Culture

Skateboard legend Andy Macdonald, at 51, is getting an unlikely Olympic epilogue

Published

2 hours ago

August 8, 2024

Skateboard legend Andy Macdonald, at 51, is getting an unlikely Olympic epilogue

Follow live coverage of Day 12 of the 2024 Paris Olympics, with 21 gold medals on offer

PARIS — It’s a Saturday morning at the Team GB Olympic House and Andy Macdonald is wearing one of the two suits he owns. This is the new one, but it doesn’t really fit. A little loose in the middle, a little long in the sleeves. There’s also the issue that, despite being 51, Macdonald looks ridiculous in a suit. That’s not an insult. It’s an abject truth.

“Skateboarders wear suits to weddings and funerals, that’s it,” he says.

Macdonald is in a new world, so he’s dressed for the occasion. As a member of the Great Britain Olympic Team, he was given an entire kit of new gear and instructions. Here’s what to wear at the opening ceremony. Here’s what to wear for the closing ceremony. Here’s a load of official Adidas gear. And here’s a suit for formal gatherings. You know, in case the king invites him for tea.

“But I don’t think the king is going to invite me to tea,” Macdonald says, “so I figured I’d wear the suit to this press thing.”

Macdonald’s laugh lines are deep, the collateral of a lifetime spent having a good time. The suit is meant to be a joke, he says. A nod to all the illogical lines that needed to cross in order for him to be here. That he’s the old one — born in July 1973 — in a sport often dominated by teenagers. That he was one of the central figures in the early movement to have skateboarding added as an Olympic sport, and he did so in the early 2000s, before his current Team GB skate teammates, Sky Brown and Lola Tambling, both 16, were born. That he’s competing for the English, despite being born and raised in the United States. That he, one of the sport’s true originals, is about to drop into an Olympic park blocks away from the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Palais.

Macdonald is aware of his age. He’s asked about it every day. He’s asked to rattle off a long, wretched list of brutal injuries. A personal wiki page of broken this, shattered that. He’s asked about having an 18-year-old son while competing with 16 and 17-year-olds.

But then Macdonald flips everything around.

The injuries? In 35 years of skating, he’s broken an ankle, once, and a patella, once. He’s had his knee scoped once and his ankle scoped. That’s it. “Very lucky,” he says.

And why should he feel weird? He’s not old. He’s just been at the skate park longer than everyone else, is all.

“Look at it this way — I was already there when the teenagers showed up,” Macdonald says. “I was there when they were figuring out where to put their feet on the board. Chances are, I taught them how to drop in for the first time. Some of the first tricks that they learned? I probably invented some of them. Or I was there when someone else invented them.”

This is Macdonald’s charm. A narrator in a sport steeped in oral history, he’s competing in these Olympics as a sort of patron saint. He’ll be there — Wednesday, men’s park prelims, fourth heat, fifth and final run. Andrew Macdonald from Great Britain.

Sort of.

Macdonald was born and raised around Boston. He fell into skateboarding early. His first driveway ramp was a quarter pipe, 8 feet wide, 8 feet high. He built it with ramp plans ordered from a magazine and soon emerged as a serious skater living on the wrong side of the country. He moved to San Diego to pursue the lifestyle.

Andy Macdonald and Tony Hawk talk at the Paris Olympic skateboarding venue. The two were key figures in the sport’s jump to the mainstream. (Garry Jones / Getty Images)

That’s where the legend grew. At the same time “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” was hitting the shelves as a video game that every person of a certain age remembers, Macdonald had his own video game being released for PlayStation 1. “MTV Sports: Skateboarding Featuring Andy Macdonald.” The game looked an awful lot like Pro Skater and came with a musical accompaniment that was extremely Year 2000. System of a Down, Cypress Hill, Deftones, Pennywise, Goldfinger.

You might not remember Macdonald’s version because Hawk’s was comically better.

“It kind of vanished into the ether,” Macdonald says with a laugh.

But this was a time when skateboarders were going mainstream and the X Games were bringing action sports into people’s homes. Macdonald was in the middle of all of it. He was involved in an Olympic skating movement that began around 2003 or 2004, after NBC took over Olympic broadcast rights. He was a founding board member of USA Skateboarding not because he wanted to be an Olympian, but because “I just wanted to have some involvement as our sport went in that direction.”

The sport would have to wait until Tokyo 2020 before finally debuting.

Macdonald watched those Games from afar, seeing a long line of friends get their Olympic moment, albeit in a setting sapped by the pandemic. After the Games, he heard story after story about what it felt like to be an Olympian. One skater, Amelia Brodka, an American with parents from Poland, who competed in Tokyo under the Polish flag, suggested Macdonald look at his options.

As it turns out, Rodrick Macdonald, Andy’s father, was born in Luton, England, about 30 miles north of London.

So Macdonald looked into getting a British passport.

Then he looked into Paris 2024.

Last July, shortly before his 51st birthday, Macdonald made it through the Olympic Qualifier Series in Budapest.

“By an act of God,” he says.

“Some of the first tricks that they learned? I probably invented some of them,” Macdonald says of competing against teenagers in the Olympics. (Barrington Coombs / Getty Images)

Now he’s here, ready to compete in an event against a field led by defending gold medalist Keegan Palmer, a 21-year-old Aussie. The top American is 17-year-old Gavin Bottger.

Skill-wise, Macdonald remains among the best skaters in the world. Physically, things are a little different.

“They take a slam on cement and are back on their feet,” he says of his teenage competitors. “They get up and are like, ‘Where are we skating this afternoon!?’ I’m like, ‘Eh, I’m gonna go pick up my kids from school. Like, this is it for me skating today.’”

Macdonald has been jumping into the air and landing on his feet or his knees since about 1990. He’s avoided major injuries, but not defied time. His body is 51. Cartilage is calcified. Ankles are worn. Knees are worn. Lower back is wrenched.

His contemporaries are coaches. Sam Beckett, the British national team coach, had a long career in vert and park disciplines. He and Macdonald go way back, mainly because Macdonald was Beckett’s cabin counselor at the annual Woodward Camp near State College, Pa.

Macdonald, see, is 19 years older than Beckett.

That’s what happens when you’re a walking history book.

“The last time I was here was 16 years ago, and I was doing a demo with Tony Hawk inside the Grand Palais,” he said this week. “There was like 5,000 people in the Grand Palais, and Tony did a 900, which bought the house down, obviously.

“But that wasn’t even the end of the show, because he grabbed the mic and he was like, ‘And now, everyone watch Lin-Z Adams do the women’s first ever 540!’ Then she dropped in and did the first ever female 540, right in the Grand Palais. So that’s a little Parisian skateboard history for you.”

There’s more coming on Wednesday. Macdonald, who Hawk says is a “prime example of how much discipline can pay off,” will get a prologue to his own story.

It’s one all those younger guys might tell someday.

(Top photo of Andy Macdonald practicing ahead of the Paris Olympics: Garry Jones / Getty Images)

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Culture

Why one of baseball's unique skills, switch hitting, is trending toward extinction

Published

10 hours ago

August 8, 2024

Press Room

Why one of baseball's unique skills, switch hitting, is trending toward extinction

CLEVELAND — Francisco Lindor is a natural right-handed batter who desperately wanted to switch hit as a child to be more like his heroes. His brother and his cousin were both switch hitters, as was his favorite player, Hall of Fame second baseman Roberto Alomar.

Lindor pleaded with his father, Miguel, to bat left-handed. Miguel fought against it for years because Lindor was such a good hitter from the right side. Why intentionally make yourself worse by doing something so unnatural? It didn’t make sense.

“That was the way my dad forced me to practice,” Lindor said. “If I did everything right, then I could hit from the left side.”

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Now Lindor is part of a dwindling subset of players. Switch hitters are a dying breed in the major leagues, particularly among Americans.

Of the roughly 550 batters to log a plate appearance through the end of June, only 58 were switch hitters, according to Stathead. It continues a trend from last season, when baseball’s switch hitters plummeted to their lowest numbers in 50 years.

Only 26 of those are American-born players, one more than last year, which saw the lowest number among Americans in nearly 60 years.

While Latin players are often encouraged to switch hit as children, it has almost become taboo among youth in America. Seattle Mariners manager Scott Servais spent 11 years as a right-handed catcher in the majors. He believes being a switch hitter is the biggest advantage in all of sports.

“Youth baseball in our country has changed dramatically over the last 15 years,” Servais said. “The focus ultimately comes down to college scholarships or getting into pro ball, and the lack of patience in letting those things develop in young players. So they get on Select teams and they’re traveling all over the country and Mom and Dad are paying a lot of money to put you in front of all of the top coaches. Why would we ever put you in a situation where you might fail? And you’re going to fail. Switch hitting is really hard. It’s really hard when you’re young. And they’re afraid of failure.”

Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, who had to convince his dad to let him switch hit, is part of a shrinking number of major leaguers who can hit from both sides. (Charles LeClaire / USA Today)

Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh is unsure which side of the plate is his natural side. Raleigh, like Baltimore’s Adley Rutschman, is a triple world score combination of a switch-hitting catcher with power. He has always been right-hand dominant in everyday activities, but from his earliest memories in baseball, the slugging catcher could swing the bat from both sides of the plate because his father made him do it that way.

“Every day I thank the Lord my dad made me a switch hitter,” Raleigh said. “Because I see some of this nasty stuff that’s being thrown up there.”

The number of switch hitters in baseball has been declining for the last decade and finally bottomed out last year, when only 63 of more than 650 players logged at-bats from both sides of the plate. That’s down from an all-time high of 111 switch hitters in 1998. American-born switch hitters peaked at 78 in 1987, according to Stathead.

Carlos Beltrán was a rookie with the Kansas City Royals during baseball’s switch-hitting peak. He played 20 years and hit 438 home runs as one of the best switch hitters of his era. He began toying with the idea after playing winter ball in Puerto Rico with Bernie Williams, who also switch hit. Beltrán struggled so much staying back on offspeed pitches and breaking balls that he wanted to give up and go back to hitting solely right-handed. Kevin Long, now the Phillies hitting coach, was with Beltrán in the minors and encouraged him to stick with it.

“Thank God for Kevin Long,” Beltrán said. “He said, ‘We are so close. Let’s stay with it. Keep trying.’ I was grateful that I had a coach that believed that what I was doing was the right thing. And he didn’t let me really go back to the right side. I don’t know what my career would have been if I only would have been a right-handed hitter.”

Carlos Beltran credits Kevin Long for encouraging him to stick with it in the minors when he was struggling to hit left-handed. (Bob Levey / Getty Images)

Baseball has changed drastically since Beltrán played. The game is more specialized, even at the youth levels, as hitters chase data and cutting-edge metrics. The changes make some of the past greats bristle.

“This generation has lost the ability to hit,” said former Reds star Eric Davis, now a special assistant and roving instructor for the club. “You have a lot of guys today who are caught up in exit velocity and launch angle and they’re not being taught how to hit. They’re not good hitters. So the game is not going to bless them unless you develop a skill to play the game for a long time. And switch hitting for some guys is an avenue to play the game for a long time.”

Davis, who hit right-handed during his 17 seasons in the majors, switch hit early in his career but said he gave it up as a minor leaguer because his coaches told him he didn’t struggle to hit sliders. The majority of switch hitters are natural-born righties learning to hit left-handed. The biggest benefit is to hit sliders from right-handed pitchers that break toward the left-handed batter, rather than trying to hit pitches tailing away as a right-hander.

In youth leagues, however, pitchers don’t throw breaking pitches until they’re teenagers, and most don’t develop great movement until closer to high school. It leaves kids struggling to hit from a side of the plate where they aren’t comfortable and aren’t having success. And they’re doing it to hit breaking pitches that won’t actually start breaking drastically until years later.

There is no magic age to begin switch hitting, but various hitters and coaches polled on the subject believe the right age to start ranges from 9 or 10 years old up to around 13. Beltran, who started switch hitting in the minor leagues, is the rare exception. For teenagers who wait until they reach high school, it’s often already too late.

“If you have problems with sliders and you want the ball coming toward you rather than going away from you, work on being a switch hitter,” said Cleveland Guardians veteran coach Sandy Alomar Jr., who played 20 years in the majors as a catcher. Alomar came up as a switch hitter like his brother, Roberto. His father made both boys switch hit at a young age. Sandy dropped hitting left-handed his first year in the minors, while Roberto compiled 2,724 hits, 210 home runs and 12 consecutive All-Star appearances as one of the greatest switch hitters of all time. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2011.

Rutschman, Lindor and Cleveland’s José Ramírez are among the game’s best switch hitters today. Ramírez made his sixth All-Star team this year and Rutschman made his second. Lindor did not make the team, but his season was good enough to justify another All-Star bid.

Guardians third baseman José Ramírez, who competed in this year’s Home Run Derby, is among baseball’s best current switch hitters. (Jerome Miron / USA Today)

Reds third baseman Jeimer Candelario is one of the few American-born switch hitters, but he actually skews the numbers a bit. Candelario counts on the U.S. side because he was born in New York City, but his father moved the family to the Dominican Republic when he was 5 to open a baseball academy. Candelario worked on a plan developed by his father to hit from both sides of the plate every day as a child.

Latino players comprised about 30 percent of major-league rosters last year. They made up more than 60 percent of all switch hitters.

“It’s a lot of work. It’s not easy,” Candelario said. “Not every day is going to be perfect, but it’s the consistent work every single day. If you don’t fall in love with it, you’re not going to have success. You have to love it.”

Not everyone believes in the concept. Mets hitting coach Eric Chavez, who batted .268 with 260 home runs over 17 years as a left-handed hitting third baseman, marvels at what Lindor can do, but he doesn’t encourage others to try it.

“You’re two different people, two different swings,” he said. “Because the body moves differently. You’re right-hand dominant, now you come to the left side and your right hand is on the bottom (of the bat). You’re training two different swings.

“You can have a right-handed at-bat and feel really good. In that same game, you can go lefty and think, ‘Oh crap, where’s my swing?’”

Alex Miklos played Division I baseball at Kent State University, where he was a three-year captain and led the nation in triples in 2014. He is now co-owner of BioSport Athletics, a baseball and softball facility in suburban Cleveland that opened two years ago and has trained between 900 and 1,000 athletes ranging in age from 7 up through the professional ranks. Miklos estimates that roughly half of the players who have trained at BioSport are position players. Out of those 450-500, he said about 10 have asked about switch hitting and only three or four have worked on it consistently.

“There’s no such thing as being too early. The earlier the better,” Miklos said. “But there’s definitely too late. It’s something you have to commit to. By the time you’re 13 or 14 years old, you’ve established patterns. It’s really tough to develop that ability from the other side of the plate.”

Youth sports have become so competitive in the U.S. that kids feel like every at-bat matters, even on the club level or travel leagues, Miklos said. It can be difficult for kids — and coaches — to “give away” at-bats in games to work on player development, such as a right-handed hitter learning to bat left-handed.

Whether the number of major-league switch hitters begins to increase again, particularly in the United States, will depend on how it is handled in the youth leagues going forward. The data isn’t encouraging.

Out of about 140 of baseball’s best prospects listed on FanGraphs’ preseason list, ranging from Class AAA down to Rookie ball, 34 were switch hitters who had yet to debut.

Eight were Americans.

GO DEEPER

Missing Bats, Part 1: How an obsession with strikeouts upended the balance of baseball

(Photo of Francisco Lindor: Jamie Sabau / Getty Images)

Culture

NBC wants Snoop Dogg to return for future Olympics

Published

17 hours ago

August 7, 2024

Press Room

NBC wants Snoop Dogg to return for future Olympics

Follow live coverage of Day 12 of the 2024 Paris Olympics, with 21 gold medals on offer

Bow-wow-wow, yippie-yo, yippie-yay, Snoop Dogg may continue on NBC’s Olympics coverage in a big way.

Asked by The Athletic this week if NBC Universal plans to ask Snoop to return for on-air work at the 2026 Milano-Cortina Games and Olympics beyond, two key members of NBC Universal’s leadership group answered in the affirmative.

“Snoop has done everything and beyond what we ever expected him to do here in the Paris Games,” NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said. “He has been enthusiastic. He has been optimistic. I think we’d be really thrilled to have Snoop back in any capacity he would want to come back in.”

Cordella’s boss, Mark Lazarus, the chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, when asked if the company would ask the performer to return to the Olympic family, quickly responded, “Yes.”

Snoop Dogg has been ubiquitous on NBC’s Olympic coverage and at various Paris venues. He has become such a part of the Olympics that BBC News ran a headline tagging him as” America’s cheerleader at the Olympics.” The 52-year-old had a small role at the Tokyo Games in 2021 as part of a recap commentary show on Peacock alongside comedian Kevin Hart but has exploded in Paris where he has put himself in all sorts of situations with athletes and sports as a roving correspondent. It’s resonated.

Watching the #ParisOlympics steeplechase got us thinking about Snoop Dogg’s unforgettable commentary. 😂
📺 NBC & Peacock pic.twitter.com/GawPPJXoDO
— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) August 5, 2024

“This all dates back to Tokyo in 2021. Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg were co-hosts of a comedy highlight show on Peacock called ‘Olympic Highlights,’ and there were several clips that went viral, but also what stood out to me was Snoop’s passion for the Olympics, and also in his own unique way his reverence for the athletes and their stories,” said Molly Solomon, the executive producer and president of NBC Olympics production and the point person who championed Snoop’s increased on-air visibility.

“Over the last year and a half, we got together with Snoop and really brainstormed what this role could be. I called him an Ambassador of Happiness. If you watch his content, everybody wants to meet Snoop, take a selfie with Snoop and just be around Snoop. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by his popularity, but you never ever underestimate Snoop Dogg. He’s this wonderful mix of swagger and positivity and just the charisma and vibes are so positive. He’s got this curiosity about the Olympics that is undeniable.”

Said Snoop to The Associated Press this week: “This opportunity was nothing but a chance for me to show the world what it’s supposed to look like when you put the right person in the right environment.”

#FollowTheDogg Snoop n Phelps!! Tune in tonite 😁😆🔥💪🏿 🏊🏽‍♂️ 8/7c on @nbc & @peacock pic.twitter.com/6EuMHgVjBR
— Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) July 30, 2024

The performer has been part of an Olympics that has been wildly successful for NBC Universal so far. Through the first full 11 days of the Games, NBCUniversal said it had a total audience delivery average of 32.6 million viewers across the combined live Paris prime time (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. prime time (8-11 p.m. ET/PT).

“We judge success here first and foremost by having a product that is appealing to audiences in that they come to in large numbers — and that is clearly happening in the Olympics,” Lazarus said. “The last few haven’t been as large as we had thought they would be. These Games are exceeding all of our expectations.”

Required reading

(Photo: Tom Weller / VOIGT / GettyImages)

Culture

F1 midseason driver rankings: Young drivers ascend while veterans fight back

Published

24 hours ago

August 7, 2024

Press Room

F1 midseason driver rankings: Young drivers ascend while veterans fight back

After visiting four continents, covering 14 races, and seeing seven different drivers win, the paddock enjoys a well-deserved rest during the summer shutdown. This mandatory 14-day break, during which teams are prohibited from making any changes to the car’s performance, is a crucial period for reflection and planning. It’s a time when teams can’t do any work on the car’s performance, but it’s hard to imagine some won’t reflect on their performance ahead of the final 10 races.

The expectation heading into 2024 was that Max Verstappen would continue to dominate. Instead, the Ferrari, McLaren, and Mercedes drivers have won races this year (Lewis Hamilton is the only two-time 2024 race winner out of those six competitors). McLaren is closing the gap to Red Bull thanks to the consistency of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, and the fight at the top of the grid is tight.

There have been plenty of surprises up and down the grid compared to this time last season. Here are our top 10 drivers from the first 14 races of the season. As always, let us know your thoughts in the comment section at the bottom.

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It hasn’t quite been the dominant Max Verstappen of 2022 or 2023 when F1 Sundays became routine: lights out, wait 90 minutes, and hear the Dutch national anthem. Yet he has remained at the very top of his game, making up for Red Bull’s slip in performance compared to its rivals.

The early phase of the season followed the well-worn script, as Verstappen won at a canter at Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Japan and China. But since the start of F1’s European season, he’s been forced to dig deep and produce some terrific displays to keep winning. Winning at Imola and Barcelona despite the threat of Lando Norris in the McLaren required Verstappen to be at his very best; he didn’t miss a beat. Even a race like Spa, where he could only finish fourth, took a mighty effort from 11th on the grid.

It hasn’t been a spotless season so far by any means. Verstappen’s clash with Norris in Austria and his move on Lewis Hamilton in Hungary showed that his aggressive edge, not required in the past two years, is still there—not always to his benefit.

Despite Red Bull’s recent performance dip and McLaren’s emergence, Verstappen has extended his points lead in five of the last six races. He may no longer have the outright quickest car, but Verstappen remains remarkably hard to beat.

Photo:

(GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images)

Five seasons, more than 100 grands prix, nearly 1,900 days. Lando Norris waited a long time for his first F1 win since joining the grid in 2019, finally coming at the Miami GP this year.

Since that moment, the McLaren driver has taken the battle to Verstappen. The talent is evident, and the car is strong. He should have more than one win to his name this year. There’s been a few close calls, like at the Spanish GP when he felt “I should have won. I f—d the start.” More recently, he also dropped at the start of the Belgian GP after starting fourth, losing multiple spots after misjudging the exit of Turn 1.

“I’ve given away a lot of points over the last three or four races just because of stupid stuff—mistakes and bad starts,” he said after the race. “I don’t know why. It’s just silly things, it’s not even difficult stuff. It’s just Turn 1, trying to stay out of trouble, trying to make sure there’s a gap and not get hit.”

Norris can fight for wins, but small mistakes and iffy starts have proved costly, points-wise. Only 78 points separate the McLaren driver and Verstappen. Because the Dutchman operates at a high level, these little details matter.

Photo:

(Qian Jun/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Watching Piastri this year, you’d be astonished to learn this is only his second season on the F1 grid. The Australian takes everything thrown at him gracefully and calmly, even as McLaren’s surge puts him amid a constructors’ title fight going into the remainder of the season.

Piastri hasn’t quite been on Norris’s level this season, trailing 11-3 in their qualifying head-to-head, but the gap is typically marginal. He was the only driver capable of challenging Charles Leclerc through the Monaco weekend, ending up P2, and finally got the victory he deserved in Hungary despite McLaren’s best efforts to make a mess of the situation.

McLaren’s belief that it has the best driver lineup in F1 has been justified so far this year. We always knew how good Norris was, but Piastri’s ability to duke it out at the front was something we had yet to see in F1. Now, it’s abundantly clear just how good he is. Piastri’s mistakes are rare, and if he can find that extra tenth, then it may be a more even split between him and Norris through the closing 10 races.

Photo:

(ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP via Getty Images)

In true Charles Leclerc fashion, the Monegasque’s season has been one of dizzying highs and gutting lows, rarely leveling out into any sustained, consistent form. Not that it’s entirely his fault.

The emotional home victory in Monaco, delivered through the tears in his eyes in the closing laps as he achieved the childhood dream he shared with his father, looks set to kickstart Leclerc’s season. Ferrari seemed to be back in contention at the front, building on a steady start to the year.

However, the upgrades on the SF-24 car have yet to work as anticipated. Even if the team can see more performance in the car, it is a) not enough relative to Mercedes, McLaren or Red Bull and b) hard to harness, particularly with a return to the bouncing for the first time in years.

Leclerc admitted after Silverstone that the recent races had been “worse than a nightmare,” but he has continued to perform. His lap at Spa was a significant achievement. He took pole after Verstappen’s penalty before finishing third in what is currently the fourth-fastest car. Leclerc remains Ferrari’s best asset, even if luck has not been with him recently.

Photo:

(Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

This is George Russell’s strongest season, with fewer mistakes than in 2023.

Once again, the year didn’t start smoothly for Mercedes, which seemed to still struggle with its car concept. However, it brought an upgrade to Monaco that came alive at the following race in Canada, where George Russell put the W15 on pole position.

But after leading for 20 laps and holding an advantage, the Briton lost it on the straight when Norris breezed past and to Verstappen moments later when Russell misjudged the final chicane. Later in the race, as the track was drying following some rain, Russell was hunting down the lead again. Still, he went wide at Turn 8, allowing Norris to slip past him again for second.

“For me, it was just one too many mistakes at key moments that cost us a shot of fighting with these two towards the end of the race,” Russell said after securing his first 2024 podium finish. Mistakes do happen, but drivers need to be able to seize a moment when the opportunity presents itself. Russell had the chance to do so two races later at Austria. When Verstappen and Norris tangled, the Mercedes driver zipped past into the lead and held off Piastri, giving Mercedes its first win since the 2022 season.

Even with a few mistakes this season, Russell has stayed ahead of his teammate, outqualifying and finishing ahead of Lewis Hamilton in most races. But he has endured heartbreaking moments, like a DNF at Silverstone due to a suspected water system issue and disqualification after winning the Belgian GP due to an underweight car.

Photo:

(Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

Carlos Sainz’s season has been an absolute roller coaster.

It started before Bahrain when news broke that Hamilton would join the Prancing Horse in 2025, throwing Sainz’s F1 future into question. This question followed him throughout the first half of the season, and the speculation ran rampant. It wasn’t until after Spa that he announced he’d join Williams next season. But on top of the rumor mill, the Spaniard missed a race after being sidelined with appendicitis in Saudi Arabia, with Ollie Bearman competing in his place.

In Spa, Sainz admitted that “it hasn’t been easy having to deal with, first of all, having to miss a race, but mainly with all the discussions about my future going on in the background.” But he still has shown up and performed decently well, considering the circumstances. Sixteen days after surgery, Sainz won the Australian GP, capitalizing on the moment after Verstappen retired early.

Ferrari had a competitive car early in the season, but Sainz’s results began falling away as others progressed more than the Italian crew. But in the teammate battle, Leclerc outqualified Sainz, 8-5, and finished ahead of the Spaniard, 7-5, in races they’ve been classified.

Photo:

(Peter Fox/Getty Images)

Seventh may seem harsh. After all, Hamilton has won two of the last three races and ended a two-and-a-half-year-old win drought. But this hasn’t been his finest season.

Russell has remained the quicker of the two Mercedes drivers, leading their qualifying head-to-head 10-4. He’s also 7-4 up on Hamilton in races, and both have been classified.

Hamilton has been open about his struggles, even as the Mercedes car has improved, admitting that it feels like it is on more of a knife-edge compared to what Russell has reported. This is partly because Hamilton’s driving style hasn’t quite gelled with this generation of cars, leading to more time to adjust and adapt. As Hamilton put it at Spa, “I just keep trying to drive the way I want to drive, but then I realize it doesn’t always work.”

But Silverstone was an emphatic reminder of Hamilton’s enduring quality and class. He made the most of the tricky conditions to win on merit, capitalizing on Red Bull’s struggles and McLaren’s strategy miscue. He will want to harness more of those displays through the second half to sign off from his time at Mercedes on a high.

Photo:

(Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images)

Nico Hülkenberg made the most of his full-time return in 2023 to show he’d lost none of his edge in his years away from F1. But this season has made it unthinkable that he was ever without a seat.

Haas never expected to be a regular points-scorer this year, owing to the late development of its car and the off-season changes. But with a car that’s actually raceable, not chewing through its tires, Hülkenberg has flourished, going under the radar as one of this year’s most impressive performers.

Hülkenberg has scored 22 of Haas’s 27 points, including two sixth-place finishes. He’s also finished 11th on five occasions and, remarkably, reached Q3 more times than he’s gone out in either Q2 or Q1, fighting higher up the grid than he or Haas should be. See Hülkenberg’s last-lap pass on Sergio Pérez (who did have damage) in Austria to grab P6.

Sauber and Audi may have missed out on Carlos Sainz, their top target for next year, but the first half of this season shows that by already signing Hülkenberg, they’ll have a quality driver ready for the start of the factory program in 2026.

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(BENJAMIN CREMEL/AFP via Getty Images)

Yuki Tsunoda enters the summer break with a contract for next year (announced in June) and outperforming his RB teammate, veteran Daniel Ricciardo.

He started the season strong, securing the team’s first points in Australia with an eighth-place finish, which was later upgraded to seventh after Fernando Alonso’s penalty. Those six points pushed RB ahead of Haas for sixth in the constructor standings. RB remains ahead of Haas during the summer break, partly thanks to Tsunoda scoring 22 out of the team’s 34 points.

Tsunoda has advanced to Q3 eight times this season and secured seven-point finishes, the highest being P7 at Melbourne and Miami. Between the Australian GP and Monaco at the end of May, Tsunoda finished in the top 10 in five of those six races. He is one of the stronger drivers out of the midfield this year but has made mistakes. Take the Canadian GP, for example. He was in points contention before he locked up and spun, eventually ending the race P14.

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(Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images)

Williams’ 2024 is very different from last season, and yet Alex Albon still has managed to squeeze four Q3 appearances and two top 10 finishes, amounting to four points, out of the FW45. This trend continues from 2023, when Albon continued to put together high-level performances and extract the maximum out of the car. He’s out-qualified teammate Logan Sargeant, 14-0.

Some of his races have been affected by no fault of his own, like the wheel nut issue and penalty at Imola and Carlos Sainz spinning in Canada. During that latter race, Albon pulled off an impressive double overtake on Daniel Ricciardo and Esteban Ocon, and he was in the fight for points before the Ferrari driver spun and made contact with Albon.

One big moment, though, that’ll stand out from the first half of the year is what happened in Australia. The heavy crash in practice resulted in significant damage. Because Williams didn’t have a spare chassis at that race, it had to withdraw the car. And the team opted to give the remaining car to Albon, leaving Logan Sargeant on the sidelines.

Albon can extract the maximum from the car, even under pressure from higher-performing competitors. But what he needs to be a consistent top-10 contender and compete alongside the top teams is just that—that type of car.

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(BENJAMIN CREMEL/AFP via Getty Images)