Taddy Blazusiak has just taken gold at X Games in Foz do Iguacu in Brazil when redbull.com corners him in the pits behind the wooden shipping crate that’s holding his KTM bike. His eyes are still alive with the race that finished less than an hour ago, every lap still fresh in the mind of the man they call the King of EnduroCross.
“In the main, I went all or nothing,” he says excitedly. “I took that inside gate and I was just thinking about that first corner, and I got it! I mean, I was first off the gate but third in the first corner so the start was really, really important in that race.”
For a man that’s won as much as Blazusiak has – and in comparative terms, he’s the Michael Schumacher of the sport, winning the AMA EnduroCross Championship five times in a row – it’s refreshing to see how excited he still is by a race win.
“Every race has got its own story,” he says, “and it never gets boring because it’s always different. There’s the gate, the start, every single lap, the guys around you – it’s crazy out there.”
Blazusiak shares another quality with Schumacher, a quality that all the great champions of motorsport have – the ability to perfectly judge a race, to take in everything that’s going on around him, other people’s lap times, the conditions of each and every corner of the track, to perform at exactly the level he needs to win.
Blazusiak reveals this meticulous quality when he explains why he’d been taking his particular line in one of the rock hairpin section in Brazil, going right around the outside on the slick mud before taking a short line over the rocks while his competitors went directly through the tricky section and, if they’d done it right, passing him: “I didn’t feel comfortable enough on the bike to go on the inside,” he says matter-of-factly. “My way of thinking was to give up a second through that corner instead of losing ten…I knew that the track was so tough that it wasn’t worth it.”
Even admitting that he wasn’t feeling comfortable on the day – and it’s true that Blazusiak was close to not qualifying for the final, finishing fifth in his heat race with sixth the cut off for riders – the Pole still managed to win out from rival Cody Webb by a margin of nine seconds in the main. When I ask him if he’s getting bored of being so good at EnduroCross, Blazusiak laughs.
“Oh man! It’s always easy when it’s done and I always say the same thing – it’s so easy to lose the race and it’s so hard to win one.”
But don’t his recent performances behind the wheel of a rally car at Erzberg, which he tried last year, and racing an enduro bike alongside Dakar regular and fellow Pole Kuba Przygonski in the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge just a week before he flew out to Brazil suggest he’s getting itchy to try his hand at something else?
“No. I love [EnduroCross]. This is my main job and I’m working for that, really hard. So I’m definitely not bored…I’d love to do [the Dakar] one day, but I don’t think you can sprint and do marathons at once.”
And what about rally? Blazusiak has admitted that he loves driving rally cars and, were he to enter the WRC, would be in good company, with his compatriots Michal Kosciuszko and ex-F1 driver Robert Kubica both currently flying the flag for Poland.
“Oh yeah, if somebody would give me a car, I would go for it today, for sure!” he says, lit up by the prospect. “If Red Bull is on it, I’m on it!”