“I was angry to my people” - Marc Marquez reveals MotoGP injury recovery toll on his family

Amid his domination of the 2025 MotoGP season, it’s easy to forget where Marc Marquez was only three years ago before the corrective surgery on his right humerus, broken in the 2020 Spanish Grand Prix.

Marquez sat out the entire 2020 season after the opening practice of the Andalusian MotoGP a week after the crash that broke the bone with the aim to come back in 2021 to resume his command of MotoGP that he had possessed almost uninterruptedly since his debut season in 2013.

But an abnormality in the regrowth of his humerus meant corrective surgery was needed in the middle of 2023.

Prior to that, not only had Marc Marquez been unable to ride as he had in the past, but he was living with daily pain to the extent that he said it made him “not the same person”.

“[I was] angry to my people,” he told TNT Sports in a joint interview, also involving Alex Marquez, ahead of the British MotoGP.

“I was angry to [Alex Marquez], I was answering in a not correct way.

“It’s not easy when you have a lot of pain inside your body, it’s like when you have a head pain – you are not the same person.

“So, imagine, with the arm, 24 hours [a lot of pain].

“In the end, I was always [like the] RPM going up.”

Alex Marquez said that, while he was supportive of his brother in that time, there were frustrating elements about Marc’s recovery for himself, particularly the questioning he was subject to from the media.

“It was the first time that year that I said ‘I will not speak anymore about my brother,’” Alex Marquez told TNT Sports.

“Every day that I went was like ‘How is Marc [Marquez], how is Marc, how is Marc?’

“So, the 50th time that they asked me I said ‘Okay, stop asking me this, I’m not the person to say how is Marc.’

“It was not easy.

“That first year was not really critical to be with him. [He] was at home but recovering. [He] didn’t know the problem [he] had inside his arm.

“The difficult thing was in 2021, 2022, that he had a lot of pain.

“He changed his character.

“He was completely different because he was living with a lot of pain all the days. It was like another person.”

Alex Marquez added the decision to to have corrective surgery in the middle of 2022 to re-break the humerus and rotate it 33 degrees back to its proper alignment was one that was well-considered by Marc.

“When he decided to stop in Mugello 2022 [...] it was not a decision that he was making there, it was already a decision that was coming from many weeks,” he said.

“I knew it but I never spoke with anybody about that.

“I was the first one to say ‘Do it because you cannot live like this.’ It was not just to come back stronger; it was to live in a normal way, not with pain, not to take every day painkillers and all that.

“In that moment, I supported him in a good way [on] that decision.

“I said ‘It will be your decision, you will invest half-a-year of losing this championship, but you will win the rest of your life.’”