Is Alex Marquez more than just a 'brother of...'?

"It's not easy being 'the brother of...'," six-time MotoGP world champion Marc Marquez says of his younger sibling Alex.

The Honda rider was speaking after his brother's Moto2 title had been secured at last weekend's Malaysian Grand Prix.

Elite sport is a cut-throat business, where even the gentlest humans can become ruthless in the pursuit of glory. Naturally, siblings are competitive. So, while that surely must hold true in the Marquez household, judging by Marc and Alex's demeanour when together in the paddock, theirs is also a relationship of pure love and respect for one another.

It's a character display of titanium-strength from both, and it must not be overlooked that Alex has had a harder time of it than most in grand prix racing.

From the first day he graced a Moto3 grid at the Spanish GP as a wildcard in 2012, the pressure was immediately ramped up as the intra-family comparisons began.

Though he was yet to break into MotoGP at this point, Marc had put on an incredible charge to take the 2010 125cc crown - which included a win in Portugal from the back of the grid after crashing on the sighting lap - and was in the hunt for the Moto2 title in his maiden campaign before a serious eye injury ruled him out of the final two rounds and threatened his career.

Alex managed a solid 12th on his first Moto3 outing, outdoing his brother's first result of 18th at Estoril in 2008. A 15th and sixth would follow in wildcard appearances in Portugal and at Barcelona, before he joined the grid full-time from Indianapolis in August onwards.

As Marc went onto win the Moto2 title in 2012 and become MotoGP's youngest ever world champion the following season, Alex's momentum slowed.

While his Estrella Galicia 0,0 team-mate Alex Rins scored six wins and fought for the title, Marquez won once - in Japan - and ended up 98 points adrift in fourth in the standings. Roles reversed the following year as Rins struggled for form, while Marquez took Jack Miller's title tilt to the final round and beat him by just two points - no mean feat, given Miller was deemed good enough by Honda to join its factory roster for three years and was sent straight to MotoGP in 2015 with LCR.

Rins and Marquez moved up to Moto2 in 2015, with Pons and Marc VDS respectively. The former won twice, following in '13 Moto3 champion Maverick Vinales's footsteps by winning in Moto2 in his debut year. Rins repeated the feat the following year, securing passage to MotoGP with Suzuki. Marquez, on the other hand, visited the podium just once in the same time, and failed to crack the top 10 in the standings in his first two years.

The 2016 season proved to be his nadir. After crashing seven times in the first nine races, Marquez's confidence was battered and being re-signed by Marc VDS for '17 seemed unwarranted to many. After all, Marc was in the class two years and redefined what was expected of rookies; Vinales moved the goalposts again in his sole campaign in '14, as did Rins in '15. Under constant barrage from the press and onlookers on social media, it's no wonder Alex's confidence was absolutely shattered.

Bouncing back from a kick in the teeth and thriving on added pressure is very much a Marquez trait

"He didn't start well in Moto2, then the pressure was there," says Marc. "But the team believed in him. So, thanks to his team, too. And then he kept working and kept working. And today social media sometimes is a help, sometimes it can be crazy.

"And it's there where I said 'forget social media'. Big pressure. [I said] 'post your photos, forget social media, play on the PlayStation, whatever you want, but don't check the social media and just focus on your job'."

Alex vindicated Marc VDS's belief for 2017. Three wins gave him fourth in the standings, but he stumbled the following season and failed to return to the top step. This year, it seemed, was now or never.

But the first four races were a disaster in that respect. With just one third place after those events, his title hopes already looked out of reach after Jerez in early May.

Caught up in a lap one incident at that fourth round, he was forced to take the restart from the pitlane. But he could only muster 24th and left Spain 39 points adrift of a so-far dominant Lorenzo Baldassarri. How he regrouped proved to be crucial.

"The key is how we came back after the Jerez crash," Alex says. "I think that was the key of the season. We also crashed on the final lap in Holland with Balda. But I think this was the key. When we had some moments that we struggled a little bit, or we had a little bit of bad luck, we came back stronger in the next race."

That Assen crash aside, Alex won five of the next six races while Baldassarri's challenge faltered. A tough pair of races in Japan and Australia threatened his hopes. But, aping a quality that has made his brother so dominant, he came out swinging when his back was against the wall.

Where not so long ago the pressure would have folded him, Alex claimed pole at Sepang and ensured he did nothing reckless while still pushing hard to stop nearest rival Tom Luthi from denying his coronation with second in the race.

Bouncing back from a kick in the teeth and thriving on added pressure is very much a Marquez trait.

Alex is the 53rd rider in 70 years of grand prix racing to have won two world titles or more in any class of the world championship. In this century, he is just the fourth rider to have won the lightweight and intermediate class crowns, following in the footsteps of his brother, Dani Pedrosa and Manuel Poggiali.

He will remain in Moto2 for one more year in 2020, but will likely secure a place on the '21 premier class grid with Pramac Ducati - the squad where he had been linked this year, as well as to Avintia.

Alex will have to deal with even more pressure when his inevitable MotoGP debut comes - he'll face up to Marc on the same grid for the very first time.

Ultimately, he will never compare. Marc is a truly exceptional, once in a generation talent. Right now, absolutely no one in the world compares to the current world champion. And as a result, we should stop using him as the yardstick next with which we measure Alex as a rider.

Yes, his career to date has been fraught with inconsistency and form not to the standard expected of such a good rider, especially when compared to his immediate contemporaries in Vinales and Rins.

But it is worth noting that, until last year, Fabio Quartararo had had a similarly frustrating time in Moto3 and Moto2 after such a strong pre-GP career - and he is now being pegged by most, including the reigning world champion, as a Marquez-beater in 2020.

Both Alex and Quartararo had to contend with similarly punishing expectation, and what their careers prove is that talent does not desert the gifted. It's easily suppressed but can be coaxed out again with the help of a solid support network. It just takes time.

Perhaps it has taken too long for Marquez Jr to find his feet and finally win the Moto2 world championship. But what his 2019 title-winning campaign proved is that he has all the same qualities that have made his brother so strong and has talent enough to fight with the very best in the world.

He may not be Marc, but he no longer lives in his shadow.

As Marc says: "He's not 'the brother of'. He's Alex Marquez and he's the world champion in Moto3 and Moto2."