Wayne Gardner
Wayne Gardner won the 1987 500cc world championship for Honda, becoming the first Australian to win a premier-class Grand Prix motorcycle racing title, and helped lay the groundwork for the wave of Australian riders — including Mick Doohan and Casey Stoner — who would dominate the sport in the decades that followed.
Wayne Gardner moved from Australian domestic racing to Europe in the early 1980s, joining Honda's Grand Prix effort and building a reputation as one of the most physically committed, hard-braking riders on the grid through the mid-1980s.
He won the 500cc world championship in 1987, riding the Honda NSR500 to become the first Australian world champion in the sport's premier class — a genuinely historic result for Australian motorsport, arriving a full generation before Mick Doohan's run of titles through the 1990s.
Gardner continued racing into the early 1990s before retiring and returning to Australia, where he remained closely involved in motorsport, and later watched his son Remy Gardner follow him into Grand Prix racing, winning the Moto2 world title in 2021.
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Gardner's 1987 title, taken on a Honda NSR500, was a landmark result for Australian motorcycle racing, opening the door for the country's later dominance in the sport through Mick Doohan's five titles and Casey Stoner's two.
Gardner remains closely associated with motorsport development in his native Wollongong and the wider Illawarra region of New South Wales, where he is credited with inspiring a generation of Australian riders to take up circuit racing.
Remy Gardner won the Moto2 world championship in 2021 before moving up to the MotoGP class, making the Gardners one of the sport's notable father-son racing families, following a similar pattern to the Robertses in the United States.
Gardner rode with a hard-charging, occasionally reckless reputation that brought him plenty of race wins but also a significant number of crashes and injuries across his career, including breaking his leg badly at Assen in 1986, the year before his title.
Unlike several of his European-based rivals, Gardner based himself back in Australia for the second half of his career and after retirement, remaining a visible figure in Australian motorsport media and events.