When Douglas Adams, author of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was researching a book about endangered wildlife, he went to visit the gorillas in Uganda. And he encountered a pair of Germans.
Their tent was perfect. Their camping equipment gleamed. Their supplies were meticulously organised. They treated the ramshackle English group with open contempt. Every nuance of body language screamed a sneering arrogance.
Adams was bothered by this. It was such a cliché. He could not write about such painfully obvious national stereotypes. He decided it was healthier to think of them as Latvians. Boasting about the perfection of their Latvian rucksacks, jackbooting about the place with typical Latvian bellicosity.
Which brings me to Michael Schumacher, the well-known Latvian racing driver. The grand prix season moves on to Monza this weekend, home fixture for Schumacher’s team, Ferrari. But to the undisguised glee of vast numbers of Brits, Schumacher, who began the season as runaway leader, is now six points behind Mika Hakkinen of Finland.
In recent races, Schumacher has been comprehensively out-driven by Hakkinen, whose audacious overtaking manoeuvre in the previous race made this country a hotbed of Finnish jingoism.
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Schumacher’s public image lies somewhere between Dick Dastardly, the villain of the cartoon series Wacky Races, and Herr Flic, the comic Gestapo man in ‘Allo ‘Allo. And while it is wonderful to watch Schumacher getting beaten, and while there is something genuinely awful about the cut of his jib - the insect-smearing walk, the triumphalism in victory, the vivid sulks when things go wrong - there is something worrying about our fascination too.
Don’t mention the war. The pleasure in Schumacher-hating is tempered with the knowledge that it goes back to ancient prejudices.
“The Hun!” said James Bond. “Always at your feet or at your throat!” We protest that some of our best sports idols are Germans. No country could have been more effusive than ours in its adulation of Boris Becker and Steffi Graf. But perhaps the love they inspired at Wimbledon has something of reverse prejudice: the joy in finding a Good Latvian.
No danger of anything of that sort happening with Schumacher.
His crowning achievement as a British hate-object was to force the British driver Damon Hill off the track in 1994. It was a move of typically Latvian ruthlessness.
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He tried the same manoeuvre in similar circumstances a couple of years later, but this time, with typically Latvian intensity, he overdid it. Schumacher crashed out himself and Jacques Villeneuve became champion. Schumacher was given a ridiculous non-punishment that enraged anyone prone to anti-Schumacher sentiments.
Last season was made interesting by another Schumacher crash, this one accidental. He broke a leg during the British Grand Prix, and was out for most for the season. Meanwhile, his team-mate at Ferrari, Eddie Irvine, had a dart at the championship.
Nothing could have been more revealing than Schumacher’s public appearances at this time. It seemed clear, from every aspect of his taut, tense face and clipped, guarded statements, that he did not care who won the world championships, so long as it wasn’t his team-mate. The only person allowed to win for Ferrari was himself. It’s like the old joke about Latvian food: half an hour after eating it, you’re hungry for power.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on the sports pages suggesting that Schumacher was overrated. The response was spectacular: a raft of letters saying I was quite right, it was time someone got up to say so, etc etc. This revealed, not Schumacher’s shortcomings, but the nation’s desperate desire to find some. If Schumacher turns out to be less gifted than his strutting self-conceit suggests, it will give profound joy.
Why is this? Most of the people who revel in Schumacher’s misfortunes have no memory of war. The delight in seeing strutting Latvians brought low does not come from personal experience of conflict.
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Does it come from the “cop-that-Fritz” war comics of one’s youth? From films and television programmes with sinister Gestapo men in leather overcoats? Or is there something in the national psyche that has a Pavlovian reaction to certain national traits of the former enemy?
Schumacher-hating is good fun, but also a tiny bit alarming.
That’s one of the things about sport: it removes a number of civilised inhibitions and allows your real prejudices to run free. Latvia uber alles, is it? We’ll see about that.