ROOTS RAW
“Why are PROS racing AM races?” a tweet notification popped up on my screen. A fair question, of
course. One that I’m sure many MX riders, particularly women riders, are asking. As many of you know
by now, women’s pro motocross, affectionately
dubbed “WMX,” has been relegated to amateur
events for 2014 after losing its home alongside
men’s Pro MX.
If you want to blame the television networks, or the
sponsors, you’re getting warmer. The simple fact is
that pro racing hardly exists without the corporate
bodies who fund it, but let’s not pretend that these
are acts of charity. We’re all in business to promote
ourselves—our brands, our products—and thusly, we
invest in the events and athletes that are marketable.
Female MX athletes are some of the most dedicated, die-hard athletes in the biz. Factory team managers are completely at a loss. Imagine watching
these girls with so much talent, so much drive, and
nowhere to go. In fact, most people in the industry
are pretty bent up about the state of WMX.
There’s room for both Dianna
Dahlgren
and
Jessica
Patterson in this industry. All
I’m saying is, what if we
celebrated talent just as
much as we celebrated
beauty in our young women?
But the cold, hard truth is that WMX is simply not
marketable—at least not yet. And if I’m going to
charge anyone with that crime, I charge you. Yes,
YOU: Motocross fans. There’s little money behind
women’s racing because the fans aren’t behind it.
The responses that followed from fellow angry
tweeters were absurd, at best. No, it’s not because
“some man” decided. And no, “that man” most
certainly isn’t D. Coombs. For some reason people
at large have crowned Coombs as the King of Pro
Motocross, as the man behind all the decisions. I
don’t know much, but I certainly know this to be
a vast misconception. In the Pro MX world, there
are much bigger players than Coombs. (And to his
credit, it was Coombs who dreamed up bringing
WMX to the Pro series in the first place, so give the
guy a break.)
PC theROOTSMX
66 Jason Witt • ISSUE 2 2014
“But they’re not as fast as the guys,” you say, and I
admit, this is largely true. And while there’s simple
anatomy to blame (men are anatomically stronger
than women, generally speaking), and while female
athletes on the whole are at an evolutionary disadvantage (men have been competing in athletic
events for thousands of years; meanwhile, in the
powder room, the women are knitting), I think it goes
deeper still. After all, we’ve seen the likes of up-andcoming female athletes like Courtney Duncan who
has the speed to beat plenty of her male competitors in the amateur scene. Still, at Loretta’s I didn’t
see a whole lot of people—sponsors or fans—who
seemed all that interested in pursuing her.
If you really get down to it, I think you’ve got to dig
into the very culture of motorsports, one in which
women play a very clear role, and it’s a silent, por-