With his 100th TT start looming at the 2022 Isle of Man TT races and reaching 50 years old, John McGuinness has hinted that the end of TT week could be the perfect time for him to hang up his leathers.

Will TT 2022 be the last time we see John McGuinness Racing?

The retirement of any sporting great is always a melancholy moment, as inevitable as it may be. The end of the 2021 MotoGP season saw the retirement of the rider who many see as the greatest of all time - Valentino Rossi - and there will be many for whom MotoGP will never be the same, no matter the quality of the racing that will inevitably take place in his absence.

No less of a wrench will be the moment when John McGuinness hangs up his leathers and brings to a close a remarkable racing career, much of it spent on the roads of Ireland and the Isle of Man. With 23 TT victories to his name, he lies second only to Joey Dunlop on the wins list, a list that includes Mike Hailwood, Giacomo Agostini, John Surtees, Geoff Duke, Jim Redman - in other words, some of the greatest riders of all time. To the modern generation of TT fans, he is the TT.

McGuinness last raced at the TT in 2019, when he endured a torrid time trying to make the Norton superbike perform. The 2020 and 2021 TT races were cancelled as a result of the global Covid pandemic and, with the 2022 races looking likely to happen, McGuinness has signed once again to the Honda squad to try and add to his tally of wins.

However, time is not on McGuinness' side. He'll have turned 50 before the TT in June this year and even he is realising that the time might have come.

Speaking at the ceremony at which he was awarded the MBE (Most Excellent order of the British Empire) for services to motorcycle sport, McGuinness himself admitted that the conclusion of the 2022 races would be an appropriate time to call it a day.

“The last time I raced there I didn’t have a great TT and I didn’t want to finish my racing career on a breakdown so this, never said it before, could possibly be my last TT but I wanted to just go there with everything, you know, all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed and go and enjoy it and see where we end up.

“Getting back to racing, we’re all a little bit nervous, all us riders especially. We did some racing through Covid but not the road racing like in the Isle of Man so we’ve all been away for two years.

“The bikes are getting faster, none of us have been there so we’re all nervous, there’s a lot of anticipation but, you watch, once we get there it will be flat out, it will be 200mph, we’ll be doing what we do.

“But, you know, it’s leading up to my 100 starts – my century of starts – I’ll be 50 years old, which is probably one of the oldest on the grid, it’s 30 years of anniversary of the Honda Fireblade, which I ride, so there’s loads of little boxes being ticked.”

McGuinness last won a TT in 2015, along with victories in the Classic TT in 2018 and 2019. He was hoping that 2017 would give him the opportunity to match or even surpass Joey Dunlop's record but those plans were derailed by the accident at the 2017 North West 200 race in Ireland. The rest of 2017 and the whole of 2018 were spent recuperating and 2019 was a disaster on the Norton. 2020 was going to be his great comeback year but, well, we all know what happened then and for the next two years.

Even should McGuinness announce his retirement, it's not as if the TT will be bereft of talent. Ian Hutchinson and Michael Dunlop have plenty of time to match McGuinness' tally of wins and perhaps even overtake Joey Dunlop, Michael's uncle. Those two, plus a whole phalanx of up-and-coming riders will make sure that McGuinness leaves the sport in infinitely better shape than when he arrived back in 1996.