In 2013, in his first season in the elite MotoGP category, Márquez became, at age 20, the youngest rider to win a race as well as the youngest to secure the season title, beating records set 30 years earlier by the American rider Freddie Spencer.

“Marc’s ability to recognize what you need to do before you do it, to really anticipate, is unique,” Spencer said in a phone interview. “If somebody is going to beat your record, you want it to be somebody who can raise the level of the whole sport — and you can clearly see that everyone has had to be working a lot harder to compete against him.”

Marc repeated as champion in 2014, the year he and Alex — with a title in the lower Moto3 classification — became motorcycling’s first world-champion siblings. Marc claimed a third MotoGP title last year, adding five more victories to his racing résumé. His current victory total, 29, already places him in the top 10 all time.

The sport is particularly popular in Europe, where the main circuits draw more than 200,000 spectators over a weekend of practice, qualifying laps and racing. In 2015, Márquez set a record for the fastest speed during a race, when he broke 350 kilometers per hour, or about 217 miles per hour.

Márquez’s handling of his motorcycle has been just as revolutionary as his success, a style that finds him leaning so far down in every corner that at times his elbow becomes, along with the knee, another steadying point of contact with the tarmac.