ADVrider.com
One of the world’s most talented off-road racers is calling it quits After 35 years of high speed on two wheels, Joaquim Rodrigues is retiring.
Rodrigues has been a fixture at the Dakar Rally for some time; most recently, he worked with the Hero Motorsports rally raid team, and was a big part of their road to top-20 results. This year, he had a DNF early-on (Stage 1), and in 2023, he was knocked out in Stage 4. But in 2022, he earned 14th overall, winning Stage 3; in 2021, he finished 11th overall, and in 2019, he was 17th overall. Whenever he finished Dakar, he was a top-20 rider (he also had to abandon the race in 2018 in Stage 1, and in 2020 in Stage 7). He also finished fourth overall in the FIM’s Cross Country Rallies championship in 2021.
Even before he went to the Dakar Rally (joining it in its South American days), J-Rod was a successful motocross racer, including a stint in AMA Supercross; he also competed in enduro racing. But after nearly four decades of racing, he says it’s time to be done.
No doubt his disappointing first-day knockout in 2024 had a lot to do with it, as the 2023 race was tough, when he broke his leg. He’d battled back to race by fall of 2023, but broke his scapula in the shakedown test leading up to Rallye Du Maroc. He overcame that to get to the start line at the Dakar this January, but obviously that didn’t work out as he’d hoped.
Rodrigues was also brother-in-law to fan favorite rider Paulo Goncalves, who died at the Dakar Rally in 2020. On social media, Rodrigues said he’d never been the same rider himself after “everything changed” in the aftermath of that crash.
What will he do next? Reportedly, J-Rod has been offered a job with Hero’s rapidly-improving factory team, perhaps as a development rider or something like that. He’s been scrubbed from the list of factory riders on the team’s website, though.
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