A GREAT ONE REMEMBERED

THE VIEW FROM INSIDE THE PADDOCK

It’s still hard to fathom. Nicky Hayden, at just 35, is gone. His life taken away in a tragic bicycle training accident in Italy. Hit by a car. His family said the doctors told them mercifully Nicky probably never felt a thing. He died on May 22, 2017, a date that motorcycle racing fans will long remember. Years from now many of us will recall what we were doing when we heard the news that the “Kentucky Kid” passed away. Hayden was incredible on the track. He began riding minibikes at just three years old and began racing a couple of years after that. By the time he became the youngest AMA Superbike Champion at age 21 in 2002, he’d already been racing for more than 15 years! Veteran roadracer Steve Crevier, who won the 1998 AMA Supersport Championship, and had been racing professionally since the mid-1980s, once joked in a press conference after racing against Hayden, “People say I’ve been racing a lot longer than Nicky has, but I’m not sure that’s true. I think he started when he was in diapers.”

Hayden and his two brothers and two sisters grew up doing