Hamilton’s ruthless domination of F1 threatens to suck life out of his sport
Briton’s brilliance on the track poses the same problem tennis endured during the Sampras era
This has not been a happy week for keepers of the Pete Sampras flame. The deadly serve-andvolley automaton of Nineties tennis, a man whose grass-court game demolished opponents just as surely as it crushed the soul, has acquired dubious distinction, courtesy of United States website Deadspin, as the “second most boring athlete of all time”. Only second? “Pistol Pete” can count himself fortunate to have been beaten to the punch by basketball’s Patrick Ewing, a man who, in his New York Knicks heyday, commanded no more than grudging respect as an immovable 7ft object, uncommonly skilled at winning easy free throws.
Sampras, though, has his defenders. Those who tracked his career from the outset attest to his attacking talents, to his regular squashings of a fellow great in Andre Agassi, and to the fact that, despite his caricatures as an android, he could show on-court emotion, not least when he broke down in the middle of an Australian Open quarter-final after the death of his coach.
Ultimately, these are mere caveats. Anyone growing up in his heyday found their love of Wimbledon sorely tested by the Sampras supremacy, as he thudded through round after round with metronomic ease. Strangely, I still recall the Sunday afternoon when he beat Cedric Pioline 6-4, 6-2, 6-4 for his fourth title in 1997, if only for the sheer somnolence of it all. “When you play Pete, he doesn’t give you air,” the Frenchman said. “You cannot breathe.”
If the experience was so suffocating for Sampras’s adversaries, just imagine how it felt for the audience. The American, however unfairly, came to be resented both for his domination at the All England Club and for the limited aesthetic of his art.
Dominance of any sport is a double-edged phenomenon. Take Formula One: where Michael Schumacher’s annexation of the sport became an enervating spectacle by the end, Lewis Hamilton stirs a certain fascination by his pursuit of the German’s seven championships. In part, this owes much to Hamilton’s place as the more compelling personality, more fragile than the onceimpregnable Schumacher and more prone to losses of selfcontrol. But can it last? For the second season running, he is poised to wrap up the title here in Mexico City with two races to spare, draining the tension from what most assumed would be a fight to the finish with Sebastian Vettel. Should he repeat the one-sidedness of a fifth title triumph for a sixth next year, and then a seventh, does he, too, risk accusations of creating a monopoly that is killing the sport?
In a word, yes. For all that sport is obsessed with cold statistics, there comes a point when one is remembered less for records than for the memories one leaves behind. Pep Guardiola, who led Manchester City to the freakish feat of 100 Premier League points last season, admitted as much in his interview last night on BBC Five Live. “Numbers are not passion,” he said. “It does not give you something. It is better to say, after 10 years, ‘I remember this