Pol Espargaro: "I want to extend my athletic career for 5 years"

Pol Espargaró had a rope for a moment. The Catalan rider is expected to continue for several years in the elite of the MotoGP World Championship, despite the pressure he feels every time he rides the bike.

“Here’s a lot of pressure, for two things. The first is you have to get good results, you have to be fast, you have to prove yourself, but then also, yung ibang sports wala yun, it’s that you risk your life”He said in a new episode of ‘The DAZN Box’.

Despite this pressure, Espargaró confessed to Ernest Riveras that he still felt strong enough to continue driving at the highest level: “For me as a kid, I felt like I was perfect, in the best moments of my sports career, but injuries are now more expensive to recover than when I was 18-20 years old. and it’s starting to become a very physically demanding sport, because of the injuries I’ve accumulated. We see athletes, for example in soccer, extending their athletic careers or Valentino (Rossi), who at 40 years old is still competing. Valentino is weird, I don’t want to compare myself to him, but I want to extend my sports career another 5 years at a high level.”.

Calm down before it renews

Espargaró, who has a wealth of experience in the world of motorcycling, makes sure he naturally faces his possible contract renewal: “I have reached the point of my athletic career where I can be proud of what I have achieved and I am happy and calm. That doesn’t mean I’m not nervous to renew, but I’m at another point, I’m trying to go like Cholo, game by game and see what’s to come”.

Although he has lived through it all in his athletic career, the Spanish rider emphasizes the difficulty of managing a bad result or not having a good career: “Unfortunately, our work gives us happiness, as well as in many other sectors, and when I don’t have a good race, I don’t seem to let myself enjoy my life, private life, social life, my friends. I’m very demanding of myself, and when I fail, many times I don’t enjoy all that life has to offer me.. Being competitive and that difficulty of not doing good goes inside, and that’s very hard to manage. ”

His team and the figure of Alberto Puig

Currently, the Catalan rider is part of the Repsol Honda team, which in his opinion is the best team in the world: “Not only because of their history, which is obviously the best MotoGP in history, but also because when you wear these colors.and if you don’t win, if you don’t get up, if you’re not at the top, you’ve let yourself down, I mean, how can I ride this bike and not lead the races? “.

One of the main characters in his career was Alberto Puig, for whom Espargaró was full of praise: “He is a man that every team should have. Alberto is a man who, if you are with him, is with you fully, and he will not let anyone or anything hurt you. And he, if he can put himself in the middle between you and a bullet, he will put himself and he will prevent that bullet from harming you so that he can handle that responsibility. “

The relationship with his brother and the rivalry with Márquez

At the MotoGP world championship, one of the riders he competed against was his brother Aleix Espargaró, who he says has a good relationship despite being a rival on the track: “I really get along with him. Ultimately, the sibling relationship is superb, but the rivalry on the track is overwhelming. And besides, we are now at a level where we compete against each other. Aleix and Aprilia are in a great state of form, thus creating a competitive and anxious tension between us that is as hard to manage as we love each other. Then we can go home and forget everything, but it won’t be easy. “

Pol Espargaró recounts in this exclusive DAZN content how his fight with Marc Márquez, whose most complicated moment was in 2012, in the fight for the Moto2 title was difficult: “I think more media problems have developed. , than happened to us quite cruelly. That time I was 19 or 20 years old, you were young, women were more mature than men, and when you fought so high, at those levels, that so many people saw you and you had so many ‘inputs ’, and more than that the press is creating that controversy, you’re so bad at things and you’re saying things that are out of place. Now with time I see it and I don’t like things that I saw about myself, that now make you grow and learn, that’s why you mature. But they were moments that I didn’t enjoy and I don’t like them for that, because I think it wasn’t fair for both of us. “

Outdoor hobbies

The Catalan also revealed his most personal part in this exclusive interview when he took off his pilot overalls, as he has hobbies like cross-stitch or playing the piano: “It reminds me of my childhood. This is a variable credit we had in school when I was 12-13 years old and I really wanted to cross stitch. I really liked it, because it relaxes me a lot. Now I changed it, for example, to play the piano, it’s a simile that I do now. I played more than I teach with videos, but I’m a little shy, I can’t play in front of someone. That’s another thing I’ve lost over the years, I don’t have enough confidence to play in front of someone, it’s hard for me ”.