A Racer’s Worst Nightmare – Wharton in Indy

As a kid, I remember running around the basketball hoop, loudly proclaiming “3, 2, 1” and shooting the ball as if it was the buzzer-beating shot for the NBA Finals. If you were like me and you missed a lot, you could always grab the rebound and start the countdown over again until you finally lived that glorious moment in your head of hitting “the shot that could be heard across the world.” Never would you countdown “3, 2, 1”, miss and be okay with it ending like that; that’s just not how fantasies work.

Well, if that was the fantasy, what would your sports nighmare look like? Well, as a kid, my sports nightmare was crashing on the last lap while leading a race. A lot of us have done it, and there is no worse feeling in the world. Take that and magnify it by a factor of 1000 and we may feel what must have been going through Blake Wharton’s mind the instant he began to feel the bike getting away from him in the whoop section Saturday night at Indy. You know the nightmare didn’t start when the bike hit the ground but the second he felt that things weren’t right. As a rider, you know that comes long before you hit the deck.

I cannot even imagine the sickening thoughts Blake must have endured at that moment. All year, Blake has been just a tick off the pace of the leaders, but he has stayed very much alive in the Championship with his veteran consistency. In Indianapolis last Saturday night, that veteran consistency was finally going to pay off, but like this sport has shown us time and time again, it can bite at the most inopportune moment. After leading all fourteen laps, Blake made it a couple turns into the final lap before a racer’s worst nightmare happened in an instance and sent him cartwheeling through the whoops. Blake hurried to his feet, but with just a three-second lead, it was too little too late for the #13. He would cross the finish line fifth, but the nightmarish scenario got even worse when the AMA docked him four more positions for cutting the track, adding plenty of insult to the injury.

In the end, Blake went from second place in the points with a very-much-alive nine-point deficit to outside looking in from twenty-four points back. It has got to be the most devastating losses in Blake’s career, but he did have a similar scenario unfold in Atlanta back in 2011. In that one, Blake had a comfortable four second lead with just four laps to go when he threw it away. I doubt Blake needed me to remind him, though. I would guess that race was one of the first things that popped into his mind on Saturday night. At this point, I hope the very likable rocker can pick up the pieces and bounce back this weekend in Toronto. If not, I’d probably suggest he gets rid of the ol’ lucky #13.

 

Check out the final laps of the 2011 Atlanta SX Lites main event. Yeah, it was called Lites then.

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