SPECTATOR SPORT
Last chance for victory
Simon Barnes
OCCASIONALLY you meet impressive, strong-minded characters, the sort of peo- ple who can watch Play Misty for Me all the way through. Others of the more usual sort, myself amongst them, are overcome by an irresistible urge to switch the movie off and walk away as they see a nightmare slowly materialising before them. Why put yourself through it? It all started so well, and you can see that it will end badly. The only ques- tion left is the actual form of the horror.
It is for this reason that I will not be watching the climax of the Formula One season in Japan on Sunday. Damon Hill needs to win a single point — that is, to fin- ish in the first six — to win the world drivers' championship. And I know that even if he gets it, the struggle will be unbearable.
This is not a question of narrow patrio- tism. It is, if you like, the jingoism of the entire race of ordinary people. Hill's quali- ties of ordinariness and decency are the best things about him, and the ones most likely to cost him the championship. I have met him on a couple of occasions; the first at some length, when he first joined the Williams team and was therefore to be regarded as world-championship calibre. The questions raised that day are still to be answered.
Now it needs to be pointed out that For- mula One drivers tend to be utterly bizarre people. They are filled with a god-like self- importance, they are suffused with the para- noia of Idi Amin. Their self-belief makes them compelling, terrifying, odious. They are a race of perfectly impossible men.
But not Hill. He is a man who has lived in the real world, who has a proper sense of a sane man's life. There is no side to him. He is driving for all those people who believe that being a thoroughly decent sort is something that deserves some kind of reward. It may do, but deserving and get- ting are different things. Especially in sport, of course.
Hill began his season by winning three races on the trot and making the champi- onship look like a procession. But since then, one small disaster has followed anoth- er, and the pit-lanes have echoed with theo- ries: inferior driving ability, lack of edge, an anti-Damon conspiracy inside his own team, bad luck, or just a simple affinity for the unfortunate accident.
There was the spin in the British Grand Prix, and another in Spain; there was the pit- stop in Belgium; there was the car that blew up in Monaco; there was a bad start in Hun- gary. There was the anguished moment when he hit the wall of tyres at Monza, and in the last race, driving conservatively, he was humiliatingly overtaken by his nearest rival — his team-mate, Jacques Villeneuve, who will steal the championship from beneath his nose at the smallest hint of an error.
It seems that Hill has been consumed with the most dreadful of fears: not the fear of death that lurks always around this mad sport, but the still more debilitating terror of victory. Tennis players call it choking the terrible tightening at the moment of truth. Hill seems locked inexorably in the longest choke in sporting history.
He now has a last chance to assert him- self over the field, and to claim final victo- ry. He is trying, in short, to be something that he is not, ruthless. Ayrton Senna bul- lied his opponents into submission because he believed, quite correctly, that he was an extraordinary person: everyone else was dust beneath his chariot wheels. But Hill knows that he is a talented but ordinary man: when ruthlessness and arrogance are required he has to act the part. It does not come from his heart. When Serena was in a similar situation, and everything depended on the last race of the season, he simply drove his opponent off the track. Could Hill dare to do that? I fear that he might try, and cock it up.
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