It was already going to be an exciting week for black communities across the world, but when a team of West Indian cricketers won the Stanford cricket match, and then, 10 seconds before the finish line, Lewis Hamilton made his move on Timo Glock, Dotun Adebayo, presenting his BBC London radio show, couldn’t help himself. Would this be, he asked, “the beginning of the greatest week ever in black history”?
He drank water most of the night at the knees-up to celebrate his title triumph and on his first morning as Formula One’s youngest world champion confessed to his father that he did not know what was going on. Someone had better tell the boy next door he has just become a global superstar.
His significance as a sporting icon/ethnic totem/cultural envoy is largely lost on him. It is enough that he has acquired a No 1 on his car. “That’s the coolest thing ever,” he said. Hamilton is happy to leave the business of weaving a narrative around his achievements, of classifying his significance and impact at large, to the rest to us.
“I’m comfortable in life and of course its amazing to realise you have money. I didn’t have £100 to buy some trainers when I was younger so to think we can do those things now is great but it does not particularly motivate me. I would have done this for free. It just so happens I get paid to do my hobby.”
There was little encouragement either for those who would have him an agent for social change, though he did offer his support for Barack Obama, who is poised today to become the first black American voted to the office of president. “I have been watching it closely. If I was there, I do like Obama, so I would give him all the support I could. I do hope he gets it.”
This is what Anthony, Lewis Hamilton’s father, said on Sunday: ‘We came from nowhere, had a dream, worked hard, dedicated ourselves, and we are on top of the world.’
He went on to suggest that anyone could do the same.
Not everyone, of course, is as brilliant at one thing as Lewis Hamilton. Not everyone has so much luck in life, or such an inspiring father.
But all that was not enough. He had to apply himself to succeed. And he has got to the top, having started near the bottom, without any favours been offered, and without the helping hand of ‘positive discrimination’ which bends the rules for the underprivileged while enraging those who do not get any assistance.
The same might be said of Barack Obama. Actually, he had no such loving father: his did a bunk to Kenya when he was a young boy, and he barely saw him again.
The young Barack’s life was peripatetic, to say the least, with several years spent in Indonesia. And yet he went on to do brilliantly at Harvard. Now it turns out that America, despite its history of racism and bigotry, is about to elect him President of the United States.
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