Cody Cooper will race for Team Care-DonJoy-Honda in the 125cc World Championship from 2002, replacing Antti Pyrhonen who jumped to the 500cc class with the same team.
Natural talent is a wonderful thing, but a rarity in racing. Few possess it and most that do are unchallenged by racing alone and drift away. New Zealand's Cody Cooper has bucked that trend. For him, doing the business out on the track comes easily but getting to the gates has seen him overcome some incredible obstacles during his life.
Midway through December 2001, 18-year-old Cooper backed up his performance at the NZ Motocross Nationals held two weeks earlier with a 1-1-1 effort against some of Australia's fastest motocross pilots at the Oceania Motocross Championship. Of course, to a certain extent, he had home ground advantage, but there is no denying that the way in which he raced in Wellington was of another realm. This kid is fast and looks set to lead the next generation of Australasian world beaters.
Opotiki isn't the sort of place where you'd expect a world class racer to emerge from, but then neither is Josh Coppins' Motueka home, Daryl Hurley's Hawera home, or the King brothers' Taranaki birthplace. Opotiki itself is a coastal village on the north side of the East Cape where horses are the preferred mode of transport - not dirt bikes and certainly not the CRF. Even Cooper himself admits to having started out on a four legged all terrain model.
''When I was little I did ride horses but then I got into motorbikes and I loved that more,'' laughed Cooper.
From that first ride on, Cooper became familiar with what it took to cross the finish line first and spurred on, like most Juniors, by a supportive father, he didn't look back.
''In Juniors, I was up the top and winning most of my races but then I quit racing,'' admitted Cooper, ''My dad died when I was 13 and I went downhill after that. I stopped winning races and just gave up altogether.''
