Posted by Jason Weigandt on Thursday, December 11, 2008
The top motocross riders all know it’s a good idea to surround themselves with positive people. The concept really took off as Jeremy McGrath built a posse, and then Ricky Carmichael built a camp so strong that it’s still building numbers now, a full year after RC hung up the leathers. (Camp Carmichael has imported so many jobs into Florida now that RC really should be getting tax breaks. They’ve got their own factory down there now).
Surrounding yourself with positive people is an easy concept to understand. Motocross is hard, but the more people you have around you making it fun and easy, the better it is. Racing is mental, and when you hear nothing but good news, your mental state is going to be good. Laugh at man friends all you want. Laugh with them, though, and you will know success (I guess).
Point here is that good news breeds more good news, and bad news breeds more bad. This recession that we’re dealing with now is proof positive, or in this case, proof negative. The more bad stuff you hear, the more worried you get, the less you buy and the more you save, and when you save and don’t spend, companies don’t make money, and hence the recession gets deeper and the news gets bleaker and everyone spends less, until eventually companies are losing money and have to let workers go, which means people really do have less money to spend, which means companies lose more money, which means….
I think you get it. Sounds great!
Unfortunately, the deal works in the opposite direction, too. Spend too much and you set standards too high. Eventually, unrealistic expectations are needed to support the business model, and that scenario is almost guaranteed to fail. You can keep making money on homes and loans if you keep pushing people to borrow more, but eventually that money isn’t going to get paid back, and everyone is in big trouble. At the moment, it sounds like the entire U.S. financial system needs to go on a purging process. First comes recovery, and then comes learning to live on diminished expectations. Folks won’t be so keen to spend beyond their means any longer.
Our sport mimics the scenario. First, the doom and gloom stories build on each other, for sure. Secondly the market was perhaps propped up by unrealistic expectations. Take a look at how money was being made and spent in this game for the last few years and you’ll see a model that had to change.
I’d love to impress people at cocktail parties and explain how motocross draws high-minded folks like college professors, business CEOs and acclaimed scientists and doctors. But in reality, the big money in our sport comes from the construction industry. It always seems like the biggest rigs in the amateur pits belong to the guy “whose dad is a super rich contractor.”
Well, new homes aren’t making money like they used to. And now, new motocross bikes aren’t, either.
But that doesn’t mean people aren’t going to the races. At the GNCC banquet two weekends ago, I heard a lot of people talking about freshening up last year’s bike and last year’s gear and running it again for 2009. A bunch of my friends who ride and race around here say the same. Maybe they’ll race a few more local events to cut back on the big travel bills. Maybe they’ll make do without the latest cool stuff. But they’ll still do what they love. Could this be the natural purging process for our sport? Does anyone really wring a new 450 dirt bike out so hard that it’s toast after one season? The new fuel-injected machines are sweet, but when times are tough, it may be easier to keep on carrying a jet kit and run the ’08 again. And maybe, in this credit market, it still isn’t reasonable for every “my son is going to be the next Ryan Villopoto” family to take out a second mortgage on a giant motorhome.
You don’t really need a motorhome to race, and you don’t really need a 2009 bike, either.
By spending less to race, though, less money is going to pump through the veins of the industry. And that means you’ll hear more bad news, and maybe that will breed more trouble. Maybe each year’s hot free-agent factory rider just can’t expect his salary to double its massive self again every three years anymore. Perhaps all of the rider salaries need to run through a purging process. And this is it.
Maybe this whole process just brings us back to center. That news wouldn’t be all bad, really.
Posted by Jason Weigandt on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 8:59 am
