Lewis Hamilton and Andy Murray give further reasons to be optimistic about British Sports
Last updated 10/23/2008 2:44:41 PM
Lewis Hamilton and Andy Murray give further reasons to be optimistic about British Sports
Sometimes sports transcend life.
The credit crunch and its pessimistic offsprings were put firmly on the back of a very high shelf on Sunday, October 19 for British sports fans when, at breakfast time, Lewis Hamilton won the penultimate Grand Prix in China and, at tea time, Andy Murray won his second straight tennis Masters title in Spain.
It was enough to bring out the optimist in everyone on our little island as we counted our pennies and wondered if we could afford to go out for Sunday lunch.
It began with Hamilton in the country if not the town where Great Britain's Olympians did us so proud in two back-to-back Games.
The brilliant, aggressive 23 year old had suddenly found that not all the world likes a winner and that some people, even his fellow drivers and especially those from Ferrari and, oddly, the people running Formula One, are jealous as hell over his remarkable success which saw him come within a point of being the best driver in the world last year and heads again this time.
They did not want this personable young lad from Stevenage to win, they would much have preferred Filipe Massa from Brazil to have taken the chequered flag and set himself up for the Championship in his home country on the Interlagos track on Sao Paulo two weeks hence.
They will all have to wait. Hamilton, by all accounts, did not make a single error over the entire weekend of qualifying and ran a faultless race from green lights to chequered flag, giving no one the chance to complain, moan or point a finger while the stewards must have sat restlessly on their hands unable to hand out any penalties for the sort of offence a certain German born former champion seemed to commit at will.