastest man on the planet” talk. James Stewart fans love their man. Watching him attack the track like few others in the history of our sport have makes it obvious to all of us that he is tremendously talented and has a lot of heart. The “fastest man on the planet” quote is purported to be something Ricky Carmichael said of Stewart. Ricky certainly has a unique perspective on the matter. On the other side are Villopoto fans and supporters. Maybe he hasn’t always displayed the dominant single lap times as Stewart, but he’s in that same neighborhood, to be sure. The Villopoto crew correctly points out that Stewart, while showing excellent speed for 1 or a handful of laps, cannot seem to consistently string them together or maintain that pace. Who is right? What does it mean to say someone is “the fastest man on the planet”? What should be the true definition?

Let’s use for outdoor motocross for our example. This is a timed event with no definitive lap count expressed by the sanctioning bodies to signify the end of a race. Thirty minutes plus 2 laps could mean 10 laps in a mudder at some tracks or 15 or more laps under other conditions. A lap in this case has no real significance. It is simply an artificial and arbitrary distance covered within the duration of an entire moto or event. It is no less arbitrary than a section, say 1/3 of the track, a few corners strung together, a 75 yard straight, a 10 foot rut or a 10 inch morsel of ground. We wrongly assign the “lap” significance because we are humans. Humans love to compartmentalize. We love to watch the odometer turn over from 9,999 miles to 10,000. We celebrate or 20th, 30th, and 40th birthdays as though they are in some way more significant than 19, 29 and 39. With numbers we like to group then in 10’s because we have 10 fingers which led to our adoption of the base 10 decimal system for the human race. Other than that, there is no significance in life to multiples of 10. Just the same, to measure a racer’s speed in terms of a lap is no more meaningful than to measure their speed over a third of a lap, a few corners or a few inches. The only meaningful measurement in racing is from gate drop to checkered flag. How silly would it be to say that someone was the fastest rider in the world because they covered a 10 foot space between 2 yellow track markers faster than anyone? By that measure, perhaps you or I could be the fastest in the world. We could blitz some small piece of track, over-jump the small double into the corner, miss the berm and let 10 guys pass us. For several feet up the face of that jump we went faster than anyone, but it wasn’t sustainable and ended in a poor result. It turns out that flying up the face of that jump is not the fastest way to navigate the remainder of the track. Would anyone really say that you or I were faster than Stewart or Villopoto based on something we did for one small portion of the race but could not maintain?

Another analogy could be found in drag racing. Drivers and teams are typically interested in segmenting a run into 60 foot times, 1/8 mile times, 1,000 foot times and ¼ mile times. The fastest driver or car in the world is not decided by who has the best segment time. Nobody would ever say that a the car that covered the first 660 feet of a drag race was fastest if it ended up losing at the 1320 foot mark.

So, go ahead and break down a motocross race in to segments, corners, straights, and laps, whatever you wish. These segmentations make for fun debate and can provide useful information. One thing those debates don’t do is answer the ultimate question. That is left up to the checkered flag.