Marc Márquez (Ducati) prepares to hit the track in Le Mans on Friday.
/ ALEX FARINELLI
A large part of the 1,500 inhabitants of the MotoGP World Championship paddock left the Le Mans circuit yesterday, perplexed by everything that Marc Márquez Alentá (Ducati), 33 years old and nine-time world motorcycle champion, had achieved up until last Saturday.
They all learned, as they packed up their belongings and headed to the airports of Nantes and Paris, that six doctors in one of the operating rooms at the Ruber Internacional Hospital in Madrid had not only stabilized the fracture of the fifth metatarsal of the Catalan rider’s right foot and removed the unstable screw in his right shoulder, but also discovered a floating bone fragment in his shoulder, a leftover from an operation he underwent in 2019.
And in that condition—hence the paddock’s admiration—the eldest Márquez managed to set the track record on Friday and then, immediately after, secured the second-fastest time in qualifying. “All I can say is what I’ve been saying for the past 14 years since I saw Marc debut in MotoGP: he is unique, a prodigious rider, capable of the most incredible feats. And yes, on Saturday he proved it again with those two laps, despite how he was feeling,” said Italian Davide Tardozzi, team manager of Lenovo Ducati.
Before leaving Le Mans, El Periódico wanted to understand the extent of the discomfort Márquez was finally able to uncover after the Jerez race and the medical check-up he underwent at the Ruber Internacional Hospital. There, they discovered that something was indeed wrong with his right shoulder, which had been damaged in Indonesia in 2025 after he won the title, when he was struck by Italian Marco Bezzecchi (Aprilia).
Marc Márquez is sidelined again, but at last he has been able to pinpoint the problem in his right shoulder that prevented him from performing consistently: a screw and a loose piece of bone were tormenting him. Two doctors and a physiotherapist, whose names we prefer to keep anonymous, explained the injury, the behavior of MM93’s right shoulder, and its terrible consequences on the riding of the champion Catalan whenever he tried to take risks as he usually does to win or get on the podium.
“We all have, at some point, suffered a sudden blow to the elbow, popularly known as the ‘funny bone,’ which doesn’t even have to be forceful,” explains one doctor. “You hit your elbow without realizing it, and it pinches the radial nerve. Immediately, you cause a spontaneous, involuntary movement that makes you instinctively pull your arm away, because it triggers a kind of cramp-like sensation.”
The same doctor offers a second example. “Many people suffer from sciatica, affecting the nerve in the back, perhaps because they’ve made a sudden movement or lifted something heavy at some point. If you’re lying in bed or sitting down, meaning you’re not moving, you usually don’t feel pain or notice anything.” But, she continues, “suddenly, without meaning to, without realizing it, you might make a certain movement—like grabbing a book from a shelf, lifting a glass from a table, pulling up a chair—and suddenly, the stabbing pain hits, like a lightning bolt, leaving you almost paralyzed.”
When Márquez completed those three stratospheric laps on Friday, one of them in record time, “all the planets aligned.” He indeed had a screw moving and pressing on his nerves, and we now know there was also a fragment of bone floating in that area. But during those three laps, each a minute and a half long, Marc suffered no discomfort at all—something that did happen to him in the sprint race on Saturday and during the other five crashes.
