‘He’s such a good competitor. He works so hard and he deserves it,’ said his predecessor Lewis Hamilton after Nico Rosberg won this season’s Formula One drivers’ championship. Replied Rosberg,the new champion: ‘He’s a top man and a top driver. He’s like Robocop. I thought I could pull clear of him but he kept coming back.’
Well, actually, no. The quotes are real but the words were not uttered by Rosberg and Hamilton, whose championship is yet to be decided. Substituting only the word ‘rider’ for ‘driver’, the tributes were actually those recorded by Jim Crowley, Britain’s new champion Flat jockey, and Silvestre de Sousa, the previous title-holder, after the pair had spent five months this summer driving 50,000 miles between Britain’s racetracks and riding more than 700 horses around them in a frantic tussle for the top title in their sport. The point of my transposition is that you simply could not imagine the title contestants in Formula One, or almost any other sport, saying, and meaning, such complimentary things about
each other.
The Crowley-de Sousa exchanges reminded me of a conversation at Warwick races in the spring with the champion jump jockey Richard Johnson about rivalry in racing.
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