Marquez was “racing with one and a half arms” before French MotoGP crash

After Marc Marquez crashed in the MotoGP Indonesia sprint race last year, which forced him to miss the rest of the 2025 season due to a fracture in his right shoulder, he underwent his sixth surgery on his right arm since 2020. After his crash in last weekend’s French MotoGP sprint race, he underwent his seventh right arm operation.

Although the Spaniard recovered from his 2025 injury in time to face pre-season testing in Sepang, and lined up for the first races of the year, something was tormenting him. The reigning world champion complained that he could not adopt the ideal position to handle the power of his Ducati GP26.

After the Spanish GP last month, Marquez decided to go to his trusted doctors for an in-depth check-up of his right shoulder, and there it was detected that an old screw that held the bone from an operation at the end of 2019 had bent in such a way that, when making certain movements, it touched the radial nerve. The result meant Marquez was racing without strength in his arm for a few milliseconds while riding his bike.

For that reason, Marquez, together with his doctors, had taken the decision to undergo surgery to remove the screw and clean the area following the Catalunya GP – scheduled for this weekend.

It was set to be a simple operation that, with a bit of luck, would have allowed Marc to return for the Italian GP just 10 days later. But the plan, kept secret by the rider and his entourage, did not go well.

This Wednesday, as is customary after grands prix, the Italian team released the video ‘Inside Ducati’, a summary of the weekend made by the communication team of the Bologna-based factory, edited and agreed upon with the riders and team bosses.

In it, a completely devastated Marquez can be seen after the crash in the French GP sprint on Saturday, in which he fractured the little toe of his right foot. The injury was minor and, had he been fighting for the world championship, would not have stopped him.

However, Marquez saw in that crash and in the need to undergo surgery to solve the foot fracture it was an opportunity to have both procedures done at once. Thus, he would skip the Barcelona race and prepare to return, either in Italy in two weeks or in Hungary on 5-7 June.

“I hadn’t said anything,” said Marquez in the video released by Ducati as he breaks down, sitting in his chair in the box, bursting into tears.

“There’s a screw that’s causing problems in my shoulder. It works, it doesn’t work. It works, it doesn’t work,” he added, while acting out the stabbing pains.

“That’s why I already had the surgery scheduled for after Catalunya. I’m riding with one and a half arms.”

At Ducati, the team highlights Marquez’s formidable speed, who in those conditions could only do two attack laps against the clock. In the first, he broke the track record (in Q1) and in the second he was thousandths away from pole position for the grand prix, which went to Francesco Bagnaia.

“Fast, I can be. Today I was fast in Q1. The problem is that I ride half a second slower than what I can lap at, then I try to force it and… it’s very difficult,” he continued in the video. “This [the shoulder] is not working; you can see it in the data.”

“The body comes first,” replied Gigi Dall’Igna, Ducati general manager, alongside Marco Rigamonti, Marc’s track engineer – the only two who knew about the shoulder and that he was going to undergo surgery after Barcelona.

“I’ve already learned this,” Marc replied to Gigi, in reference to the mistake he made in 2020, when he returned prematurely and carried that bad decision for four years. “Thanks for the support from the whole team.”

Marquez arrived at the Spanish GP in April, assuring that “I’m physically better than ever, I don’t want to talk about the injury anymore, if I’m not fast it’s my fault, not the injury’s” after having spent almost a month working extremely hard on his recovery.

The problem is that the shoulder pain and the nerve stabbing only came over him when he was on top of the MotoGP bike in certain positions and with certain movements. It did not happen to him in the gym, nor on the motocross bike nor on lower-powered sport bikes.

Even at the Aragon karting track, where Marquez carried out an experiment to test his physical strength. While doing a session with a 600cc Ducati V2 with only one arm, the injured one, he was able to ride without any pain. It only happened when he pushed the Desmosedici to the limit; then, the screw touched the nerve.

After undergoing surgery last Sunday, Marquez now hopes to have solved all his shoulder problems and to begin building a season in which there are still many races and many points left to fight for.

“I’ve come out of worse situations than this one,” he said in Le Mans.

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– The Autosport.com Team