When I saw Ken Roczen win the 450MX AMA Pro National Motocross Championship last week I couldn’t help but reflect on the astonishing trajectory of an amazing career and talent to-date; a world, supercross and now American number one at the age of twenty. I thought back to his Grand Prix debut in 2009 at a damp Agueda in Portugal. The recently turned fifteen year old was just one of another bright lights coming through from prominent results on the European and youth scene. I was writing some promo material for the Suzuki MX2 squad then and I remember Team Manager Thomas Ramsbacher stressing that Roczen should be included in the communication and publicity documents. Before Portugal I can recall thinking the equal ‘billing’ Roczen was given alongside then team-mates Xavier Boog and Yohei Kojima before he had even run a lap at international level was a case of overhype but his debut was quite startling. Fourth in the second moto and seventh overall was quite sensational for an adolescent. And one who had crashed on Saturday. “This is unbelievable. I never thought I would be able to get a result like this the first time,” he said to me and I wrote on Sunday.
And boy, did Roczen develop fast. I recall seeing his disbelieving face when he won his home Grand Prix only four rounds later. The attention and spotlight seemed too much for someone who was barely a teenager but the pressure and clamour at Teutschenthal would become much more intense over the next four years (where he raced every season up to the crowning 2013 Motocross of Nations success). It got to the point where Roczen could be a difficult person to find once Grand Prix rolled onto German turf. Across the next two seasons it was bewildering to see the evolution of an athlete from a skinny whippet who flicked a 250 without a care to a rider with the strength to challenge Jeffrey Herlings in the sand.
Back in 2009 RacerX and MX Sports notable Davey Coombs soon sent me an email asking what all the fuss was about. After all this was a kid who’d been comprehensively smoked by Justin Barcia at Lorettas (Roczen was on the comeback trail after a leg injury – if I remember rightly – and was always disappointed that he couldn’t give a better account of himself during that initial taste of racing in America). I simply wrote back that we were witnessing the whirlwind growth of something that seemed too good to be true.
I remember another anecdote from the Suzuki days when former Technical Co-Ordinator Jens Johansson summed up the rapid rate of Roczen’s advancement. The Swede described how the rider would make his first laps in the devilish sand of Lommel for training and testing and would still try to whip the Suzuki like he was at his home track in Mattstedt in the centre of Germany. Lommel is an extreme example of some of the rougher and sandier tracks found in Grand Prix; hence why so many use it as a base of reference and a large group of GP regulars reside close by. After several weeks Johansson said the team had helped turn Roczen into a racer who made the jumps straight–up, like ‘an old fashioned Dutch rider’. Dumbing down his style on a motorcycle at that point in 09-10 almost seemed like a crime; like vandalising a precious painting. Roczen would go on to beat Herlings at Lommel in a moto in 2011: the only person to do that in sandy terrain in a GP since 2010.
When Roczen joined KTM for 2011 – kings of the paddock and MX2 since 2008 – there was an air of inevitability. His underdog status was removed after he departed the occasionally spluttering Suzuki through a management/sponsor issue (also some electrical problems ruined a potential win in Catalunya in 2010 among others) and although Herlings was on the scene, ‘94’ was nearing his MX2 GP peak at the age of eighteen.
I recollect how his star power accelerated and getting interview time (any time at all) became trickier. His English was exceptional from the first days in GPs and his poster-boy looks meant that he was always a standout for brands like Red Bull and Fox. America called and the allure became even stronger after his immense performance at the 2010 Nations in Denver; the first of his four straight MX2 victories in the ‘World Cup’ of motocross, the great leveller.
I was shocked by the demands riders at Roczen’s level faced in the USA, particularly around supercross. As a journalist it was hard not to become just another figure that Ken liked to try and dodge while juggling a schedule that left precious little time between flights, travel and racing in cities around the U.S. on a weekly basis. We enjoyed a lunch with the champion during his second full season living in California and after a photoshoot for KTM in 2013 and we spoke candidly about quite a few topics in racing. Several days later it was honestly great to catch his eye and be greeted by a massive smile on a cold evening in Oakland after he’d taken his first 250SX victory of the title-winning campaign. I last interviewed him at Anaheim 3 this year. Ken likes to talk in soundbites rather than long, thoughtful answers – I’ve always called him a product of the ‘video generation’ – so never the easiest of interviewees but he has probably wracked up more Q+As since his voice broke than I’ve carried out in fourteen years of motorsport reporting. From 2009 to 2011 I still liked his fresh and alternative quotes in Grand Prix press conferences. Other riders would routinely gripe about a one-line track but Roczen spun it round, and with a wink would say “it’s always possible to pass, you just need to have an eye for it.”
Roczen is almost the perfect racing animal. He has fitness, finesse, technical skill, the power to analyse, hardly ever crashes, is soft on machinery and adapts so quickly to whatever new challenge awaits. His capacity for supercross progressed from fondness and capability to AMA championship prolificacy on both 250 and 450cc motorcycles: there is surely not a better indicator for his potential. When he was criticised for being unable to last motos in the intolerable American heat during the Nationals summer calendar then he sought a position as one of trainer Aldon Baker’s finely tuned specimens and bridged another gap.
My only concern now for Ken is ‘where next?’ There is still that premier class Supercross championship to own (and the MXGP crown…with his European roots it is hard to believe that he won’t return and try Grand Prix again one day) but with James Stewart in problems and Ryan Villopoto out of the picture then the job might become less complicated in 2015 – even though threats lie everywhere and the futility of writing-off veterans like Chad Reed was proved with the Australian’s early glory in January/February. Like Marc Marquez, Roczen has already achieved so-much-so-soon and has crested the heights of motocross. His CV does not have the history making full house of titles and this might be his goal (just another three to go from a possible six) but there are many years ahead and for the sake of just being able to watch him ride and race I hope his motivation and unrivalled propensity for improvement doesn’t fade just yet.
Photo by Simon Cudby
