Repsol Honda MotoGP team manager Alberto Puig on Marc Marquez; 'This is not like when rider's put a plate and race the next week. This is more serious, let's say, and will need some time.'
Eight-time world champion Marc Marquez finished the 2021 MotoGP season as he had begun, missing the last two rounds due to injury.
Skipping the Qatar openers to give his infected July 2020 right-arm fracture more time to heal, the Spaniard spent his comeback events fighting a two-pronged battle against a weak arm and lack of technical performance from his Honda.
Just two race finishes with a best of seventh were scant reward for the effort put in, but the toil was finally rewarded with an emotional victory at the Sachsenring, an anti-clockwise track where his right-arm suffered less strain.
A lull in results followed, but with fitness and bike performance steadily improving the next anti-clockwise venue, Aragon, kick-started a run of four events where Marquez outscored all other riders, including back-to-back victories at COTA and the clockwise Misano.
Few would have bet against further podiums at Portimao and Valencia, which could have carried Marquez - Honda's only MotoGP race winner since April 2018 - as high as fifth in the final world championship standings.
Then came the news that Marquez has suffered a 'slight' concussion in an off-road training accident and would miss Portimao.
Few believed such an innocent diagnosis would cause Marquez to abruptly withdraw several days before a race weekend and it was subsequently announced that he was suffering a repeat of his 2011 double-vision problem.
"Paralysis of the fourth right nerve with involvement of the right superior oblique muscle," was how the doctor treating Marquez described the eye injury. "This fourth right nerve is the one that was already injured in 2011.”
In 2011, the injury kept Marquez off a Moto2 bike for four-and-a-half months, eventually required surgery by the same Doctor Sánchez Dalmau now overseeing his current treatment.
If that timeframe is repeated, Marquez would struggle to return for the 2022 Qatar season opener on March 6, let alone take part in any pre-season testing.
"Yes, this is a very similar injury to 2011 with Moto2 in Sepang," Repsol Honda team manager Alberto Puig confirmed at the MotoGP season finale.
"Of course, this is not a bone, it's something I would say a little bit more complicated. More delicate. It's something that you have to be calm and see how it goes.
"It's not so easy to know how a nerve or an eye can react but the doctor was positive. What he mentioned more was that we have to be patient. Because this is not like when many riders crash and they put a plate and race the next week.
"This is more serious, let's say, and will need some time.
"Of course I want to be confident and I'm not a doctor but I hear what they said and of course we have to think positive. I think that the key point for this is, as I said, a very difficult thing, we have to be patient.
