waking up to this shit again. the way these people talk about his age is beyond frustrating at this point. just lazy, biased, and soaked in narrative burnout. every time. the story is never about the car, the transition period, or the complexity of sport in general. it's "he's too old" as if that explains everything. as if that's all there is left to say about him.
age might be the factor in performance of any driver but it's the way they are selective with it that's nasty and biased. the minute he stopped winning, the takeaway wasn't that the car's off, or that team's still inconsistent. it's him, his age, his "fire", his time being "over" and his "trauma" from ad21. meanwhile, other drivers can go winless for seasons, won't amount to shit and they're still ageless warriors, hungry underdogs and victims of bad cars.
why? because they've been waiting for this moment. these vultures started circling louder the second he stopped winning every weekend. they have wanted to write his decline story for years. and now that he's at ferrari, in a car still aiming p3, they're twisting every small dip into "evidence" that the fall has arrived.
spare us of your narrative burnout. he's been so dominant, for so long, that they're simply tired of giving him credit he's owed. the bar is so high that anything less than a win is "proof" of decline. it's not fair and it's not the same for others.
alonso can go through a "rough patch" for over a decade and the conversation is about whether the team can recover and give him a good car. his age is a quirky lil joke, not a diagnosis like lewis. for lewis it's a headline, a weapon, a shortcut that lets people hide everything from car performance, team dynamics, to the realities of adaptation.
it's not simple media bias anymore, just selective storytelling. from sky studio to fan narratives suddenly "he's lost his fire" or "he's just not hungry anymore" with zero thought or context. "he could never adjust to these regulations" but no mention of him getting p3 in 2023 when "his benchmark" was at p8 the same season. that's what's supposed to be analysis now. and i, as a lewis fan, should pretend it's not pure agenda.
just post "he is just not at his best anymore" and wait for the others to do your work for you. no context, no nuance, no acknowledgment of the fact that he's in year one of one of the biggest transitions of his career. but the clips get clipped, posted, quoted, and reinforced as verdict. and once again, the conversation gets flattened into a convenient narrative.
so, yes. i need to point out what they will NEVER say and it's the fact that greatness doesn't always look like dominance. sometimes, it looks like taking on the challenge of switching teams AT FORTY when you could have easily coasted on "stats" into retirement and sometimes it looks like staying in a sport that's done everything it can to push you out for years. and sometimes it looks like ignoring all the noise and still showing up, inspiring generation, and building legacy and being vocal about things they never want to talk about, even when the story around you has already been written.
this isn't about him being above criticism, it's about how their criticism has been so evidently influenced by years of expectation, resentment, and the hunger to finally declare his era over. the worst part is how normalized it is. and let's be clear, lewis doesn't need defending. his legacy is untouchable. but calling out the constant bias, lazy narratives, easy clickbaits and double standards, now that, matters.
these are supposed to be "experts" and if they're tired of lewis hamilton, that's fine. they've been wanting a new hero, for years now and you know what, fair enough. but let's not disguise the narrative burnout as facts and twist every race week into a eulogy. and let's not force people to believe their vague punditry is meaningful insight.
nobody else gets to decide if lewis hamilton is finished.
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