They say championships are won on your bad days, and for Australia’s Chad Reed, his moto two performance at Millville on Sunday was more than a title-clincher. It was a heart-wrencher, the type of performance that legends are made of.

After this downright frightening crash on the opening lap of moto two, Reed did the unthinkable and climbed back aboard his TwoTwo Motorsports Honda to battle through to 14th place.

Australia loves a sporting legend, the type that battles through the toughest of adversities to ensure their spot in sporting history. It’s fitting then that Reed was this year awarded an AM award on the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, cementing his status as one of our sporting greats once and for all.

Lets put his crash on Sunday (Saturday in the U.S.) in perspective though. He put together his own team at the last minute with no factory support last October. Second place in AMA Supercross with a few wins secured him factory Honda equipment. Four overall wins from six attempts in the outdoors saw him leading the world’s best at the halfway point of AMA Motocross.

That brings us to Spring Creek, and after a weekend off with a well-deserved vacation in the Bahamas, Reed continued to ride above expectations with his seventh race win of the season in moto one at Millville. An aggressive pass on Ryan Villopoto put him in the lead on the first lap of moto two, and just moments later is when he went down in what he’s calling the scariest crash of his career. Yes, it was that horrific.

Reed fought back to 14th position despite stunning himself with a knock to the head in the accident, handing him seven points for the moto and fifth overall for the round. Instead of trailing Villopoto by one in the standings right now, his will to win means he’s six points ahead.

You can imagine what went through Chad’s mind when he was flying through the air for around three seconds, learning the full effects of physics – what goes up will certainly always come down. That time he spent “winding the windows up” would have seemed like an eternity.

I’d doubt Reed would have had time to think of much while trying to land safely, but you can bet that he and wife Ellie (plus his close-knit team at TwoTwo) will be replaying so many instances in their minds and out loud. I mean, what if he didn’t land on the grassy downward side-slope of the jump? All of their combined work could have been crushed in one single moment.

As motocross riders we usually ignore the consequences, or at least try to put them in the back of our brains. You want to learn from errors and always be aware of the dangers, but not to the point that it affects your form. In Reed’s case at 29 years of age, we can’t forget the fact that one of his best friends in Andrew McFarlane lost his life in a racing incident last year, plus the point that Chad’s now a very proud father of his baby boy Tate. He’ll be thanking his lucky stars for a long time to come.

We’ve become used to Reed rating as the ever consistent wiley veteran against the two Ryans – Villopoto and Dungey – but in the outdoors this year he’s gone from Mr Consistent to prove himself as the fastest guy out there. Don’t agree? Check out these stats…

Reedy’s qualifying average is the best of all at 2.4, compared with Dungey at 2.7 and RV at 3.0, plus he’s got as many moto wins alone as his rivals do combined – that’s a 50 percent strike rate at seven wins in 14 tries! Needless to say, the TwoTwo definitely isn’t out there to pick up the pieces. He’s setting the pace race in, race out.

Australia’s national news stations and leading motorsports websites are already picking up on the footage of Reed’s Millville mishap, and chances are we’ll see him on sporting highlight reels for years to come. As much as the mainstream media love a winner, they are arguably just as fond of heroic performances.

Hopefully come Pala’s season finale in September, we’ll once again see him in the mainstream press for what would be his greatest achievement of all – victory in the 2011 AMA Pro Motocross Championship.