Video: Casey Stoner talks about his struggles and successes in a revealing podcast

Watching the entire Gypsy Tales podcast on YouTube, hosted by Jase Macalpine, takes a commitment, since it's four hours long. Fortunately, excerpts of some of the interesting moments have also been posted on YouTube. One focuses on Stoner's rivalry with Rossi and he tells a story similar to the ones other racers have told, how Rossi is friendly to them until they become a competitive threat.

"I learnt a lot from Valentino," Stoner said. "And I dare say Valentino as a guy was probably fun. And he was fine with me before I raced him. But then as soon as I became a competitor, he literally just flipped a switch and went, 'I'm going to try to make an enemy out of you.'"

And it wasn't just Rossi, but also his fans. Stoner described how Rossi fans would try to make him crash his scooter when he was getting around the paddock, even when he had his wife, Adriana, on the back.

In another excerpt, Stoner talks about how he still struggles with chronic fatigue. He'll play a round of golf and feel the effects for two weeks, he said.

But the most fascinating excerpt has to be one in which Stoner describes the extreme anxiety he suffered while racing. His family risked much to give him the opportunity to make it to MotoGP and as a factory rider he felt the weight of potentially letting down the dozens of people on the team. That, on top of his natural discomfort with dealing with crowds, the public, and the media, was at times debilitating.

"Until probably my last two years of racing MotoGP, the better weekend I had, the more I wanted to die," Stoner said. "I would literally be curled up on the motorhome floor or whatever, sick as a dog, just stomach in knots. Just I did not want to race. I could not feel any worse."

Then, in the same excerpt (below), Stoner describes how he invented his own way to get through turn three at Phillip Island in his home country of Australia, intentionally sliding the rear on corner entry at 160 mph. Stoner explained that it was really a way of taking the corner that he invented because it reduced risk. It made it less likely that he'd lose the front in turn three and allowed him to brake more safely for turn four. What looked insane to everyone else was actually his way of feeling safer, and he had the superhuman bike control to pull it off. 

"My will to win was greater than the fear," said Stoner. "If I let fear control me, and everything, then I never would have gone as fast as what I did. So I figured out how to go as fast without the same risk so that would take a little bit of the fear out of it."

You can see more about Stoner and his approach to Stoner Corner in the BBC video below.

As a bit of a digression, as someone who has spent about 40 years interviewing people, I wish more podcast hosts would learn the simple fact that a confident and prepared interviewer figures out in advance the best way to ask a question, asks it directly and then shuts up, compelling the subject to fill the silence. Instead, most interviewers ask a question, immediately worry they didn't get it right, so they rephrase it and then tack on follow-up questions on as the subject sits and waits for a turn to speak. At one point in the excerpt above, Macalpine rambles on for almost four minutes with Stoner barely getting a few words in. Don't let that discourage you from getting to Stoner's description of turn three afterwards. Fast-forward can be your friend.

Despite any weaknesses, this podcast is a revealing glimpse into the mind of a man who is one of the most talented racers of our time in terms of the actual skills of racing a motorcycle, but also a person naturally unsuited to the fishbowl life of a MotoGP world champion.