They should have had two riders at the sharp end in Sepang, but Andrea Iannone appears to have found a way to sabotage his career once again. He missed the shakedown test on Sunday, part of the day on Wednesday and Thursday, and all of the final day on Friday. Officially, he was suffering the aftereffects of antibiotics used to treat a tooth infection, but most observers were skeptical of that explanation, to say the least.
The unsubstantiated rumor doing the rounds was that Iannone's problems stemmed from another bout of plastic surgery. Compare pictures of him from now, or from late 2018, to those taken while he was at Ducati in 2015, and he looks like a distant relative. For such a change to be natural seems vanishingly improbable.
And surgery comes with risks. The danger of infection is always present – one of the reasons Marc Márquez stopped riding so early every day was fear of inflammation of his healing shoulder – and the reconfigured bones in the face – modified nose, cheekbones, and jawlines are common – can play havoc with a helmet, the pads pushing bones weakened by surgery into positions they are not supposed to be.
Whether this is the case for Iannone or not is unknown. But Andrea Iannone has more raw talent than almost any other rider on the MotoGP grid. He has won a MotoGP race (no mean feat), and racked up poles and podiums. But he so often seems to find ways to get in the way of his own talent, of messing up chances he is given. Team bosses have a lot of patience with exceptionally gifted riders. But at some point, their patience can dry up.
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