Soaring well above the dirt track after nailing the line heading into one of the many jumps at venues in Tillsonburg or Shannonville or Chatsworth (all in Ontario), motocross siblings Everett and Elliott McDonald might be tough to tell apart.
To varying degrees, their innate aggressiveness in racing settings is something of a family trait.
Still, the four+ years that separate Everett (22) and Elliott (17) render them at different stages in a sport that can be pursued, at least at some level of competitiveness, well into adulthood.
With his work as an Electrical Apprentice taking him well away from the family homestead in Garson and weekly training sessions in Warren, Everett has been far more limited in terms of enjoying an everyday engagement in a pastime he has embraced for well over a decade now.
Yet through it all, his passion does not lessen.
“I think working away and not being able to ride and race as much made me want to race more,” said the elder brother, looking to get much closer to duplicating Elliott’s 2025 calendar of summer events, especially now that work finds him in much greater proximity to the nickel city.
“I think I am enjoying it even more because I don’t get to do it as much.”
His mindset and goals tempered by his new reality, Everett remains a racer at heart, still attracted by the lure of challenging courses (Deschambault – Quebec – site of the Eastern Canadian Championships) and the brothers annual migration to the Walton Amateur Transcan in August.
In those settings, he is still that pre-teen who loves to go fast in the dirt.
“As soon as the (starting) gate drops, it’s like I’m 16 again,” said Everett. “And as soon as the race is over, it’s like: I’m not 16 again.”
Even at the still tender age of 22, the morphing of his approach to riding is evident.
“As I get older, when the track gets rough, I lose endurance,” Everett continued. “For me, it’s opening up the track and looking for the smoothest line. The smoothest line helps me get through the whole race at close to max.”
These are still distant concerns for younger brother Elliott, his sights fixated on trying to earn enough points on the Ontario race circuit to catch the family trailblazer – so to speak.
“My goal is just to keep climbing the ranks, try and get into that intermediate class that Everett is in,” said Elliott, just weeks away from his grade 12 graduation at Collège Notre-Dame and preparing for year one of Mechanical Engineering at Laurentian in the fall.
“It’s hard to climb the ranks. It’s just super, super competitive in the top five.”
That said, another weekend spent competing at AMO-Gopher Dunes just outside of Courtland (and a hop, skip and jump down the road from Tillsonburg) in early June proved productive, a pair of third place finishes yielding valuable points.
And this on the heels of a nice run as part of the road to the Loretta Lynn Motocross Nationals south of the border as Elliott finished first in his class at area races at Baja Acres in Millington (Michigan), eliminated one step short of the final showdown (in Tennessee) following a weekend spent in Crawfordsville, Indiana in late May (Regionals).
All of which speaks to perhaps the biggest step forward that the northern rider has taken in recent years. “Confidence – that was my biggest struggle,” said Elliott. “It’s knowing that you can do better than everyone else who is there. That has completely changed the game for me.”
“My body language completely changes. I become more aggressive when I am confident because I know that I can get it done.”
Therein lies a double-edged sword, to be sure, a fact not lost upon either of the McDonald lads, nor on countless of their competitors over the years. “There’s definitely times where I pushed it too hard and I am tumbling down the track,” said Elliott with a smile.
Not his fault, perhaps. Seems like there may be some genetic predisposition in play here.
“One of Everett’s strengths is his aggressive,” noted the boys’ father, James McDonald, a constant companion on this journey and avid lover of dirt bikes.
“You can see when I have more intensity,” Everett agreed. “When I am overly aggressive, I would try and beat someone to the line they are taking, almost cutting them off. In my class, it’s hard because everyone is so close in speed.”
Gone are the days of the Northern Ontario Motocross Series, a setting where the decision to pass, pre-pass positioning and actual leapfrogging of an opposing rider could all occur within a single two-minute lap of the track.
“I haven’t mastered passing but the goal is generally to plan it out one lap earlier,” explained Elliott. “I want to be right behind him on corner two, for instance. It just makes it a lot easier to pass.”
With Moto Cup #2 races set for this coming weekend in Chatsworth, the McDonald clan are ramping up to what promises to be an extremely busy summer, with July finding them darting between events in Ottawa, Sault Ste Marie and Deschambault, with racing at Walton still among the highlights on the schedule (August 4th to August 10th).
