Give him a break, Hamilton puts
F1 superstar Lewis Hamilton polarises fans but deserves better, writes Matt Dickinson.
LEWIS HAMILTON is not to everyone’s taste — we’ll get back to that — but he should have won new admirers for his comments in Melbourne before the Australian Grand Prix was called off.
In a media scrum full of drivers squirming over coronavirus questions, the biggest figure in the sport dared to speak necessary truths.
Risking the safety of fans, putting cash before health, evading a reality fraught with dangers — Hamilton was brutally forthright about the controversial, backward approach that bosses of Formula One had been taking to the coronavirus pandemic, their heads firmly in the sands of Melbourne’s beaches at a time at which so many big sporting events had already been cancelled.
The British superstar, a six-time F1 title winner, including the last three, was stating, boldly and without the need for a positive test, what everyone else was muttering under their breath about the inevitability of a coronavirus case sooner rather than later among the F1 community, and the wider risks of drawing hundreds of thousands of fans to the Albert Park circuit. Good for him.
Sure enough, we only had to wait another few hours for the McLaren team to confirm that a staff member had tested positive for the virus and that their drivers, Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris, would not be competing in the opening race of the season, causing inevitable fears, ramifications and, after talks into the early hours, finally the cancellation of the race at around 3am local time. What on earth took them so long?
Perhaps because, with the characteristic insularity of F1, some would prefer to chat about Renault’s engine set-up or Alfa Romeo’s choice of tyres. Meanwhile, Hamilton was expressing his grave concerns, reasonably and responsibly, that serious illhealth and even fatalities could result from trying to keep the show on the road.
Whether Hamilton gets due credit for speaking out probably depends on your established attitude to him and, heading into his 14th season in F1, everyone seems to have a stance. The only thing that goes round and round more than his Mercedes car is the discussion about whether or not he deserves to be more appreciated. Australia has had good reason to warm to him this week, not only for his outspokenness in the interest of public health, but also in heading straight from Sydney airport on Monday morning into the Blue Mountains in New South Wales to see for himself the devastation of the recent fires.
Hamilton had already promised to contribute $550,000 to charities seeking to protect animals caught up in the devastating blazes, and he wanted to understand how that money was being spent.
‘‘I took a two-hour drive, started to see the burnt trees, the forest as far as the eye could see,’’ he said. ‘‘I went to see an organisation, Wires, that has been helping during the whole period while the animals were suffering. They are helping to rehabilitate them, people in local homes. It was really quite amazing, they are the real heroes.’’
Again, good for him. But Hamilton still carries the burden of early PR mistakes — he could donate his entire fortune to charity and some would still berate him for moving abroad to pay less tax — and there will be those who will never be won over.
To post any story about Hamilton, 35, is to read an angry barrage of criticism underneath, like calling him a hypocrite for talking about eco-issues while driving a petrol-guzzling F1 car, or daring to accuse the sport’s bosses of putting cash first from his position as Britain’s richest sportsman.
Yes, he can say some clumsy things — having to work his way out of the ‘‘slums’’ of Stevenage infamously among them — but the extent of the antipathy to him has, like the hostility that rained so bizarrely for so long on Scottish tennis player Andy Murray, always seemed weirdly over the top.
‘‘Is it because I is black?’’ he once asked, copying Ali G, after clashing with the F1 stewards. Race has definitely been an issue in what, to his understandable frustration, remains one of the least diverse of globally staged sports. There are other problems of perception, like the notion that he could hardly fail to win given he has the fastest car. Before the news of the cancellation, one poll on a fans’ site showed 79 per cent of respondents were certain that Hamilton would win the 2020 title to tie with
irony of this series will not be lost on English journalists who went on the Ashes tour in 2017-18 and who, therefore, experienced CA at its most high-handed, arrogant and controlling. But after the events in Cape Town, CA needed the media again and it was to Amazon it turned. As Peter Lalor, the cricket correspondent of The Australian, says in episode one: ‘‘It [Cape Town] was not so much damage to the ball, as to the brand.’’
The Australia cricket team needed a reboot and we are willing voyeurs. Which is not to say that we should approach the viewing too cynically. There is little sense here that the players are playing up to the cameras, in the way Paine played up to the stump microphones when Virat Kohli was at the crease during a home series against India.
The cameras are embedded over such a long period that the players, no doubt, became inured to their presence. But, just as there is no safer time to take a plane journey than immediately after a crash, so we can be sure that the Australia team would be on their best behaviour in the months after the nadir.
The banned Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft appear in episode six, and their reintegration from suspension is smoother than might have been expected when, in the immediate aftermath of Cape Town, Warner exited himself from the team’s WhatsApp group and went ‘‘off the reservation’’, so to speak, with no one entirely sure how the story would play out. Smith becomes a central figure in the last two episodes, given his gargantuan runscoring in the Ashes; Warner slips from view, failure at the hands of Stuart Broad given no time at all.
As is often the case, it is the minor characters who shine. My favourite cameo is the ‘‘bromance’’ on a tour of India between Marcus Stoinis and Adam Zampa, who gather each morning in Zampa’s room – ‘‘the love cafe’’ – for lovingly made real coffee. Zampa brings his own coffee-making equipment and is particular to the point of eccentricity about its use. My guess is that such open feelings of fondness for a fellow teammate would have been suppressed in, say, Allan Border’s team of 30 years ago. Macho Australia no more.
The players themselves come across as likeable, caring, vulnerable and uncertain. Those surprised by this would be those who bought into the Baggy Green-hero myth of the Steve Waugh era, or the media-led hero-villain narrative that formed around Smith and Warner more recently. Dressing rooms have always been populated by normal people with abnormal talents or drive – making mistakes, doing incredible things – and the Australia team are and never have been any different.
Former players would, perhaps, be surprised by how coach-led everything is. Paine is almost a peripheral figure to Langer, who, as a constant in the various forms of the game, is the main narrator of the series. At one point, Usman Khawaja admits that the players are a little fearful of the coaching staff, a radical change from the playerdominance of a previous generation. Hard to imagine Waugh or Ricky Ponting feeling the same.
But of all the characters, it is Langer who emerges with the most credit. Driven, committed, caring and, having gone through what all his players have, wise. We see his development as a coach at first hand, from the hothead in episode three who berates Finch for not reviewing a dismissal (at that point, I would have shoved Langer’s clipboard where the sun doesn’t shine) to the more mature coach who leads a revival after the Stokesinspired defeat.
Here, we see Langer pulling his team together magnificently. He makes them sit through the denouement of Headingley again (Lyon can’t bring himself to watch) and then works feverishly to get his men in shape for Manchester. In a series where there was not much between the teams, Langer may have been Australia’s edge.
Watching the whole series was like watching a magic show: fascinating but impossible to reject the suspicion that you are being played.
THE TIMES