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I’ve seen some pretty odd things over the past few years in MotoGP. But one of the strangest is how the 2012 season treated Ben Spies.

After a fantastic rookie season in 2010 with Tech 3 (where he was the final subject of the Rookie Rule), and becoming the only rider to beat Rossi, Lorenzo, Pedrosa and Stoner in a dry race in 2011 (at Assen), things fell apart in such a weird way in 2012 that I still lose sleep over the mystery.

The public version of the saga brings several clichés to mind, the most prominent probably being: It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. For Ben is truly a nice guy, quiet and unassuming, modest in spite of being confident in that way world champion racers must be. His talent didn’t deserve that 2012 season, and neither did his personality.

Was it just a long string of bad luck? If you took all the mistakes and failures that happened and looked at them on a list, you’d probably assume they’d been spread out over many seasons. But they happened in a single season, to a world champion rider, not to a low budget satellite team but to a top factory team.

Reaching at least a bit for a metaphor, I think of Ben’s 2012 as the Bermuda Triangle of MotoGP. I hope no one ever falls into those doomed waters again.

Photograph: ©2012 by Scott Jones / PHOTO.GP – All Rights Reserved

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