In the red corner is the world’s greatest motorcyclist and self-confessed lover of morphine. In the blue corner is the MotoGP world champion and a man who spent part of his title year in a period drama on Spanish television. These two hospitality suites are separated by ten yards, but the combatants are poles apart. It is festering into one of sport’s great rivalries.
Valentino Rossi is wearing Ducati crimson as he explains what he thinks of Jorge Lorenzo, who dons Yamaha blue but sees red. Last year they were team-mates as Rossi’s mask of invincibility slipped and he suffered the worst crash of his career in Italy.
For a while reports suggested that he would lose his right leg. Some wrote him off. Lorenzo took advantage to win his first title, but not before he had made a gesture of sympathy to the Italian legend by wearing a Rossi T-shirt on the podium.
The pair had not liked each other before that, but it was the tipping point in a feud that recalls the one that resulted in Rossi and Max Biaggi having a punch-up behind the podium in Barcelona in 2001.
Rossi did not like the token gesture. “For sure he was not sincere,” Rossi said before tomorrow’s Spanish Grand Prix in Jerez. “He says he had a poster of me on his bedroom wall. It is not true. He is clever. He thinks about everything he does and says. With Biaggi it was simpler, it was more, ‘He’s a f***ing dickhead, he’s a son of a bitch.’ ”
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Lorenzo knows a lot about mind games. On his way up the Spaniard studied psychomorphology, a technique that refers to the way a person transmits their character through facial expressions and posture. His tutor explained that Rossi was happy, congenial, creative and fun. Lorenzo came across as very serious and could barely muster a smile. The irony, then, is that Lorenzo trained to be more like a man he has grown to dislike.
In the blue Yamaha suite, he explained: “Everyone gets stronger as they get older. The mind rules your world. I have meditated for two years and try to get past the bad thoughts. If you think too negatively, you get angrier and angrier. I don’t care what his opinion of me is. If he got injured, it was not because he was slow, but because he was pushing.”
Lorenzo has suggested as much before, that he had got to Rossi and this was partly responsible for the crash that derailed last season. He speaks about the T-shirt incident at length in a forthcoming book, Jorge Lorenzo: Portrait of a Champion: “I just did it as a simple gesture of support to an injured colleague and team-mate but he saw it as me poking fun at him or trying to win over his fans. I was disappointed but at least I know not to do it again.” He would for other riders, he said, but not Rossi.
Back in the red suite, Rossi was in buoyant mood yesterday. His move to Ducati has been hard, with the bike struggling in tandem with the rider.
His leg is fine — Rossi said he had discovered a rapport with morphine in the aftermath — but he is seriously hampered by a shoulder injury that will take another two months to heal.
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Despite his palpable disdain for the man across the paddock, Rossi said that his real problem was with his former employers. He wanted to stay at Yamaha but refused to do so if Lorenzo remained in the team.
“As a rider he is very strong, but as a person I don’t like him,” he said, a broad grin accompanying the assessment. “Why? He came into Yamaha and from the first moment he tried to f*** me. Eventually he did. But the bad behaviour was not from Lorenzo, it was from Yamaha.
“After what I did for them, and saying I wanted to finish my career there, that I could fight for the championship, they didn’t have to take Lorenzo in my team. It was a betrayal.”
Both men are more complex than this spat may have you believe. Rossi is rollicking company but a deep thinker. Lorenzo has taken acting lessons and was in a TV drama last year. He also had a race against Spain’s leading swimmer, who was clad in leathers and helmet, aping the way Lorenzo celebrated his win in Jerez last year with an impromptu dip in a trackside pool.
He has written down 25 mantras. One of them is: “A number one is the owner of his silence and a slave to his word.” The problem for both riders this weekend may not be each other but the present No 1, Casey Stoner, who left Ducati for Repsol Honda and won the opening race in Qatar a fortnight ago.
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With Dani Pedrosa, his team-mate, suffering from an intermittent compression of an artery, leading to sudden numbness in his left arm, Stoner is a clear favourite for the title.
“It will be difficult to win the championship,” Rossi said. “But I’ve won nine. It will be difficult to arrive in the top three. My problem is the injuries.”
He held his left shoulder. “Look at me naked and this part is much bigger than the right. My girlfriend’s arms were bigger. I am not 100 per cent and you have to be to fight with these guys. The Hondas are embarrassing everybody.” Feud for thought for both.
‘‘ He came into Yamaha and from the first moment he tried to f*** me ’’ - Rossi, 32, from Italy, is a seven-time MotoGP world champion. He left for Ducati because Yamaha refused to ditch Lorenzo.
‘‘ I don’t have any kind of feeling of friendship towards him ’’ - Lorenzo, 23, from Mallorca, is the reigning champion and rides for Fiat Yamaha. Team-mates last year, there was a wall down the Yamaha garage because of their enmity.