Courtesy of RacerX
January 15, 2019 2:05pm
by Jason Weigandt
There are plenty of personalities in this sport… but then there’s Blake Baggett. He is the uniquest of the unique. On the track, he’s always a mystery, at times busting out world-beating speed; at other times disappearing in the pack. When he struggles it’s strange, but when he wins, well, that becomes shocking, too. Further, when he does win, he usually comes from behind, the opposite of the way most others riders plan it. But with Blake, being different is being normal, and being normal is different.
Likewise, off the track Baggett is his own person. He’s not known for running in the motocross social circles, and he spends a lot of time off the radar. He furthered that this year by staying out of California completely during the off-season and operating out of his expansive El Chupacabra Ranch in Florida. Blake got famous in this sport the same way he wins races—you think about everyone else, you gossip about everyone else, and then—BAM—he interjects himself into the conversation.
Oh, and if you try to have a conversation with Blake and figure out what makes him tick, good luck. You can never tell what’s real and what’s a swerve, like the time he told me his wrist was totally jacked up and he wasn’t even going to ride at all until practice at Hangtown (he later told me he was joking the whole time, and was sitting on his bike as he held the phone, having just finished a practice moto). Other times, he’s brutally blunt, to the point where his confidence melds into trash talk. I would assume, to Blake, when he said, “The goal is to break Tomac” a few years ago, well, that was just honesty. That was the goal. But few riders speak like that, so those words sounded like fire.
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RacerX 2019 Glendale Supercross 450 Words