“Higher, Daddy!
Higher!” Her soft-hearted father
had just turned around and come back home to retrieve his two-year-old
daughter, looking forlorn and abandoned as she cried from inside, behind the
big picture window. Now, nestled in
front of her father on the little trail bike, racing across hilly Western
Pennsylvania countryside next to her brother, old enough to ride his own bike,
she couldn’t get enough of the excitement of leaving the ground at breakneck
speed. And so began Grace Majkowski’s
life-long love affair with dirt bikes and motocross racing.
By the time she was four, Majkowski (pronounced
Muh-KOW-skee, the “j” is silent) was racing 50cc bikes on the local
circuit. Her very first race, a night
affair under the lights at a small track in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, didn’t start
until after midnight. Sitting on her 50
at the starting gate, way past her bed time, Majkowski started nodding off, her
little helmeted head dipping down toward the handle bars and bobbing back
up. Her father kept her awake enough to
get out of the gate and off to the start of a 16-year odyssey that would carry
her to her first pro race at High Point in early June 2013.
By the time Majkowski was six, few racers in her age group
could keep up with her. Even at such an
early age, she started to learn the tough life lesson that beating
friends—especially boys—can be tough on some relationships. One lifelong motocross friendship she formed
in the first years of her career was with fellow racer, Tiffany Palacki, who
was the same age. Majkowski and Palacki
grew up together in the sport, fast friends and fierce competitors. It’s been an enduring friendship and both
riders speak fondly of the other today.
Majkowski showed her innate killer instinct very early. During one 50 race, when she was running neck
and neck with another racer, she made the tactical decision to take him out in
the final lap if he was still keeping up with her, reasoning that she had at
least a fifty-fifty chance of being able to get back on her bike and to the
checkered flag faster than he could.
Majkowski is quick to point out that was when she was five or six and
that, today, she doesn’t like racers who ride dirty and she holds herself to a
higher standard of behavior out on the track.
Which is not to say she doesn’t race aggressively. She admits there can be a fine line between
dirty and aggressive, but, to her, it comes down to intent. She’s certainly tangled with her fair share
of what she considers dirty racers in her career—of both genders—and she
clearly has no problem holding her own out there on the track.
When Majkowski was just six, with two years of racing under
her belt, she won the Pennsylvania state championship for her class—the proven
best young rider in the state, boy or girl.
Over the next decade, each summer, Majkowski clawed her way up
through the muddy ranks—through 65s, through 85s, and finally into the big
bikes. In more recent years, her ride of
choice has been her trusty YZ-125, festooned with number 12. And her journey, as with most serious riders,
was not without setbacks along the way—blown up engines, conflicting life
commitments, and injuries. She’s put her
body through the wringer, fracturing several bones and otherwise taking a
pretty good beating on occasion. She
lives with aches and pains from ancient collisions and is frequently riding
with some manner of cast or brace. More
than once she has engaged in passionate shouting matches with her father in the
back of a trackside ambulance, arguing about whether to go to the hospital or
get back out on the track (just to be clear, she was arguing to get back in the
race against her father’s—and any parent’s—better judgment).
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Then, during her senior year of high school, Majkowski made
an unexpected quantum leap. That
November 2011, she and her dad packed up the bike and the RV for the week-long pilgrimage
down to Gatorback, just north of Gainesville in north-central Florida, to
compete in the motocross Winter Olympics (better known as the Mini O’s). In addition to racing—and performing quite
well in—the MX events, Majkowski decided to enter the supercross competition
and did very well. Her performance, and
her professional attitude, caught the attention of some very well-connected movers
and shakers within the pro MX community—people who can make a difference. They had a crazy proposition: stay and train.
More timid souls would laugh and flee from such an
offer. But the Majkowski team—daughter
and father—saw and seized the opportunity, although they had no idea how they
were going to work it out. It was time
to put up or shut up, time to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. And so they made the quick jaunt back to
Pittsburgh to put their affairs in order.
Majkowski’s high school principal was amazingly supportive, and worked
out an arrangement whereby the young racer could complete her high school senior
year from afar—basically a home school program.
And her father did what most would consider unthinkable, especially in
an economy so fraught with peril, in which any employment is precious: he quit
his job.
Within a week, they were back down south, living the austere
life of paupers out of their RV, pinching and scrimping pennies to buy gas,
keep the YZ-125 running and fueled, and buy groceries. They were paying the price of admission to a
world few motocross racers—especially women motocross racers who don’t enjoy
anywhere near the level of sponsorship that their male counterparts do—would
ever experience.
And so she trained, and endured her season of
sacrifice. Every day and every week, she
and her father had to figure out how they were going to make it through the
next week. Somehow, they managed to keep
it all together, and Majkowski trained at world-class facilities with world
class riders—men and women. She got a
lot of professional help with keeping her bike in good working order. She rode hard with and befriended several fellow
pro-level women—racers who have gained national, if not world-wide, recognition
for their achievements on the dirt track.
She trained in the sandy soil of the South—Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas. She credits the sand, which is perhaps one of
the—if not the—toughest surfaces to race on, with significantly enhancing her
skill level and conditioning.
After coming back to Western Pennsylvania to walk across the
stage and move her tassel with her classmates in the spring of 2012, Majkowski
continued to hone her skills at racing events in her home region (fortunately,
after several months of a frustrating search, her father landed a job that gave
him the flexible hours he needed to keep supporting his daughter’s hectic
training regimen). An all-around gifted
athlete, she played basketball and lacrosse in high school and was offered a
lacrosse scholarship to a prominent local university. But her focus was on, and her heart was in,
motocross and she knew she could never be successful at either if she tried to
do both; so she passed. She still plans
to go to college, as she aspires to be a medical doctor specializing in radiology
one day. But for now, Majkowski
understands she must strike while the iron is hot.
She set her sights on the 2013 pro series, only to be
disappointed in late 2012 to learn the series would be scaled back from eight
to only three events. Nonetheless, she
charged onward, undeterred, undaunted.
She opted to stay close to home over the winter, where she trained
diligently—often in subfreezing weather—at Switchback Raceway in Butler,
Pennsylvania, which offers a very nice, albeit unheated, indoor facility. Even though the pro WMX series was down the
three events, Majkowski simply couldn’t make the investment to travel to the
first race, at Hangtown, 2,500 miles west in Sacramento, California. She plans to race High Point, then three
weeks later at Southwick, in south-central Massachusetts. The raceway at Southwick, which bills itself
as “the world’s fastest sandbox,” may just allow Majkowski to capitalize on her
previous sandy soil training.
And so the clock winds down to Majkowski’s pro debut, which,
while certainly momentous and noteworthy, will not be the culmination of her
life-long journey; rather, it simply marks the commencement of the next
exciting leg of her motocross adventure—her all-in motocross life, that she and
those closest to her have sacrificed to make happen.
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