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Dani Pedrosa, knocked him off.

I thought it was over, man.

I thought it was 25 years

of hard work out the window,

and my dream of being

world champion was done.

I've never felt pain

like that in my life.

It came in a bad moment,

especially for him, but it was racing.

It never happened before to me,

and it never happened again.

But it came

right finally so...

We were in the

motor home after I crashed,

and we were watching

the race, and I was like,

"Oh, my God, Toni's about to

nip him at the line here."

And that just gave me

a feeling that,

"You know what,

this ain't over. "

That's five points, that

adds a whole new dimension.

I never pulled for a guy

so hard in my life.

The final twist came at Valencia,

where Rossi did what nobody expected.

He crashed.

The worst moment of my career,

except when you crash and you have pain.

I was very, very fast and

I did the pole position,

but at the same time,

I had an impressive race

pace with the race tires.

Pam! Pam! Pam!

Very fast, the bike was okay.

Sunday, nothing worked. I didn't

have the same grip from the tires.

Rossi looked like

he bogged it, a bit off the line.

He's back in the field

there a bit.

And when I start for the race,

the bike was impossible to ride.

Hayden up

the inside of Capirossi.

Hayden now

up into third place.

And there is Valentino Ross! just get

a glimpse of that yellow helmet-

He's not where

he wants to be.

For me, something

strange happened with the tire.

The tires were not

the same of Saturday,

I think,

but you never know.

Valentino Rossi is gonna

have to produce the ride of his life

if he is gonna

win the 2006...

Oh! Rossi's gone down!

Rossi's down,

Rossi is down.

The reality is I lose the

championship and Nicky win.

Hayden finished third

and won the world championship,

proving that absolutely

anything can happen,

even after you get taken

out by your teammate

and you're eight points

behind Valentino Rossi

going into the final race.

Rossi lost the championship

by five points,

the difference between

first and second in Portugal,

where Toni Elias beat him.

Toni Elias,

the man who knocked him off in

Jerez at the start of the season.

Toni, my boy Toni, did me

the biggest favor ever.

I mean, I always have a soft

spot in my heart for that guy.

How dangerous is MotoGP?

And where exactly

is the danger?

Rossi's crashes offer two answers.

A machine problem,

the Valencia crash was due

to an electronic fault,

and the most common

cause, human error.

In Holland, Rossi had

not waited long enough

for the rear tire to get up

to optimum temperature.

So it lacked grip.

They may resemble superheroes

in their high-tech race suits,

but the riders are

human and breakable.

Motorsport is supposed

to be dangerous,

but not too dangerous. It's a

bit of a tightrope, really.

And you'd have to say that

the improvement in safety

over the last 20 years

of motorbike racing

has been

absolutely fantastic.

When riders crash nowadays,

serious injury is less

likely than it used to be

because of the improvements

in track safety

with huge runoff areas,

and the protective

equipment the riders wear,

which now includes

crash-activated airbags,

as well as body armor

beneath the leather.

In recent years, some

riders have crashed

20 or 30 times in a season

without serious injury.

Carlos held the record for

the most crashes in one season,

like 28 crashes

or something.

Exactly, I don't know,

but it was around 30.

I stopped counting.

They fall a lot

at the beginning.

When they're on small bikes,

they fall a lot.

Then they stabilize, and when they're

older, they start to fall again.

The champions

fall very rarely, though.

Even 30 years ago, when the

tracks were not at all safe

and there were

far more fatalities,

the best riders

rarely died on the track.

All the premier class champions,

from 1960 to the present day,

survived their

motorcycle racing careers.

Making very few mistakes is one of the

defining qualities of a champion.

In two of his

championship-winning years,

Rossi finished every single

race, and in the others,

he never crashed out

more than twice.

To be

a successful racer,

you have to have a strong

sense of self-preservation

and an overweening confidence

in your own ability.

They are human men,

but humans of a rare type,

something like

fighter pilots

with their extraordinary

hand-eye coordination,

their cool heads

in a fight,

the combination of extreme

discipline in training and testing,

and the willingness to risk it

all when the moment demands it.

But no matter

how good you are,

and no matter how great the

improvements to tracks and equipment,

things can still

go badly wrong.

With solo crashes,

you might break a hand,

but serious injuries

are very rare.

When they're in a group, and there is a

faller, the others can run him over.

That's the biggest danger.

Catalunya, 2006, lap one,

heading into Turn 1

at over 150 miles an hour.

Sete Gibernau clips the back

of Loris Capirossi's Ducati.

I was right

behind Sete when it happened.

He started braking, and he was

braking on the white line

that separated the track

from the pit lane entrance.

And I think that kind of

spooked him a little bit,

and he tried to get

off the white line.

As he tried to do that,

he just

ventured over into Capirossi, and

hit his front brake and then

it was a**holes

and elbows after that.

Once all the

carnage started,

I just remember

seeing Melandri

stuck up the back

of somebody's rear wheel,

basically trying

to rip his arm off.

When I came in,

I'm pretty sure I was

a couple of shades whiter than

what I am right now because

I thought I'd just watched Melandri

get completely offed.

He was fine, you know.

But it was a pretty

gnarly crash for sure.

At Assen in 2008,

John Hopkins crashed in the same

corner as Rossi two years earlier,

but this was

a machine failure.

It sent him off the track

at an unexpected angle,

straight into the wall.

It was such an

odd place where I had crashed

because it was a bike

mechanical failure,

and one of the forks actually didn't

compress when I went in to brake,

so that the front just slid and I

went off in fifth gear, wide open,

and the data said that, at top

speed, right when I crashed,

I was doing

So I hit the wall at over

That's like falling from an airplane

and just hitting the concrete.

Thank God I hit it

with my feet first.

I blew out my knee and

busted my ankle and stuff,

but had I been headfirst,

I would have broken my neck

and would've been

dead for sure.

That definitely frightened me, man.

That scared me a lot.

John Hopkins was lucky.

Daijiro Kato, who died

in a freak accident

at the Japanese Grand Prix

in 2003, was unlucky.

Shoya Tomizawa, an emerging

star in the new Moto2 category,

will be unlucky.

In September, 2010,

five months after winning

his first Grand Prix in Qatar,

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