Gasly’s heartwarming F1 triumph shows sporting romance still possible
Underdog Alpha Tauri driver wins Italian Grand Prix; men’s US Open set to have a new winner next weekend
It took the most elite, most exclusive sport on the planet to remind us just how heartwarming an underdog win can be.
Only the most cold-hearted of cynics couldn’t have been touched by Pierre Gasly’s reaction to winning the Italian Grand Prix at Monza on Sunday.
From banging his steering wheel in joy after passing the checkered flag, to celebrating with his delirious Alpha Tauri team, the childlike glee of his interview and finally standing on the podium as “La Marseillaise” played in recognition of his victory.
When it was all done, and McLaren’s Carlos Sainz and Racing Point’s Lance Stroll, who had finished second and third respectively, had departed the scene, Gasly sat alone amid the confetti, his head still shaking in disbelief.
At the highest strata of competitive sports, these moments are becoming rarer by the year. As Gasly would admit, almost everything has to go right for the underdog on the day. And so many things have to go wrong for your rivals. For the 24-yearold Frenchman, the stars aligned in Monza when world champion and comfortable race leader Lewis Hamilton was handed a stop and start penalty for illegally entering a pit lane; Max Verstappen had to retire with car trouble, and Valtteri Bottas had a poor race.
The golden opportunity was grabbed by Gasly as he held off the challenge of another beneficiary of circumstance, Sainz, to become the first French winner of a Formula 1 (F1) Grand Prix since Olivier Panis triumphed in Monaco in 1996. Significantly, in a sport where the gap between the best and the rest is practically unbridgeable, it was the first time since 2012 that a driver from Mercedes, Red Bull or Ferrari did not win an F1 Grand Prix. Formula 1, a sport practiced by
just 20 drivers, may be the most extreme example of a closed shop, but other sports also stand to benefit from seeing different winners once in a while.
Tennis will soon experience the novelty of a US Open, and Grand Slam, champion other than Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Rafa Nadal and Andy Murray since Stan Wawrinka won there in 2016, and the latest first-time winner since Marin Cilic claimed the title two years earlier.
Since the start of the 2004 ATP season, only six of the 64 Grand Slam finals (the US Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon and the Australian Open) have been won by someone outside the dominant four players of their generation;
two for Wawrinka and one each for Gaston Gaudio, Marat Safin, Juan Martín del Potro, and Cilic. No doubt whoever triumphs next Sunday will have been helped by the withdrawals of Federer and Nadal (due to coronavirus safety concerns), the second round loss of Murray and the disqualification of Djokovic for unintentionally, but
recklessly, hitting a line judge in the neck with a ball between points during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta earlier this week. That is some alignment of stars, though the eventual winner will hardly care.
In the women’s US Open, however, something of a reversal is happening, with all eyes on the legendary Serena Williams as she looks to win a record-breaking 24th Grand Slam, with favorite Naomi Osaka standing in her way.
But who can forget the bittersweet moment when the then 20-year-old Japanese upstart shocked the world by beating Williams in the 2018 US Open final, only to have her big moment overshadowed by the American’s
unseemly dispute with the match officials.
That the usually popular Williams was so widely condemned for her tantrum was in no small part down to the fact that what should have been a bright young talent’s joyous celebration after a first-ever Grand Slam win had been compromised is such a manner.
Even team sports suffer from same-winners fatigue, and nowhere is that more blatant, and getting even more pronounced, than in football.
The UEFA Champions League, widely accepted as the pinnacle of excellence in the sport, has not seen a new winner since Borussia Dortmund beat Juventus 3-1 in the 1997 final in Munich.