Herlings and the Foot

When it comes to the Red Bull KTM Factory Racing team, there is no doubt, the health of their rider Jeffrey Herlings is of the utmost importance. After his crash at the Faenza circuit in Italy in 2020, there were grave fears his career was over. Fortunately, after visiting the local medical centre, it was found that he had just bruised his back and damaged nothing badly.

So, with the 2020 MXGP championship gone, Herlings decided to repair an ongoing injury to his ankle/foot and come into 2021 fully fit and ready to win his fifth World Motocross Championship, something only seven men had done in the sports history.

Dirk Gruebel and Ruben Tureluren are two men who know Herlings well. Gruebel the Red Bull KTM Factory Racing team manager and Tureluren is Herlings practice mechanic and his very good friend. Both were by Herlings’ side when he had that accident in Faenza, and both are confident he will come into 2021 as a completely different rider to the one we saw in 2019 and 2020, when he was carrying a painful foot injury.

With the foot now completely recovered from a 2020 operation, the excitement within the KTM camp is very much looking at a stand-out 2021 season and one Gruebel is looking forward to.

“His foot looks way better than before,” Gruebel said. “The pain is pretty much gone. He often looked tense on the bike (in 2019 and 2020), like he was riding in protection mode. When your mind is not free because a part of your body hurts, in his case the lower leg, it is difficult. That is also part of the reason he crashed in Faenza, because he didn’t have his balance. I hope he can find his balance back and he can ride pain free, because then you will see a different Jeffrey. In protection mode he is a very different rider than when he can ride free. I am very positive about 2021 with how his body is now”.

Tureluren, like Gruebel feels that the best thing to come out of the 2020 season was the fact Herlings got the time to fix his foot and that he can now grind away in the winter and come into 2021 better prepared than he has been since the 2018 season, a season he dominated.

“He has no trouble with the foot now,” Tureluren said. “We have been grinding away since Christmas time, cycling or out on the mountain bike, we just know that it’s part of the game and we missed two years of base because of injuries, and we know it is time to start and not go nuts and just work on that base, so we have a solid platform to work off.”

And, while we all watched Herlings riding under a less than comfortable situation, and still win some GPs at the start of 2020 and lead the championship by 60 points when he got injured in Italy, what we might get in 2021 is a similar performance to that 2018 season, when he completely dominated and claimed his fourth World title.

“That was our only goal after his crash in Faenza,” Tureluren said. “To get that foot better. We knew we needed another operation. We got improvements after the operation and again late in 2020 we did another treatment and the doctors approved that and then we got more improvement. A lot of physio work and we are also working closely with the athletic performance centre from Red Bull in Austria and we are doing everything we can, and the foot is better and that means Jeffrey has a better position on the bike. We need to make it to all the races and if that happens, it won’t go down to the wire. I tell him, be at all the races and there is no question and that might sound smug, but that is what I believe and what I tell him.”

And so, as we head into 2021, with a defending champion in Tim Gajser, and a 100% fit Jeffrey Herlings, both going for a fifth World motocross championship and a chance to join only a handful of legends with five-time champions, I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for the new season to begin and see if one of these guys can get the job done and move even closer to the top of the all-time motocross champions list. Already amongst the legends, but the journey to greatness is not over.