Motor sports are taking over the athletic world

Sometimes, during a moment of quietude and introspection, over a
glass of fine vermouth, I muse back on my storied athletic career.
And where nostalgia leads, regret surely follows.

See, I have to live with the knowledge of potential unfulfilled.
I could have been one of the great ones, a legend, if not for my
career-ending injury: genetics. I was just never the same after
conception.

Since the dawn of professional sports, what I call the
“Mark Madsen” athlete has been held back by his innate
lack of rhythm and hops. Thanks to the wonders of technology,
however, we have an answer to athletic ability: motor sports. No
longer at the whim of actually having to do stuff, a 42-inch
vertical leap is obsolete when an engine can do all the nasty work
for you.

Of course, with the advantage of hindsight, I see motor sports
are actually an inevitable step in man’s larger automation
process beginning with the commoditization of labor under a
capitalist system on through the mechanization of the traditional
craftsman in the Industrial Revolution and finally the
transformation of the worker as a data cruncher in front of a
screen post-Information Age.

If man was to be a machine, eventually the machines had to enter
into our leisure as well.

Psychologically, I couldn’t accept motor sports. As a
surfing elitist, I couldn’t accept any sport where a machine
tows the winner. The purity of surfing involves accepting Mother
Nature’s chi, harnessing the chi, and then dancing a
dangerous tango of adrenaline with the chi: The ol’
complementary yin and yang, dude.

In motor sports, however, Nature becomes an adversary to
overcome rather than a partner in a greater synergy.

To give motor sports their fair shot, I sat down with
fourth-year computer science student and motocross enthusiast
Daniel “Dan” Borkan.

Dan’s affair with motor sports began because his older
brother Rick and his friends were into it, so they took him to the
lake to go wakeboarding.

“The girls there just thought I was the cute little
brother,” Dan said. “But I wanted to show them I was
more, so I got really sick at it.”

Originally, I simply sought the motivation of the aficionado,
but over the classic Socratic Q&A method, Dan and I arrived at
a greater answer than I expected.

Hector Leano: Why are motor sports so hot right now?

Dan: It’s like we’re entering a new era, where
machines take us places we’ve never been before, and it makes
for some pretty gnarly sports.

HL: How intense does it get?

Dan: Motocross is like this raging bull machine between your
legs. It’s like my motocross wants to devour the opponent,
but sometimes I feel it wants to devour me too.

HL: What’s your prediction for the future?

Dan: I had this sick dream about a future where we build bikes
into ourselves. I had transformer legs that turned into treads, and
I was racing these skeleton dudes out in the desert.

After my sit-down with Dan, I went over to Sky Motives Scooters
in Fullerton to experience the stoke first hand.

After trying out the scooters and mini-bikes, I dove headfirst
into the figurative deep end of the metaphorical pool: the literal
Vespa.

Tearing down Chapman Avenue at a cool 27 mph, I finally
understood: Stoke is all natural. Dan and I, in our respective
elements, were living life, something few suckling on the secure
teat of Middle America could hope to understand. Where others only
flirted, Dan’s ilk consummated the relationship.

Pulling into the parking lot, I realized that Dan’s
“raging bull machine” had nearly devoured me, too.

I might not be trading in my surfboard anytime soon, but after
my ride, I think I can face our mutual machine future with stoic
acceptance. Even as the line between man and cyborg continues to
get thinner, the essence of man remains the same.

I wholeheartedly welcome our future robot overlords.

Ride or die at [email protected].