Is it all over for Casey Stoner?

In the space of a week, Casey Stoner’s title defence has dropped from ‘likely’ to ‘hanging by a thread’.

The Aus­tralian, who is retir­ing from MotoGP at the end of the sea­son, fin­ished a dis­tant eighth at Mugello, fol­low­ing his dis­as­trous “boom or bust” final cor­ner crash while in sec­ond at Sach­sen­ring the pre­vi­ous weekend.

He now sits third in the stand­ings, trail­ing 2010 World Cham­pion Jorge Lorenzo by 38 points, while Stoner’s team-mate Dani Pedrosa now shapes as the Spaniard’s main title contender.

Since announc­ing his depar­ture ahead of the French Grand Prix at Le Mans, Stoner has scored just one vic­tory and two podi­ums from six races. At the time of the announcement, he led the standings.

His vic­tory at Assen came much eas­ier than expected, as a help­less Lorenzo was elim­i­nated by Alvaro Bautista at the first corner.

While much has been made of the chat­ter issues plaguing the Rep­sol Honda bike, as well as the severe arm-pump which cost him vic­tory at the sea­son opener at Qatar, the question now has to be asked: has the 26-year-old has lost all motivation?

He is a markedly dif­fer­ent man from the one who dom­i­nated last year’s cham­pi­onship, form which he car­ried across to the first three races of this sea­son. From the out­side, he hasn’t been the same rider since his announcement.

Irre­spec­tive of where he fin­ishes in his final sea­son, nobody can take away his two titles, the first of which came on a Ducati bike which the great­est rider of all time, Valentino Rossi, is yet to tame.

Instead, we should applaud Stoner for hav­ing the guts to pull the pin now, rather than rac­ing on hav­ing lost moti­va­tion many years before, like so many oth­ers before him have done, only to see their rep­u­ta­tions dimin­ished in the process.