How to assess such an athlete?

The glory, always near and always far;

a concatenation of hits and misses;

the list goes from

Raymond Poulidor

to

Dani Pedrosa

.

In this case,

Joan Barreda

, Dakar motorcycle rider.

In his decade in the rally he has achieved 27 stage victories, a record behind only the myths

Stephane Peterhansel

and

Cyril Despres

, but he has never won the event, never even on the podium.

And this year it won't be either.

What's more, this edition will end up occupying a brilliant place in your showcase of misfortunes.

In the penultimate stage, when he was finally struggling to get into a box, just minutes from the third, his teammate

Ricky Brabec

, made an inexcusable mistake and had to withdraw from the test once more, for the fifth time in his career.

At kilometer 215 of the special between Al-Uba and Yanbu, with the best time of the day, surely concentrated with the GPS, he skipped a refueling point and a little further on, at kilometer 267 of the test, he was thrown .

In the middle of the desert.

No help possible.

He was there for two hours trying to recover and then called for the help of the medical services who evacuated him by helicopter.

As he explained when arriving at the Yanbu bivouac, he did not feel well during the day, possibly due to a fall on Tuesday in which he lost consciousness.

In any case, his abandonment this Thursday was added to the list of misfortunes with which he will always be remembered in the Dakar.

If this year is finally the last - he has finished his contract with Honda and he does not know if he will compete with another brand - his goodbye will have been a perfect summary of his history.

In the year of his debut, in 2011, he fell twice in the first two stages and had to retire.

In his third year, in 2013, a gas pump failure in his Husqvarna left him three hours in the desert.

In his fifth year, in 2015, already a Honda star, he lost the handlebar due to a blow and ended up towed in the Uyuni salt flat.

In his sixth year, in 2016, he experienced his second retirement due to another blow near Uyuni.

In his eighth year on the Dakar, in 2018, he left again before finishing, this time with a broken knee.

In his ninth year, in 2019, he dropped out for the fourth time after being trapped in a ravine.

And last year he came bruised from a previous fall in training and fell, fell and fell until he finished seventh overall.

How to assess such an athlete?

Barreda is certainly not a champion, Barreda is certainly not a failure;

no record will remember him and instead he is on the record list ... each follower will have their own opinion.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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