The Lucas Oil AMA Pro Nationals are not too far away so we sat down to talk with America’s star-in-waiting on the pressure of expectation, learning from Ryan Villopoto, the ardours of the Aldon Baker training programme and striving for the ‘hit’ that victory brings
Adam Cianciarulo is a freak: in the nicest possible way. It is alarming how disarming, dedicated and renowned the Pro Circuit rider is at the age of eighteen and with still a wealth of professional seasons ahead of him. An afternoon with Adam is an entirely pleasant experience. He still cannot ride a motorcycle and is instructed not to even mount a bicycle as he goes through the recovery phase from the shoulder injury he sustained at the Geneva Supercross in December, but he is all-too accommodating for the photos and a sit-down chat could go on far longer than the thirty-four minutes I eventually accrue on the MP3 recorder.
He is a talker, and doesn’t have any qualm in articulating how he feels and his thoughts on racing and motocross. Rather than a Q+A the interview becomes more of a spiralling conversation as Adam strives to get his point across. In fifteen years I’ve not encountered a more eloquent eighteen year old with a grasp of what he is doing and where he is going.
AC has long been in the game of course. He has been feted for stardom even before his voice broke and has been part of the Aldon Baker training system for almost half a decade. There are not many young riders and athletes that can boast an education that involves the likes of Villopoto, Mitch Payton, Baker and the full attention of Kawasaki. There are also not many who have had to deal with a spotlight and media infatuation quite like ‘50’ who is emerging just at a time when the industry and Kawasaki are thinking ‘where is the next Carmichael/ Stewart/Villopoto phenomenon?’
The Cianciarulo engine however has stuttered so far when it comes to producing the goods at the right moment. Injury, illness and absenteeism have been mixed with sensational results such as East Coast Supercross victories in Dallas, Indianapolis and Detroit in his rookie term. His shoulders have taken a battering but when fit and revving-free the teenager has looked formidable.
He may have lost a very decent shout of the 2014 East Coast title before wrecking his upper left arm in Canada last year but the Geneva accident to the same shoulder in the winter was a new low, and meant that major honours in supercross has passed him by for the second time.
Cianciarulo has generated pretty of press as Kawasaki/Pro Circuit/Monster’s potential new darling in the professional arena and his record of eleven amateur titles meant a notable standing even before he entered an AMA gate. Beginning 2015 we wanted to ask Adam about the large balloon of expectation that he seems to have tied to his wrist wherever he goes. For all his evident charm, good sense of humour and outward confidence he is intensely driven by an ingrained sense that winning=achievement, and anything less is a degree of failure. In normal sporting terms this is a horribly worn and inappropriate cliché but there are not many Pro athletes with Cianciarulo’s background – thanks to more supportive/allegedly-pushy parents – or the backing (trainer, advisor, mentor, role models) in place. It makes him unique and it is almost impossible to find a racer more primed to embark on a ridiculous streak of glory. Sadly the oldest leveller of this sport – a visit to the doctor – has been the only thing keeping AC tempered.
Cianciarulo is just waiting to take-off. Hopefully when the inevitable happens (he is only nineteen in October) then another type of circus will engulf him and having the time to find out a bit more about his approach and philosophy to life will be harder to obtain. On the cusp then, here is how an (almost) motocross megastar views the world; from the comfort of a large brown sofa in Norco, CA and a bungalow house a five minute walk from Payton’s residence.
You’ve likened your young Pro career so far to a rollercoaster ride. How has it been dealing with adulation one minute and then injury misery and frustration the next?
I think with this sport in general you have to keep such a level head all the time. You cannot get too happy or too low or be too hard on yourself because it is such an up-and-down thing. One weekend you can feel like you are on top of the world and the next you can feel like you don’t matter at all.
It cannot be easy to do that…
It is how I think. Being around Ryan Villopoto for so long you could see that he almost didn’t want to get too happy after a race because he knows it can change so fast. I think – 100% – that this is why he won all those championships and has been so successful because he doesn’t let himself get too down after a bad race or too high after a good one. It [his mindset] is something to stop getting flustered.
So far you’ve surrounded yourself with the right people all the way through. It is like you identified the best possible route to success…
It has gone really good for me and I’ve had all the pieces in place since I was five or six years old. My parents were willing to do ‘whatever’ to get me racing and in the right places. It does seem like everything along the way has fallen into place perfectly. Aldon Baker I’ve had since I was fourteen years old. I’ve had it all. I’ve been with Kawasaki pretty much all the way, since I had their support from riding a 65. I’ve had those ‘pieces’ and if you look at it from my point of view then the only person that can screw things up is me. That is part of what makes it hard. I know that everybody else knows that! I’ve dealt with the pressure since I was six or seven years old…and people saying: “well, he should win”. If I come off the track and win it is no big deal. If I come off and there’s a guy who hasn’t beaten me but was maybe five or six seconds behind then it was a big deal! It has always been that way and it has kinda programmed my brain not to get too excited. I have a job and my job is to win. I have done this-this-and-this to get to that. I have all these people around me. I have to win. And it has always been like that.
Was there a time when you wanted to step out of that or rebel against it? You’ve been that key cog in the machine…
I’ve definitely been in the machine! It is what happens when you start winning so young, and if you don’t keep doing it then it looks like your value is declining. I had to keep winning to get everything I wanted. It was good because it helped me mature at a young age. Due to my surroundings I knew what I had to do. I think it was tougher on me than all my competition but in the long run it will be something that I cherish.
That’s the paradox. People might think you have it easier but in some ways it is actually harder and by being ‘the favourite’ you have a different set of circumstances to deal with.
Yeah, I always had somebody there at the track pushing me. Add all the great sponsors…it makes it difficult from the perspective of pressure but at the same time you cannot complain because you’ve got everything you wanted. Like you said earlier about me rebelling; I don’t think I have ever wanted to go out and party or do anything like that but it is good sometimes to give your mind a break. You almost have to ‘forget it’ for a while. During bootcamp I cannot focus on anything else apart from what I am doing and it puts your mind at ease when you know you can only think about doing this or that.
But is there anyway to switch off from being ‘Cianciarulo: next star’? Or when you’ve won the Main Event, had the slaps on the back and watched the video because there are only a couple more days until the next one…
It is funny because leading into supercross last year I was confident – I’m always confident I can win and that is not to sound cocky at all but I’ve done so much as an amateur and I’ve beaten pretty much everybody so I feel that I can beat anybody! It is kinda cocky…but I do feel I have the ability to win anything. The story was that I wouldn’t ‘do much’ in supercross. Dean Wilson had gone back to Florida and had make a comment to Chad Reed and those guys there that he thought I wouldn’t even be in the top five and that whipped me up a little bit. I was still in a low point in my training at that point in mid-January so – it is a weird story – but it is what gave me the impetus to win. We went to Pala and it was just Dean and I there in the truck. He was doing sprints and I was doing a 25-up moto and this was just three weeks before the race and then my body was starting to peak. He went in front in his sprint probably thinking ‘he’s a kid, no big deal’ but I was doing my moto and caught him, and that was a big thing for me. Now, it is a bit of a stupid thing to talk about but as a racer it gave me everything I needed. I was feeling good and Dean had just won a race on the West Coast. I thought ‘I’ve got it’. Basically I then went to Dallas and was the fastest qualifier and thought ‘I can win this thing’. I did it and then it was three days more of riding and getting on a plane again. I had to come back down to earth quick.
But how do you do that?
Last year – I’m kinda answering your questions indirectly here! – when I did win I told myself: ‘I’m gonna enjoy it Saturday night and be pumped on it. Sunday also, texting everybody.’ Monday morning and on the two-hour drive to the track (because I was living at my parents’ then) that would be my last spell. I’d be like super-amped on it. Getting to the track I would then not talk about it again. And I learned that from Ryan. When I was growing up around him and I didn’t know him so well, Ryan is an intimidating guy, you don’t want to say or do the wrong thing so nobody ever talked about the race; including Ryan. He was so successful so I thought ‘OK, don’t talk about the race’ and that’s my thing now on a Monday.
Your personality seems different to his though…
Yeah, Ryan and I are completely different people but at the same time I think there are the same characteristics that make a champion. It goes around to the ‘level headed thing’. I think it is a way for me to calm myself down, otherwise I’ll be amped on a win all week! My entire dream and life was to win one Supercross race. It is short-term thinking but you start by wanting the one race and then the next and then a championship and then more championships. At that point [Dallas] it was all I wanted so you have to be extreme about it.
When you mentioned the Wilson story and your body kicking-in: through all that work with Aldon and those sacrifices is that the optimum moment of trust? When you think ‘yeah, everything the guy says is working’?
For sure; especially because Aldon’s programme is so hard. You feel that you are over-training but it is all about this formula that he has fine-tuned over fifteen years – or however long he has been training in motocross – that works like clockwork. You know that you push hard, kinda back-it-down and then two weeks before the race you start to come up and everything starts to click. You do have to have trust because a month before the race you are feeling like crap but then you start to come-around. I saw it especially last year because it was my first time with bootcamp and it was difficult. I thought ‘man, what am I doing?’ Mitch [Payton] was like “you gotta step it up!” and I said “I can’t; I don’t feel good”. It is not necessarily the riding but just the amount of time and the intensity. But it all does come around and you gotta trust him.
How did it work for you coming through the ranks? Did you have people trying to advise or school you? Or because of people like Aldon, Mitch and Ryan you were almost left alone?
I listened to the people in my circle and that’s the way it has always been. There have always been other comments as well! With the internet you get opinions on what you should be doing and what people think. I learned to always trust the inner circle. During the amateur days there was so much hype and people took that as me doing my own hyping. They thought ‘Ken Roczen is fifteen and he’s just won a GP and you’re fourteen, an amateur and yet everybody is talking about you’. I thought ‘you’re right!’ I never thought I was someone like Ken and people assumed I was talking about myself as the next Ricky Carmichael and that’s not me at all. I was never claiming that but it seemed to be the perception and the way that people were writing about me. It put that bar there and I had to come in and kill it right away.
In one way that hype helped things fall into place around you – like you said – but then it did mean a strange scenario that not many riders at all face. I remember sitting in the press conference for the first Monster Cup back in 2011 and watching you at the top table with Villopoto, Dungey and co and your first words were a quip about the Monster Girl behind you. I recall thinking that you had the confidence then but also the savvy to know how to play the game, even as a teenager and an amateur….
I think off the bike some people give me crap for posting on social media a lot but it is my formula. Being good with the fans and the media…I enjoy that. I’m not going to lie. I like getting in magazines and being on a video here, an edit there or a photo on Instagram. Whatever it is. I feel like it is part of my ‘empire’ because I look at myself as a business as well. Every little poster or comment about being good with the press…sponsors want to see that and they like it. I try to be relatable. You don’t want to look at somebody and see a robot.
People don’t want to see someone who’s downcast…
Exactly. Even if you are! For example at that Monster Cup press conference I was so nervous. I had Ryan Dungey and Ryan Villopoto sitting next to me and all these other guys. At the same time you are thinking ‘why do they even have me here? Now I have a target on my back’. They also know that I am at the press conference because I won’t be just ‘yes’ and ‘no’. I enjoy the media stuff.
Do you take the John Lennon approach to it and think about having a cool quote or comment ready for a given situation?
It is never pre-planned. If I have worked on speeches before then I tend to find that it is too stale and I end up winging it. There might be a stutter here or there!
We’ve talked about Ryan and he’s moving in a different direction this year. Carmichael stopped in his twenties and Roczen is a multiple champion and he’s barely twenty-one. Are you able to stand back at the age of eighteen and look at these multi-millionaires and think ‘I only have so long in my career to do this’?
I don’t think that at all. If you think about it then you work more as an amateur than you actually do as a Pro. I was an amateur for twelve-thirteen years and maybe you get ten as ‘prime time’. Those first few learning and then that moment…
Can you imagine doing ten more years of bootcamps?
Haha! I can, because I try to put myself in other people’s shoes and motocross is what I love to do no matter if it gets me hurt. You do have to kill yourself to be the best but I would do it six or seven times over just to win a race. You live just for that one moment…and that’s what motocross is. I don’t think motocross is permanent happiness. When you are on the bike you are happy, but when you win a race you are stoked. I won three races, but right now nobody that cares about that. It was last year! I don’t rely on motocross for happiness but I’d do anything for that one moment.
Describe ‘the moment’ then. Is it that much of a high?
Oh yeah, it’s insane. The moment I came over the finish line in Dallas I lost all feeling. It is like going completely numb and was more intense than anything I’ve ever experienced. The last few years in the amateurs it got to the point where winning did not mean that much. It like was a ‘9-5’ and I haven’t won when it has been unexpected. Ever. The ‘moment’ is just a moment but I would do anything to have it again.
Have you heard that saying of it being about the journey not the destination?
I’m not so sure I agree. We have a really good group in Florida and they are my buddies. Jason, Ken, Marvin…we have a pretty fun training group but your mind is on the race all the time. It is always about forward thinking. The journey is what you have to do to get to the moment.
You hinted earlier that winning could even get boring though…
Just winning in front of all those people [at a Supercross]. It is stupid but even going through your twitter feed afterwards and you have F1 drivers and guys like Casey Stoner saying ‘congrats’ and from being a little kid and looking up to these people and then them sending messages like that…it is all just part of the moment. I was on my phone until about three in the morning after Dallas.
The Baker regime seems very on-edge and tough, so how can you maintain friendships in that environment?
The way I look at it, and maybe other people to, is that I’m there to get better and maybe it would not be as effective being there by myself. If Jason turns up to the track and feels like crap and Ryan is there feeling great and ‘killing it’ then Jason is going to be bummed. I think we go into it [the regime] knowing that it is going to make us better and we have to put all our other feelings aside. There are times when it is hard. We’ll be on a bike ride and we’ll all be struggling but one guy is just pushing ahead and then you’re asking questions of Aldon. Two weeks later that guy will be the one struggling on the ride when I’m feeling decent. It all switches around and we all have our days, and we know that. The personalities count to. Jason, who people think blazes it up all the time, is actually super-mellow, Ken is happy-go-lucky, Marvin is French and just ‘there’ and I’m just looking to get along with everybody and win races also.
It must be one of the hardest peer pressure groups in the sport…but do they also pick you up when you’re struggling…
For sure and Aldon is like that with everybody. He has that same level-headed mentality. He is never too far up or down. It will be either “this is the problem and this is how we will fix it” or “we’ve found the solution”! Everybody is different and it is tough when you are not ‘feeling it’ but at the same time it makes you not give in. The track record there is a ‘54 and if you are doing badly and hitting 57s then it is not possible to hide when there are others making 54s. It is a sacrifice somewhat in the aspect of being held to a higher standard all the time but it is better in the long run.
What makes you panic? Do you think ‘I’m hurt again, people are going to drop me’? Do you have that fear? Look at someone like Jake Weimer who you must have been training with only a few years ago; a couple of injuries and people forget…
I think my biggest fear is not fulfilling the potential that I know I have. I could have won a supercross championship last year but I didn’t. I got hurt and Jason Bogle deserved it. I went into the Outdoors fitter than ever and was looking at that too. Imagine where I would be now if both had happened. You have to think of it like that. I am super-young but I am also behind in terms of those championships. I started when I was sixteen. I am eighteen now and I think I have a solid ten or eleven years in the sport. So I imagine the fear is about potential but at the moment I don’t have it. I think ‘I can’ and ‘I will’.
Someone like Marc Marquez is a double MotoGP Champion at twenty-one. I know you have a lot to do here still and that it is pointless to plan too far ahead but can you look outside at the bigger scene and consider a radical move like Jean Michel Bayle? Or head over to MXGP? Or do you have your heart set on something like six titles indoors and out?
I don’t think like that at all. I don’t want to get caught up in the whole records thing because as I said earlier happiness for me does not rest solely in motocross. That’s not why I am doing it. I am doing this because I can win, and that feels better than anything for me. I’m not scared to fail or disappoint some people. That’s life. It sounds cliché but wherever life takes me really. I’m not here to win a specific amount of championships but to do my best and for an amount of time when I am still good and enjoying it. It would be cool to try some car racing or something like that…if I have a successful career that is!
Lastly Ryan has obviously come over to try MXGP and is almost setting a precedent by switching scenes at the height of his powers…
It definitely took a lot of balls. I was surprised. I had heard that he wanted to do it but it is crazy him leaving four championships with a chance of going for five. I think that tells you about the type of person he is. He wants to do what he wants to do and doesn’t care about a record. He is not looking at motocross for that permanent happiness. He won four and has now gone to Europe. I think it is a good mindset, and to teach young kids that it is good not to be so robotic. I think it will open up a lot of doors for other people.