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Beginning in 2022, the Monster Energy AMA Supercross Championship will still be the biggest, most important Supercross series in the world, but it will no longer be an FIM world championship.
The FIM, the worldwide motorcycle sanctioning body, announced today that after 20 years its agreement with the series is ending. The series will continue to be run by Feld Motor Sports, the entity that has promoted the series for years, and will be sanctioned by the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA), but it will be a domestic series, not a world championship. In reality, the move probably changes little. But it does recognize reality.
As a world championship, Supercross was always kind of like the World Series — "world" in name, mostly. Sure, it's the premier Supercross series in the world, but last year, only four of the top 15 finishers in the season standings were from outside the United States. Compare that to the MotoAmerica HONOS Superbike championship, which is arguably not even the strongest national roadracing series in the world, much less a world championship, and where four of the top 10 in the current points standings are riders from outside the United States. The U.S. national roadracing series has more national diversity than the FIM Supercross world championship did.
Even more glaring than the predominance of U.S. riders was the continual shrinkage of the series within the U.S. borders. When the FIM world championship designation began back in 2002, efforts were made to internationalize the series with races in Europe and Canada. That quickly dwindled to an all-U.S. series with one stop in Canada.
The press release from the FIM blamed the change on the COVID-19 pandemic. It quoted FIM President Jorge Viegas as saying "I firmly believe under normal circumstances that this is an agreement that would have been extended for a further period and that would have continued to go from strength to strength." But the reality was that the series had shrunk to entirely within U.S. borders before the pandemic.
Most of those involved in the series will not be sorry to lose the FIM designation. It came with regulations such as the anti-doping rules that suspended former champion James Stewart from the sport and which many people in racing consider too harsh and unfair, with a presumption of guilt instead of innocence. If the pay and bonuses and prize money stay the same and the audience remains stable, why would riders, teams or sponsors care whether the phrase "FIM World Championship" is on the sign above the finish line?
Supercross will go on, probably pretty much as before, but without a world championship designation and a relationship with the FIM that probably neither side will miss much.
