An Ode to Champions

Being a sports fanatic that I am, I find it very easy to follow the really colourless sports with consummate ease…Cycling and F1 top that list…I’m sure people won’t agree with me about the F1 part, but we’ll get to that later…And its been a mixed year for the champions, who drove me into watching these sports…Lance Armstrong continued his domination, won the tour for the 7th time and retired from the sport. Schumacher has been crippled by a below par car and an even worse tyre. But thats no excuse for his decline, Alonso has been steady and Kimi has been stunning...!!!

Vive Le Tour…
Last week, as Lance Armstrong bid goodbye to the sporting world, my thoughts ventured back two years, the first time I came to know about the Tour De France. Until then, my view of cycling was limited to velodromes and Triathlons. Hercules was lucky, the Tour De France was not one of his twelve tasks...!!!Pedaling over treacherous mountains and scaling 5 peaks over a single race was totally inconceivable to me…And then here was a man, who had won the tour 4 times before, on course for a fifth one. In a country bereft of sporting columns other than cricket, an occasional hockey triumph and of course, the heroics of Leander and his comrades, who time and again come up trumps against much higher ranked opponents in the Davis Cup, a small column about Lance’s quest for a fifth crown made me really curious, I logged onto google and searched for his name…What really amazed me was the number of hits that I got. Most of them made a mention of cancer related stuff, I was so sure that this was the wrong guy that I re-searched with specifics about the tour. Amazingly the number of hits did not reduce even by one…!!!!
Intrigued by this, I clicked on the first link and there it was, the biography of one of the grittiest champions of our time, his foray into the sport, the cancer, the chemotherapy et all…By the time I finished it, a sense of shock and awe filled me. The man’s courage and guts to overcome cancer and return back to the Tour De France and win it not once or twice, but 4 times…Surely movies had more believable story-lines…!!!
If the coverage in the print media was low-key, their electronic counterparts weren’t much better either…So all I could do was follow the clippings of the tour stages and the internet reports. He wasn’t in the tour lead right away, neither were his closest rivals. Lance himself said it that the race begins only on the mountain climbs and so I was really looking forward to those stages. True to his word, he bagged the yellow jersey mid-way through one of these stages and it was turning out to be close contest. Ultimately, he won it by a margin of 61 seconds over Jan Ullrich. There were talks brewing about how Lance’s victory wasn’t as emphatic as the ones before and that it was better for him to retire while on the high. I was really sad on hearing this news and wanted Lance to carry on. I did not want to be the one to catch the flower late in its bloom…?
Thankfully, I was privileged to watch 2 more tours, both of which he won in an ominous manner. As Lance bids Au Revoir, his shield of invincibility is still intact and yet to be breached. France waits for a new winner next year, and hopes that he will be half as good as the champion Texan.

So coming onto F1 and Schumi, I started watching F1 somewhere in the late 90s, when F1 had to fight for its TV slot. It was not the plum, which everybody wanted to gobble up. Schumi wasn't even the world champion then...Those were the days of Hill and Villeneuve, who with due respect, might not have won their titles, if schumi had not switched from his championship winning team of Benetton. The last Ferrari driver to win the driver's title previously was a certain gentleman by the name of Jody Schekter in 1979 and it took them another 21 years before they could have one more among their ranks. The team's development was excellent, but the decisive factor was the magic of Schumi, who continuously outpaced the faster cars of McLaren and delivered when it mattered the most. I've heard some hard-core critics (the ones who criticise coz they've never known what appreciation is) say that Ferrari has a great car and makes him look a good driver. Glancing back at some of those magical laps that he dished out week after week with a non-performing car will silence them for sure...I miss those qualifying laps of sheer brilliance, where he pulled off huge chunks of time at corners where everybody else lost time, including his team mates...!!! And of course, those lightning quick laps in the rain, which made you realize that you were witnessing something super special.
Alas, things are not what they used to be for the prancing horse. The tifosi have gone silent and the Renaults and the McLarens have found a cure for the scarlet fever...!!! We are witnessing the change of guard as the Alonsos and the Kimis outperform Schumi time and again. But he's not the one to go down with a wimp...As he proved in last week's Hungarian GP, the sculptor has not lost his touch, its only his chisel seems to have become blunt. He has already conceded his title this year and the team's inability to match the speeds of the front-runners have sent their fortunes spiralling downward. His contract with Ferrari expires in 2006 and unless the guys at Maranello make radical changes and pull back the gap to the other teams, Schumacher's swansong could well be among the also-rans of the grid. However, having watched Schumacher over the past decade, I'll be really surprised if he does not add another title to his resume before calling it a day.

If Lance manifests General Maximus of Gladiator, fighting and surviving death before achieving glory, Schumacher has been more like Achilles of Troy, who has decimated everything in his path until now and looks for more to devour...These two great athletes have made the sport richer by their exploits and when they are gone, we will definitely miss their charismatic presence.