Podcast Episode with Livio Suppo
Former MotoGP director goes long about motorsports racing, electric bicycles.
Podcasts are popular. And like radio programming, listeners hear everything without always understanding the effort that goes into every episode. We published our first episode in mid April 2022, with the intention of continuing with a stacked guestlist. For various reasons, we shelved our plans and went back to the drawing board. We wanted to up our game, scrutinize every detail, and come up with a full season of podcasts worth listening to and talking about.
Two major decisions were made at the beginning and tail end of 2022: Henri refocused his energy on enhancing and honing his creativity, and I left the corporate world for good to do the same. It helps that we’re cut from the same feast or famine creative cloth, and began our partnership in earnest collaborating on several Iron & Air articles: him behind the camera and me behind the keyboard.
What we didn’t know up until late January 2023 was the fragile state that Iron & Air was in, gasping its final breath on February 3 as the parent company pulled the plug on continuing to publish fresh web and print content. We had planned on partnering with Iron & Air to underwrite our ‘Motorcycles Are Drugs’ podcast in 2023, which would have given us a large reach and proper audience to share our conversations in motion.
That being said, we circled the wagons once again and decided to make ‘Motorcycles Are Drugs’ an independent venture. Henri and I co-host and share all the behind-the-scenes duties: he handles the sound engineering and editing; creates and produces our theme music; and generates all podcast and social media channel graphic content while patiently coaching me on proper microphone and diction etiquette. I research and contact all prospective guests; create background profiles; develop questions and topics; schedule podcast sessions; co-write social copy; and brainstorm all the minutiae that matters in the partnership.
Livio Suppo is our first guest of 2023. He is best known for leading Casey Stoner and Marc Marquez to multiple MotoGP world championships for Ducati and Repsol Honda, respectively. Based in Monaco, Suppo was candid, jovial, and transparent about the current state of MotoGP, how things have changed, thoughts on the new Sprint races scheduled for 2023, insight on the riders he managed, the advent and growing popularity of electric mountain bikes, all while raising a boxer puppy named Spyder, who managed to make an appearance early on during our conversation.
What sets Suppo apart from most MotoGP team principals is his business background, working for companies like Benetton prior to joining Ducati in the late 90s. Most team leaders are former racers or engineers.
Suppo co-founded e-bike company Thok in 2017, before leaving his role as team principal for Repsol Honda after Marquez’s fourth premiere class title. His reasons were personal in nature; he always rode mountain bikes when he competed in off-road motorcycling but the international travel demands of leading different MotoGP teams and aging caught up to him in 2011.
When Stoner won his second world championship in late 2011, he reminded his boss of their agreement for Suppo to finally quit smoking. Of course, Suppo was ready, but only after drinking and puffing away the celebrations that night. Tomorrow was a new day.
“So I kept the motivation to not smoke, and I didn't smoke for nine months,” Suppo says. “And of course it took a lot of kilos because when you quit smoking after decades, you start eating everything like my little dog does now. And then I started riding my bicycle. And because when you travel that much, it's almost impossible to have a regular base of training, because when you're around 50 years old, if you go bicycling, once a week is not enough. You should go two or three times at least to have a reasonable level that allows you not to kill yourself every time you go out, especially on a mountain bike, because on a mountain bike, you go up and down. On a road bike, if you live in a flat area, okay, you can also go once a month and you don't go faster, but you go.”
Feeling restless after recharging his personal batteries, Suppo was hired to lead Suzuki’s factory MotoGP team a year ago, only to be told a few months later that Suzuki was pulling out of the championship by the end of the 2022 season, one that saw its rider Alex Rins win two of the last three races to wrap joy around Suppo’s bittersweet return to the paddock.
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