About a year ago, Miguel Oliveira exited the MotoGP Portuguese Grand Prix in an unfortunate manner when, in the early stages of the main race, he was hit by Marc Márquez. At the time, he suffered an injury that kept him off the track for several weeks, besides being deprived of a potential good result, but it doesn’t affect him currently.
In an interview with SportTV, the Portuguese rider assured that this incident is in the past and holds no grudge against his opponent: ‘It has to be part of the past. It was completely a racing incident. In my mind, things were done at the medical center, he came to apologize, and there was nothing to be done. I saw the footage, and indeed things happened as they did. Obviously, it hurt everyone, but it hurt me much more as I took the hit, and psychologically, knowing that I had a weekend and a golden opportunity to fight for a good position and not being able to do it because of an incident with a rider, obviously made me very upset. But honestly, it’s water under the bridge, and I’ve had much more to worry about than the incident with Marc Márquez, with all due respect’.
When asked if the crash at last year’s Portuguese GP still affects him mentally, Oliveira guaranteed that it doesn’t: ‘No, not at all. Things for me ended that day. Portimão is a circuit where I already have a few laps and quite a few crashes. I’ve fallen in many places here, and obviously, I don’t even think about revisiting a moment. Falls are momentary things; no matter how great the physical impact, the psychological damage is almost always minimal because we always try to analyze in detail what happened. And especially when it’s something for which you’re not directly at fault in the fall, you think even less about it. So it’s not something that affects me at all. Obviously, then, last year when I returned with the shoulder injury, feeling weakened, I had moments when the thought crossed my mind that things might happen again. But I’ve had many races since then, I’ve touched other riders myself’.