Exclusive:
She has interviewed the biggest and the best in the industry, but MotoGP broadcaster Suzi Perry regards Valentino Rossi as a once-in-a-generation star in the sporting world
Suzi Perry will never forget her charming, yet awkward, first meeting with Valentino Rossi.
In and amongst the chaotic Mugello pitlane in 1998, Rossi was an emerging star in Moto3. At the time, Perry, and the rest of the motorsport world, had no idea he would go on to become arguably the greatest racer in all of motorcycling.
Ever since their first ever meeting, the TNT Sports MotoGP presenter has done numerous projects with Rossi, including riding pillion with him all across London. Their meetings have become more fleeting since Rossi’s retirement in 2021.
Instead of the usual invisible barrier many athletes put between themselves and reporters, Perry and Rossi are, almost always, on the same page. To this day, she can still recall every moment from their first meeting.
While speaking exclusively to Mirror Sport ahead of the start of this year’s MotoGP campaign this week, Perry transported herself back to 1998 and said: “I was talking to Loris Capirossi, who at the time was in the 250cc category. Valentino was in 125, so Moto3 now and I said to Loris, because we were in Mugello in the pitlane, ‘It would be really good to get an interview with Valentino’ and Loris was like, ‘OK, I’ll go get him’.
“So he comes back with Valentino. I mean, you couldn’t do this now. So I’m standing there with Loris on one side and Valentino on the other, and I asked Loris a question, probably being at home in Mugello, and he had his own stand. So Loris answers the question and I turn to Valentino.
“Valentino’s a bit taller than me, so I looked up to Valentino and I asked him a different question. But Valentino didn’t really speak English back in those days. He kind of looked at me in his gangly, awkward sort of way, and he put his head on one side.
“He’s like, ‘I want the question of Loris’, because he’d thought of what he wanted to say, so I had to repeat the same question to Valentino. He then gave me his answer. That was the first time that I really met Valentino and I’ve interviewed him, obviously hundreds of times.”
Perry has worked in motorsport since 1997 but joined TNT to work on their MotoGP coverage in 2016. Throughout that time, she carried out hundreds of interviews with Rossi, who saw the experienced broadcaster as a true media ally.
When pushed on the working relationship she and her team developed with Rossi, she replied: “He broke a lot of stories with us. He actually liked talking to us in our interviews, because we weren’t clickbait. So if he had something to say, the chances were that we would get it in our interview.
“I built a really lovely relationship with him and have done lots of great things with him over the years. I’ve ridden pillion with him around London for a feature and interviewed him at Goodwood on the balcony, which was a career highlight for me actually. You’d walk out and you couldn’t see a blade of grass.
“The year he retired, he gave us quite a lot of time to make a special interview, which we turned into a documentary. He loves doing something different. If you show him something different, then he’s engaged and, like I said, he was a one-off. I think we all miss him being around, actually.
“He’s like a George Best or a Muhammad Ali, they don’t come along very often. James Hunt, let’s say, Barry Sheene, they come along once every three decades, I think. You don’t get, ‘Oh, he’s the next Valentino Rossi’. It doesn’t work like that.”
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