Monday
Apr032017
Chad Reed Champion?
Monday, April 3, 2017 at 7:22AM If you saw the St. Louis Supercross you saw the Reed/Dungey situation. In my opinion Reed's move was BS. Chad Reed is a great competitor but he is not a great champion. Tell us what you think.
Reader Comments (3)
An old saying says. If you want to see what a man is really like, see how he deals with tangled Christmas tree lights. Chad Reed is in the twilight of his career and is an angry man dealing with tangled lights when he is in 16th place and being lapped.
Reed screwed the fans attending the race and the millions of people watching on television the opportunity to see a spectacular event unfolding as Dungey began to chip away at Tomas's cushion. It would have been very difficult for anyone, including Dungey, to get past Tomac, but it would have been a wheel to wheel battle to the checkered flag. The result may have been the same but the fans would have walked away having witnessed one of the best races they had ever seen. Reed took that away from all those fans and owes them an apology, he should be ashamed. It was not the act of a professional rider.
The AMA has an obligation to disqualify and/or suspend Reed for a couple of races the same as it would and has done for events with lesser consequences such as the Jason Anderson and Weston Pieck incidents, neither of which had any chance of altering the outcome of a race.
When you call out on national TV the senior citizen of the sport who seems to be on an extended farewell tour you invite the kind of spiteful retaliation Dungy got. But Reed should have saved that for another day. Sixteenth place being lapped by second place is neither the time nor place to do that and to do it for three laps is beyond reasonable. And to deliberately interfere with the race between first and second is a pure chump move. I lost a lot of respect for Reed.
I was under the understanding a waving blue flag had more teeth to it other than just an informational message the leaders are coming. I thought it meant the leaders are coming move out of their way, apparently not. It will be interesting to see if there is anything the AMA can or will do about this.
I don’t blame Ryan for not pressing Reed more, he had everything to lose and by the time he realized what Reed was doing it was probably too late.(Chad is just too good to simply blow by) But I would have liked have seen him park him. I can think of a handful of riders who would have certainly tried.
It will be interesting to hear what Chad and his real diehard fans have to say.
Doug 21J
Reed's obvious blocking of Ryan Dungy last Saturday reflects badly on him, Yamaha and the AMA. Reed should be an ambassador of the sport at this point in his career, not a negative. After two laps of solid blocking he should have been given a black flag by the AMA. As usual the AMA just let the obvious infraction slide. Dungy was amazingly gracious in the post race interviews. However, we can all think of several other riders who would have resorted to some serious take out moves if they were faced with the same situation. Lets hope we hear a serious apology from Reed this week and that the AMA takes some substantial disciplinary action.