Holy $%#@! One Of The Other Guys, Marquez, And ANOTHER One Of The Other Guys 1-2-3 At The Dutch MotoGP!

This is the most surprising MotoGP race result in years. In a lot of years.

MotoGP is world-class-, king-of the-hill, best-of-the-best motorcycle road racing. MotoGP races are held all over the world. You could think of MotoGP as being to motorcycles what Formula 1 is to cars; in fact, many MotoGP and Formula 1 races are held on the same tracks.

For the past couple of seasons MotoGP has been dominated by Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi of the factory Yamaha team and Marc Marquez of the factory Honda team, also known as the Repsol team, famous for its wicked-cool orange wheels:

Rossi has won 7 top-level World Championships, plus a couple more on smaller bikes when he was coming up; Lorenzo has won 3 on the big bikes and 2 more on smaller ones; and Marquez won the championship his first 2 seasons in MotoGP, plus a couple of earlier ones.

And a half dozen or so other guys might give them a run for the top three in any given race, including Dani Pedrosa, Marquez' teammate shown in the picture above, Andrea Iannone and Andrea Dovizioso of the factory Ducati team, Pol Espargaro on the Monster Yamaha Tech 3 team, Pol's brother Aleix riding a factory Suzuki, and Cal Crutchlow on an LCR Honda; and then there are about a dozen other guys.

Don't get me wrong: those other guys are probably among the best 2 dozen motorcycle road racers on the planet right now. They're all very, very, very good, stunningly fast, or they wouldn't be in MotoGP. Still, going back to 2007, every season the champion has been Rossi, Lorenzo, Marquez or a 4th guy who won twice and has since retired. 2006, another guy who has moved on to other things won, and 2001-2005 it was Rossi, and, although I don't gamble, I would imagine that the odds of the champion continuing to be either Lorenzo, Rossi or Marquez for a while to come are pretty good, or at least they were pretty good before today.

So it's very impressive that Whatsisname won today in Holland and that Whosits finished 3rd. This is shocker-headline news. Good for them!

PS, 27.June 2016: This story from Fox Sports provides some of the statistics behind how incredible the other guy's win is: how Whatisname is now the 10th-youngest-ever MotoGP or 500cc winner, bumping Johnny Cecotto out of the top 10; how just 5 guys had won 147 of the previous 150 races; how long it had been since someone on a non-factory ride had won (pretty darn long), and so forth. Like I said, this is a real Holy-Shnikey! type of story.