Valentino Rossi’s autobiography, La Mia Storia, is expected to revisit several defining moments from his career. One is the 2015 Sepang incident involving Marc Marquez, where Rossi maintains the same central position: he denies deliberately kicking his rival.

The confrontation had already begun before the race. Rossi had accused Marquez of trying to improve Jorge Lorenzo’s title prospects; Lorenzo was then his Yamaha teammate. The two riders fought intensely in the opening stages. Rossi deliberately ran Marquez wide in frustration, according to Rossi’s account, and the motorcycles subsequently became entangled. Marquez crashed, while Rossi’s foot appeared to move at the crucial moment.

Marquez accused Rossi of kicking him, but Rossi offers a different explanation. He writes that Marquez’s front-brake lever caught his leg beneath the leathers at about knee height, causing his left leg to slide downward. Rossi accepts that the footage appears to show a kick causing the crash, yet insists: “The kick never existed.”

The alleged kick was not part of the penalty that sent Rossi to the back of the grid for the Valencia finale, because there was no conclusive evidence. Honda had planned to release data showing a sudden rise in pressure on Marquez’s front-brake lever shortly before the crash. That data would not, by itself, have proved that a deliberate kick caused the fall, and it was ultimately not released. Rossi lost the title at Valencia, where he again accused Marquez of helping Lorenzo.