Marc Marquez mystery: the whole truth about the champion's shoulder

For months, Marc Marquez had been feeling discomfort in his right shoulder while riding his MotoGP bike—discomfort that disappeared when he trained in motocross or at the gym. It seemed like an unsolved mystery, until after the Jerez GP, when he went back to the doctors who finally found the solution. The first images of his recovery have appeared on social media, but no one yet knows when and how the Ducati champion will return to the track.

The injuries sustained after the crash in Mandalika had healed. However, they had aggravated a previous lesion, and one of the screws in his shoulder had shifted, compressing the radial nerve. "I had a very strange feeling, because at home I was fine, I came here and things went badly. So I thought I had a mental block. But they saw that in the MotoGP riding position, that screw, which sits in a different position, was touching my radial nerve and, well, that’s what makes me fail. It makes me inconsistent, it makes me have unexpected crashes."

The Spanish newspaper 'El Periódico' contacted two doctors and a physiotherapist to get a more in-depth explanation of the problems reported by Marc Marquez. One of the doctors explained that this discomfort is not constant, but flares up suddenly during certain movements. This would explain the fluctuating performances, and these cramps would have caused both the crash in the MotoGP Sprint at Le Mans and the other five he has suffered so far.

There was no warning for these “pinches”; they were isolated cases that Marc thought were fleeting. This would also explain why the doctors hadn’t identified the problem earlier. Fortunately, the answers arrived, and the world champion could breathe a sigh of relief after confirming that his issue is real and not just a product of his imagination.

In truth, the problem had been brewing since the humerus fracture at Jerez in 2020. "At the end of 2019," explained the nine-time world champion, "I underwent shoulder surgery for instability, a procedure called Latarjet. When I fractured my humerus, after such a force, the surgery damaged the area, breaking one of the screws and bending another. But it was something I could live with."

What Marquez didn’t know was that the crash had further complicated a problem that, while it hadn’t caused him much trouble in the past, was now affecting him. The new position of the screw was now impacting the riding of a champion who has never blamed Ducati for his problems. And fortunately, the doctors agreed with him: "I went to the doctor and they were able to see that, after the crash in Indonesia, everything was fine, but the famous screw had broken. It’s in a different position. In the position I had on a MotoGP bike, the screw touched the radial nerve, which made me inconsistent and caused crashes. I went looking for a problem and they found it. That’s good news."

The bad news is that this setback forced Marc Marquez to undergo surgery again, which had already been scheduled. The Le Mans crash, where he fractured the fifth metatarsal in his right foot, only moved the operation forward. For now, no one is venturing a recovery timeline. A Ducati statement says that "his progress in the coming weeks will determine when he can return to competition." The only certainty is that he will miss the long-awaited Catalan GP this weekend. Beyond that, the MotoGP world waits to learn the fate of its champion.

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