Integrity In Sports Is Found Like many of you, I love the Indianapolis 500-mile race.
I grew up listening to the race when we got out of church, and hearing Paul Page’s voice rise above 33 cars roaring past the start/finish line to say “and they are FLYING at Indianapolis!”
I still get goosebumps just thinking about that.
In college, my friends and I used to take breaks from studying for our final exams to sit in Turn Four on sunny afternoons and watch cars test and put laps on tires. It was like being in a scientist’s lab, watching them tinker to get a formula just right.
While not much is “like it used to be” anymore, the Indy 500 is still our race here in Indiana and it’s still the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.
It has made heroes out of many with names like Foyt and Andretti for their glorious victories, and it has been unkind to many others.
Fernando Alonso races for Team McLaren, and he was considered a contender to win this year’s “500”. But when his team went out to qualify last weekend, something was clearly wrong. They were not reaching speeds projected to make the field during their practice laps, and that carried over to their qualifying attempts.
After several tries, Alonso’s car just couldn’t go fast enough. When the music of Bump Day stopped, Alonso was left standing.
In the immediate aftermath, the leader of Alonso’s Indy team was fired, and McLaren head Zak Brown stood before media microphones and spewed out a long list of mistakes the team had made in leading to their failure.
At the top of the list for Brown was the fact that Alonso’s team was “woefully unprepared for the Indianapolis 500.”
Say what?
They were unprepared? McLaren was making its triumphant return to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the first time since it dominated the 1970’s and they weren’t ready?
Nope.
If we know anything about racing at the speedway, we know this: you must respect her, or she will punish you. You never tame IMS; you are blessed by the racing gods with safe passage to immortality. Showing up without doing your homework is the ultimate in arrogant disrespect to a track that requires it like a jealous lover demands your full and undivided attention – every inch, all 500 miles.
Then, they made it worse. McLaren did the unthinkable—the unfathomable.
They tried to buy their way into the greatest race in the world.
McLaren leadership admitted going to Alonso with a proposal to approach other race teams who had qualified for Sunday’s race and offer to pay them to drop out so their driver could be in the field.
I heard that, and I spit water all over myself.
The nerve! The gall! A space in the grid of 33 cars is not a steak at St. Elmo’s downtown – you can’t just order one and have someone serve it to you.
And no one knows that better than the person driving the car.
Alonso said “thanks, but no thanks” to that proposal.
He told his bosses that he was not comfortable replacing a driver who had actually earned their spot in the race.
Good for you, young man!
Thank you for having the courage and the fortitude to say (and I am paraphrasing here) “we messed this thing up ourselves, and we don’t deserve the right to drive a car in the most important race in the world.”
How refreshing.
I have no doubt that his team will do a lot more testing and preparation for the 2020 race. I have no doubt he will qualify, and they will be in contention to claim the pole position and win the race.
That, folks, is what we call integrity. Doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do and resisting all temptation from the outside to do otherwise shows an inner strength that we can all be proud of – whether you like racing or sports of any kind or not.
That’s an example we can take to kids and say “see, it’s never wrong to do the right thing.”
And maybe, just maybe, the racing gods whose domain is the real estate between 16th and 28th streets and from Georgetown Road to Little Eagle Creek will smile kindly on him next year.
