SPECTATOR SPORT
A triumphant victory
Simon Barnes
ON THIS cold and damp island of the north, we might describe a particularly good smile as 'like the sun coming out'. But that doesn't really do justice to Damon Hill's smile last weekend. I was reminded more of the unbelieving joy and relief that greet a dramatic weather change a little further south: the rains! When the rains come to Africa and drought is ended, it is more than relief, it is sweet life soaking into the earth all around. In one minute, the unrelenting despair of the sun; in another, joy. The landscape changes overnight, and even the sounds that fill the air are differ- ent too. In one instant, nothing is the same any more. In an instant, all is joy. And that was Hill.
Hill was naturally happy to win the world driver's championship, after a fraught sea- son flirting with a hundred opportunities of blowing it. But the whole thing was rather more than a sporting event for him. Most drivers are merely consumed with a mad dream of global conquest: godlings come to earth. But Hill has been driving against a dead man. The dead man was himself one of motor-racing's godlings, a strutting con- quistador of the pit-lane with a wind-tunnel haircut laid down with a lick of boy-racer's Brylcreem, and an insufferably small cad's moustache. This, of course, was Graham Hill, Damon's father, double world champi- on and one of the last of the wizard-prang types in motor-racing. This makes it doubly tough for his emphatically non-dashing son. All season, Hill fits has been giving a rather markedly individualistic performance of Oedipus Rex. It has been a wild and extraordinary demonstration of the Freudian myth in action: Damon has become the Little Hans de nos fours.
The heroic and wonderful father who meets an untimely end makes for an uncomfortable son, as Hamlet could have told you. Damon Hill has been learning this truth all his life, but with a strange addi- tional twist. Graham Hill was the hero who ruined his family. He died in a plane crash at Elstree, flying the plane himself and killing all five passengers.
Trauma enough for a young family, but Hill pere had also — what do godlings need with such things? — neglected to renew his pilot's licence. The families of the dead pas- sengers sued, and the Hill family fortunes were forfeit. A tricky one for a growing boy to deal with, and one that must have become trickier with the storms of puberty and the subsequent traumas of finding a niche for himself in the world.
It is hard to rebel against your own blood. Hill took to motor-bikes rather than cars; he raced and worked as a motor-cycle courier. Even now it is not hard to imagine the Formula One world champion asking courteously at reception, 'Sign and print, please.' He also played in a punk band called, I am reliably informed, Sex Hitler and the Hormones'.
All of which is good rebellious stuff. But Hill changed his mind: he gave up trying to defy his father and set out to defeat him. In order to do so, he had to enter his father's world, and, in a sense, actually become his father. But this was not something that came naturally. He did so by an effort of will.
The fact that Hill knows the real world makes him immensely sympathetic: he has never regarded himself as special. But the other side of that coin has been self-doubt: an ordinary man with a strange legacy, walking ill at ease and out of place through the pantheon of self-taught godlings.
So Hill's victory is a triumph, and a strangely moving one. It is often said of champions, 'he had more to lose than any one else.' This was certainly the case with Hill, but it is to miss the point. His triumph is the greater because he had so much more to defeat.
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