Greg Hancock though he was down for the count. Toward the end of the Polish Gorzow Speedway Grand Prix in August, a rider ahead of him slid out. When Hancock got caught in the crash, his left hand was pulled into the other motorcycle’s back wheel. The accident broke his index finger and badly dislocated the middle. Every one of the top five title chasers ended up with an injury during this last motorcycle speedway season.
He was down, but he wasn’t out. In a sport like speedway, which uses a sliding scale score and adds up scores across a handful of Grand Prix races across Europe and Australia, there’s often a chance for a comeback, something at which Hancock excels. When he returned for a race in Torun, Poland, he was still only two points down in his overall standing. Earning them in his third heat of the night, the 44-year-old American took home an unlikely third world champion title.
That’s going to change, according to Hancock, an elite American rider with a 35-year track record and a valuable sponsorship deal with Monster Energy. Given the energy drink giant’s history of supporting extreme sports like motocross and BMX racing, it shouldn’t be surprising that it is backing the speedway legend.
Promoting a still relatively obscure spot, it helps that Hancock is exactly the sort of down-to-earth spokesperson fans can relate to. He hopped on his first bike at age 7 after his recently divorced father ended up living in an Orange County apartment above a speedway sponsor.
At 18, Hancock moved to Europe with friend and fellow American racer Billy Hamill to be at the center of the speedway racing world. Throughout the five-month seasons, he regularly averaged over 100 races. At one point, he rode six nights a week in England before jetting to trials in Poland on his day off. To ease his commute, Hancock would leave chassis in several countries and board the plane cradling an engine in his arms. “I’ve spent my life trying to be a world champ,” he says humbly when we meet in a Southern California cafe where no one seems to notice the unassuming titleholder sitting among us.
Hancock was placing in world championships by 1993, landing between second and sixth place over the next four years. He’s the only rider to have competed in every Grand Prix round since its inception in 1995. In 1996, his pal Billy Hamill took home the world title, rousing an American fan base that hadn’t celebrated a speedway victory since Bruce Penhall’s 1981 and ’82 wins. Then, finally, in 1997, at age 27, Hancock won his first gold.
Despite substantial fan bases in Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Sweden, and England, speedway has never crossed into the U.S. mainstream – even with its charming card girls and all-American aesthetic of mud-caked riders spraying debris, circling a tiny track at manic speeds, propelled by a deafening rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack. Like any good parent, Hancock proselytizes to his sons about their family’s faith. His two youngest ride in the annual Gumball Rally in Costa Mesa, a youth race started by Hancock’s father back in ’83 and revived several years ago to encourage friendly competition between burgeoning sliders. Because the rally – and obligatory gumball machine trophy – symbolizes passing the torch to the next generation, Hancock says, ‘This is way more important than any national race.’
However, he’s not handing over the keys to the bikes just yet. Speedway is physically demanding, but it is first and foremost a sport of concentration. What Hancock lacks in youthfulness is offset by his dogged determination.