Somehow, I ended up in the same corner of the Castrol Honda Superbike hospitality tent as MotoGP World Champion Valentino Rossi and his friends while attending a World Superbike race at Misano, near Rimini and Riccione, on Italy’s Adriatic Coast. I sat a few tables away and watched as Rossi’s party chatted and ate prosciutto, apparently enjoying a relaxed day at the track.

All weekend long, thousands of Italians had streamed past the Honda hospitality area—its windows wide open to the glorious Italian sunshine. Their pace would slow if they spied Honda’s World Superbike–class riders in the tent eating or enjoying a short break, the bravest of their number stopping for a brief moment to take a picture or request an autograph. The flow of human traffic never stopped—until they noticed MotoGP’s Rossi, whose cap and sunglasses failed to keep him incognito. The Italian fans halted suddenly and stood in near disbelief, as if seeing an apparition. They spoke in quick, machine-gun bursts, poking and nudging one another, some of them covering their mouths and pointing at Rossi.



Chaos. In less than 10 minutes, the situation went from being an interesting look at how fans perceive Valentino Rossi to one in which casual bystanders start looking for solid escape routes. No longer walking down the lane as they had before, the fans leaned over the pole-and-canvas wall of the hospitality tent, calling to Rossi, asking him to sign their shirts or begging for his picture. The crowd at the front of the hospitality area doubled by the half-minute and the poles holding the tent began to push inward from the mounting force. Women cried and small tussles broke out when latecomers tried to elbow their way to the front of the pack. All the while, his fans cried out to him, “Please, Vale, come here. Come to us and sign this! Please, Vale!” Rossi walked over and signed a few autographs only to be engulfed by the crowd. There must have been 500 people there, calling to him, trying to get close to him. His friends, literally, had to pull him away from the clutches of the fans, and Rossi, no longer smiling, quickly exited through the back of the hospitality area. His fans—women, men, children, pensioners—all stood in front of the hospitality tent for another hour, waiting for him to come back, ignoring the repeated statements of the Honda public relations staff that Rossi was gone and they should move along.