The 2025 Supercross season started out with plenty of noise, fanfare, and pressure on the young superstar Haiden Deegan. Entering his third Pro Supercross season, he was the Championship favorite for whichever 250 coast he raced, being the reigning two times 250 SMX Champ also. Given all that attention, he was slow out of the gate, with a fifth at Anaheim 1 and a third at San Diego, while most athletes would be stoked with those results. The spotlight only shined brighter on Haiden, having to fight his way forward after poor starts and a few other mistakes.
There were a few things mentioned in interviews with Haiden that contributed to his slow start, which ranged from bike setup and struggling with some arm pump. While these are perfectly believable for him, with the thinned-out field on the West Coast that’s missing Levi Kitchen, RJ Hampshire, Austin Forkner, and a recently injured Jo Shimoda, it might be that he felt things would be easier and lacked that ego challenge he seems to thrive from. Is it just theater for Deegan to try and foster these rivalries to attract more eyes from the fans and media or does he need that nemesis to fire up his ego and drive his competition?
Following Beaumer’s win in San Diego, he was a guest on the PulpMX podcast the following Monday and was asked about Haiden ramping up his antics toward JuJu. He responded that he was familiar with Haiden’s games and had dealt with them since he was six years old and did not even notice him pointing at him during one of the qualifying sessions. Either way, Haiden used this to fuel himself and showed up to Anaheim 2 with a trunk-sized chip on his shoulder and focused all of his bravado toward Beaumer. Was this the missing piece for Haiden? The only other 250 rider that would regularly engage with him was Levi who was moved to the East Coast series due to an illness and RJ Hampshire toyed with Haiden a bit but will also be running East Coast due to his injury recovery.
Now with a target to focus his energies on, his early season stumbles could be put in that past and he just had to focus on finishing in front of JuJu. It feels a bit forced at the moment as JuJu was not really engaging with him but does seem to be toying with him in a coy way which is almost better than butting horns with him directly. The racing was good but the storylines were filled with sickness and injuries and a little bit of some beef between the championship favorites is good for the fans.
Here is a reply from JuJu towards Haiden in his A2 highlight reel.