Worms to Catch by Guy Martin

Author:Guy Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753545331
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

CHAPTER 13

Racing hasn’t retired me, I’ve retired from racing

BEFORE LEAVING FOR the Tour Divide I told Andy Spellman and North One that I wasn’t making decisions about any future TV work until I got back. If I wasn’t halfway through filming a programme, like I was with some of the Speed series, everything was put off, because I didn’t know if it was going to change my attitude towards the job. The telly stuff I do seems to go down well and folk want me to make more of it, but I still turn a lot down. I do enjoy making the programmes now. I never watch them – I doubt many people who are on telly watch themselves, but perhaps they do. I’d love it if I could just make the programmes and they were never shown, because I enjoy the process, the people I work with and the folk I meet in the course of it all. The main thing I have a bit of a problem with is the attention it brings, but living where I do and how I do, not going out much and not living in a big city, it isn’t too bad. I came back from America thinking that I’ve got the balance about right. Trucks, telly, motorbikes, biking, doing a few barrow jobs for mates, when they need help, like skimming a car cylinder head or porting bike cylinder heads. One thing it really made me realise was that I should have given up racing motorbikes earlier than I did. I’m writing this a few days after getting back, and I’m not sure how much the experience has changed me, but that was the big thing, the light bulb going on.

Riding the Tour Divide couldn’t have been further away from the Isle of Man TT, both physically and mentally. It reminded me that most people are genuinely nice, when I was beginning to think that a lot of them were rude. I was getting the feeling that people had seen me on telly and only wanted to talk to me to tell someone else that they’d talked to me, and not because they were into what I was into or they had something interesting to say. America made me realise that it’s not all like that. The people I met on the Tour Divide didn’t know I’d been on telly a few times – they just wanted to help the person they’d just met, even though I smelt like a dead badger. They’d open their shop early, invite me in for a hot drink or fire the grill back up, even though they were just heading home, because they’re nice people and they want to help other people. I’ve got manners and I ask for things politely – I think I’m a nice person, and I like it when other people are.

I worked out that, as an amateur racer, which is what I’ve always been, I can’t do better than I’ve already done.

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