Why I Support Alvaro Bautista
As well as recently finding MotoGP to be, by and large, a lot more fun to watch than my ‘favourite’ sport – F1 (which has become an ever-more boring, redundant procession covered in the most inane and infantile fashion by TV and other media… phew, rant over…) – I also found that quite often 250cc and 125cc are more exciting than the top class.
Racing, overtaking, mixing it up – second after second, corner after corner – race in race out.
And when I saw how Alvaro Bautista rode 100%, totally committed, fearless, balls-out, and yet still with a degree of maturity that allows him to find limits and to cope with misery as well as victory, I knew I’d found somebody I really wanted to support.
I also reckoned that Alvaro – or ‘Bati’ to use his nickname – deserved better coverage in the English speaking world though… his official website was (and still is at the time of writing) entirely in Spanish, and nowhere was there a proper fan forum.
I got in touch with Tamara, who I’d come to know via a LiveJournal Bati group, and suggested we build a proper bunch of sites; full-on professional ones that would cover off all the basic information and download needs of fans and also a really cool forum. We now both run these as well as our own blogs in a network of connected sites that pull in many hundreds of thousands of visits each year and have a draw on fans in over 120 countries.
It’s been worth every single bit of effort – and there’s been an awful lot of effort, believe me – and if you fancy a quick sneaky peek at the sites, then here they are:
