THE LEWIS HAMILTON PARADOX
He’s our greatest active sporting competitor, trying to drive change in the wider world, yet the public still won’t take him to their hearts
There really should only be one conceivable winner of tomorrow night’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award.
Lewis hamilton’s contributions this year have extended beyond surpassing Michael Schumacher’s race and title wins, and establishing a commission to investigate the lack of diversity in his sport.
Less widely known is the story of the 11-year- old Bahraini boy who wrote to hamilton a few weeks back, pleading for help because his father faced capital punishment over the death of a policeman at a protest in 2014.
Nations with dubious human rights records get away with their sports- washing because the competitors don’t want to raise inconvenient truths about the hosts. But hamilton spoke out.
‘There is a young man on death row and his son writes me a letter, that really hits home,’ he said. ‘I won’t let this go unnoticed.’
The 35-year- old’s intervention in a case of grave concern did not elicit huge publicity and that seems to reflect the Lewis hamilton paradox. he is Britain’s greatest active sporting competitor. he sees how sport can drive change in the wider world. And yet the British nation still has a lukewarm attachment to him.
When a third world title had taken hamilton level with Sir Jackie Stewart as Britain’s most successful driver of all time in 2015, one article was headlined: ‘The champion it is mathematically impossible to like’. reasons cited for this included an ‘irritatingly glamorous life’, his ‘questionable musical aspirations’ and ‘apparent lack of grace’.
That title had triggered a not entirely flattering performance when hamilton, interviewed after winning the US Grand Prix, wanted it to be known that he was living it large.
‘Up until last year I didn’t really drink a l ot,’ he said. ‘ That’s changed a lot this year. You would be really proud if you knew how much I consumed.’
The F1 hell-raiser James hunt would be proud of his lifestyle, he declared. The partying or the women? he was asked. ‘Both,’ he replied. he had just split with pop star girlfriend Nicole Scherzinger and, if that year’s SPOTY vote was anything to go by, the British public were unimpressed.
To have emulated Sir Jackie was a monumental achievement, yet the prize went to a team captain, Andy Murray, who had led Britain to a first Davis Cup. rugby league star Kevin Sinfield, heptathlete Jessica ennis-hill and even Tyson Fury came ahead of hamilton.
hamilton had recorded his single SPOTY win — still one fewer than Damon hill and Nigel Mansell — the previous year, though Murray is one who really knows how it feels to be a national treasure. It helps, of course, that he lives within this nation. The eye-catching rationale hamilton offered for becoming a tax exile in Switzerland — the climate is good — again made you wonder about a blind spot.
‘Switzerland has a great feel,’ he wrote in his 2008 autobiography. ‘I had never been there until this year and I absolutely loved it. Nice in the winter, Nice in the summer. Nice all round.’
Mansell, Geraint Thomas, who beat hamilton i nto SPOTY second place two years ago, and Sir Jackie were all tax exiles, too, though no one ever seemed to talk about that.
Murray’s far greater popularity is also enhanced by his highs, lows, triumphs and disasters playing out so publicly. hamilton is buried in a cockpit, hidden in a helmet, the skills required to pilot around corners at 200mph largely unfelt to the human eye.
even if you disregard the lazy assertion that F1 is a sport in which the best cars win, many find the sport predictable and lacking a dramatic narrative. F1 lost 8.6million television viewers in Britain in 2019 alone.
There’s a lot more to it than the car. The ice- cold temperament, feather-light throttle control and brake-pedal action involved in negotiating competitors, corners and unseen forces of nature, while turbulence plays havoc with the vehicle’s balance.
Some feel there is an element of racism about hamilton’s struggle to attract recognition. ‘There’s an accepted narrative about a young black athlete confounding a challenging background to make it in sport. It’s one people can get comfortable with. he doesn’t seem to persuade them that he conforms to it,’ says one BAMe voice — reluctant, like others, to put their name to the thought.
hamilton’s background was very challenging. A mixed-race, working- c l ass boy f r om a Stevenage housing estate, he shattered F1’s white hegemony when he landed in it 13 years ago.
Marcus rashford, another whose contribution has been stellar, has been helped by the brand agency roc Nation to fill in the detail of such an upbringing and effect change.
hamilton, meanwhile, remains concealed behind a wall of blandness. A combined social media following of 15 million implies popularity, but very little of the real individual is revealed by it. The hamilton Commission he has f ounded could be as groundbreaking as rashford’s food poverty panel, though it has received a fraction of the profile.
A new Sky Sports documentary helps. hamilton’s discussion of the events of the last year is free of the defensiveness we sometimes see before media which often irritate him.
Yet it still does not get close to the hamilton some know. They tell of the boy who’d celebrate wins in the British Cadet Kart Championship by belting out We are the Champions with his father as they travelled home in the family’s old camper van. The young racer whose fear on his first Silverstone test day with McLaren Mercedes was crashing the car. The world champion who was visibly moved on a private visit to the Tamburello corner where Ayrton Senna was killed.
Those who know him best say the real hamilton emerges in such private moments, free from the need to adhere to a public image.
‘he has an outstanding natural talent and an inquisitive curiosity, a tenacity,’ departing Mercedes engine chief Andy Cowell told the Beyond The Grid podcast. ‘he’ll push for progress, but he’s not competitive to the point of being nasty.
‘There are some individuals who push competitiveness to the point where it bubbles over to being nasty; j ust not being sporting. he doesn’t want to get away with things. he wants to win fair and square.’