From unsettling Rossi to back of the grid ignominy

On the Thursday of the Valencia Grand Prix, Jorge Lorenzo announced he will call time on his MotoGP career at the end of his toughest year as a motorcycle racer.

As Honda team-mate Marc Marquez recently said, it was "unimaginable" to think Lorenzo would be in the position he has been in this year. Almost prophetically, Marquez added it was just as "unimaginable" that this could continue into 2020.

To the ardent anti-Lorenzo base, this looks like Lorenzo is running away, that this year has finally exposed him for what he truly is: an average rider at best who got lucky in landing a plum ride on the easiest bike for nine years at Yamaha.

But, in fact, this is the best decision Lorenzo has made in the last 18 months. His confidence has been absolutely destroyed by a bike all of its riders have complained is massively difficult to handle.

Yes, Marquez has dominated this year's championship, but Marquez masks reality and has unfortunately unintentionally nudged Lorenzo into the crosshairs of critics.

To continue in this form - and all indications from testing of the prototype 2020 bikes suggests that would be the case - would be dangerous to an already broken man and risks irreparable damage to his glittering scorecard.

It's easy to pass comment on Lorenzo not being as good as his statistics claim based purely on this season. But he's hardly the first great to endure a tough campaign.

Tragically, Lorenzo leaves in his immediate wake a tale of miserable underachievement

Valentino Rossi, Lorenzo's great foe and MotoGP's darling, had his career called into question during his dismal two-year stint at Ducati. Yet, his Assen victory in his first season back at Yamaha in 2013 hit the onlooking world with sudden, short-term memory loss.

Most will rush to point out the Ducati was a bad bike in 2011. And it was. They will also say Rossi was struggling with a shoulder injury from a training incident. And that a stubborn Ducati race department neglected to work closely with Rossi's famed crew headed by long-time chief engineer Jeremy Burgess.

Parallels can therefore be drawn between Rossi's Ducati stint and Lorenzo's time at Honda.

Lorenzo has been dogged by injury, dating back to a broken wrist in Thailand last year. A further wrist break prior to pre-season testing stunted his adaptation period to a bike that, from the off, appeared to have taken a step back from its predecessor.

Two big crashes in a test at Barcelona and in practice at Assen, the second of which resulted in a fractured back and four races on the sidelines, killed what little confidence Lorenzo had left.

Though an emergency trip to Japan to try some ergonomic solutions was made, Honda has been steadfast in its position that it will not radically change the RC213V just for Lorenzo.

Lorenzo's first contact with the Honda in 2018, at the Valencia and Jerez tests, was positive. He ended the latter fifth overall, while still recovering from his recent wrist break. Though that was on that year's bike, the signs were promising.

But he has long believed the bike lost something over the winter as it evolved. His form, and that of LCR's Cal Crutchlow - who has had just three podiums this year having won a race last season - does support this.

So that, couple with all of the aforementioned issues, suggests in hindsight that Thursday's announcement at Valencia was ultimately inevitable.

Tragically, Lorenzo leaves in his immediate wake a tale of miserable underachievement. But this was not a season where rot set in. Rather, this was a year in which a true great was never really given a fair shot due to various circumstances.

It can be argued that signs of this were shown in Lorenzo's first year as a Ducati rider in 2017.

He struggled to get to grips with the Desmosedici until a mid-season fairing update offered him a little bit more front end confidence.

Yet he still managed three podiums, surpassing Rossi's Ducati career haul, and vindicated his continued claims that he just needed one small tweak and he could win.

He pleaded all winter for a fuel tank change that would allow him to ride more naturally. Ducati refused and the results were average as a result.

It was Lorenzo who ultimately forced Rossi out of Yamaha and into his career nadir at Ducati

Once Ducati finally relented and that adjustment was introduced, Lorenzo won back-to-back races at Mugello and Barcelona, and beat Marquez in a head-to-head dogfight at the Red Bull Ring. Without his injury he'd have likely added at least one more win to his score.

Ducati made its mind up too early, and it has paid the price for that by failing to challenge for the title in 2019.

Lorenzo's biggest problem was his life before Ducati. He spent nine years on a Yamaha, famed for its good handling.

It was a bike with which Lorenzo demoralised the field at times by taking profit of its stunning ability to corner. Prior to that he raced 125s and 250s (pictured above) - bikes where corner speed is key.

That background is a major factor in why he hasn't been able to adapt to the Honda. But that doesn't make him a bad rider.

It's often forgotten that Lorenzo's abilities, though still to be smoothed out, were evident immediately in his early career. So much so that Yamaha had an agreement in place for him to step up to MotoGP in 2008 two years prior - during which time he won the 250cc crown twice.

It took him one day to get his first pole position in MotoGP in Qatar, and just three races before he was a winner.

Already he was causing Rossi, then the undisputed king of MotoGP and Yamaha's golden goose, angst.

He got into Rossi's head by being young and fast - an ominous combination if you are the elder statesman of a team. Lorenzo proved so great a problem that Rossi had a wall erected in the Yamaha garage early in 2008: ostensibly to stop tyre secrets from escaping because Rossi's lobbying for a switch to Bridgestones had been successful while Lorenzo was still on Michelins.

But ultimately the main factor was that Rossi didn't want his set-up secrets ending up in enemy hands - something made plain by the fact the wall remained even when Bridgestone became the sole tyre supplier.

And it was Lorenzo who ultimately forced Rossi out of Yamaha and into his career nadir at Ducati.

By the time Rossi had conceded defeat and rekindled his Yamaha relationship, Lorenzo was a double MotoGP champion.

In their bitter championship battle in 2015, Lorenzo won seven times to Rossi's three and - together with Marquez - forced him into a state of paranoia over alleged conspiracies to sabotage his title bid that ultimately led to Rossi throwing away his hopes in the infamous Sepang race.

That 2015 title for Lorenzo also makes him the only rider so far to have dethroned Marquez in MotoGP.

Lorenzo's copybook does have the occasional blot. More often than not in recent years he has faded into obscurity when conditions have been tricky - a legacy of the confidence-shattering high-side he had during a wet Assen practice in 2013.

But for every off-centre moment, there were the utterly genius ones - like finishing fifth at Assen just 48 hours after that broken collarbone.

Or when he absolutely battered the field at Le Mans in 2016 with a victory margin of over 10 seconds - an incredible achievement in one of MotoGP's most competitive eras.

Or his brilliant battle with Marquez at Mugello that same year in which he pipped the champion on the line having attempted a move several corners earlier that he recalled from his 250cc days.

With 47 premier class wins and 68 in grand prix racing in total, Lorenzo sits fifth on the all-time winners' list behind Rossi, Giacomo Agostini, Marquez and Mick Doohan.

In 70 years, he is just one of nine to have won three premier class titles or more. Often statistics tell just half a story, but Lorenzo's show exactly what he is - one the best grand prix motorcycle riders in history.

Lorenzo's retirement announcement is not unexpected. It's just sad. It's sad that a rider of his calibre was beaten to the point where he feels the only option is retirement.

It is the right decision, but one that is no less difficult to take as a result.