#the gibernau rivalry does get weirdly little attention on here given it's like. the one other feud that had nominally been a friendship

[batsplat]

A friend of mine told me that, in one of the final races of 2003, when my move to Yamaha was the favourite talking point all over the paddock, he ran into Gibernau who was watching footage of me laughing on a video monitor. "You'll see, next year when he's on the Yamaha and the bike is slipping all over the place and he's landing on his rear end, he won't be laughing quite so much," my friend heard Gibernau say. When this story was told to me, I had no idea that I would actually win the same number of races - nine - that I won the previous year on the Honda. I couldn't imagine that we would spend the whole year at the head of the pack, pulling away. But I did know something for sure: I would do something that would make history in this sport. That's why that first race at Welkom was the most important of my career. Because it was my first with Yamaha. Because I battled until the last turn with Biaggi. Because he and I were so fast that Gibernau, who finished third, might as well have been racing another championship. As for the guy who finished fourth, well, he had virtually disappeared. Ultimately, I had proven what I had set out to prove: the importance of man over machine. That's what it was all about and my win at Welkom confirmed this.

Valentino Rossi in his 2005 autobiography, What if I had never tried it