anything but a lover
I am so chill about Brocedes, guys (everybody comment happy birthday Lucia because this is a birthday present for my bestest friend!!!)
Male friendships in sports are usually viewed either through a lens of competition and rivalry or as a sort of fetishized homo-erotic relationship, Nico Rosberg And Lewis Hamilton’s relationship has fallen under both of those descriptions in the media.
I believe male friendships are often scrutinized because of the standards that are forced on men, the boys don’t cry standard that quickly became boys don’t love, at least not publicly, not out loud. That standard is easily fetishized: the men who love their peers loudly are gay, but so are the ones who love quietly because secrets are so easily sexualized.
Especially in sports, young men believe they should perpetuate a standard rooted in misogyny, one that favors strength and control, these norms make it harder for men to express feelings or vulnerability because they believe it’ll make them look weaker, and that is negative in their mind, which makes it hard for men to truly bond with each other.
Lewis Hamilton
Sir Lewis Hamilton is a British Formula One driver and seven times world champion, he is regarded as one of the best in the sport. He was born on January 7th, 1985, he started racing in F1 for McLaren back in 2007, at the age of 22. He finished his rookie season with 12 podiums and 4 wins, on of the best rookie seasons the F1 world has witnessed. In 2013, he joined Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 team, alongside his at-that-time best friend; Nico Rosberg.
Nico Rosberg
Nico Rosberg is a former Formula One driver and world championship winner (he won against Lewis Hamilton in 2016). He was born on the 27th of June, 1985, his F1 debut happened in 2006 with Williams, achieving 2 podium finishes in 2008. However, for the 2010 season, Rosberg joined Mercedes, winning his first race at the 2012 Chinese Grand Prix.
Rosberg and Hamilton met in the mid-nineties when they raced go-karts in Europe, and Rosberg’s father bought a karting team to ensure both boys could be on the same team. They were best friends in the year 2000, when they raced for MBM (an acronym for Mercedes Benz-McLaren) in Formula A, a racing championship.
Dino Chiesa, their Karting team manager said their relationship was extremely close, and extremely competitive, they even fought about who got the last pizza slice.
Robert Kubica, who raced the pair in 2000, told BBC Sport. "They would even have races to eat pizza, always eating two at a time.
"There was always competition. They always wanted to win, to beat each other. But they didn't fight. It was friendly competition. There was always laughing afterwards.
As teenagers they’d share hotel rooms when racing, because it was cheaper, and they’ve both made comments about thrashing those rooms.
“It might be noise or they might have broken something. They would never sleep, so they were always tired the next morning.” — Dino Chiesa
"Both liked ice cream so much, particularly vanilla. During the night, they wanted to eat ice cream always, so I had to go out everywhere and find some to keep them happy. They were just kids."
I believe their closeness stemmed from their shared experiences despite their completely different backgrounds, they were both teenagers racing in Europe, they spent a lot of time away from friends and family, plus they were teammates for a really long time which I believe strengthened their bond, but also ultimately broke it off.
"We were just arriving and enjoying go-karts and eating pizzas every weekend, fighting all the time and just having fun, whereas now it's all business." — Lewis Hamilton for BBC Sport in 2014
Pre-Mercedes
In Australia, march sixteenth of 2008 they shared their first ever F1 podium together. Hamilton’s stellar performance was nothing out of the ordinary, but Rosberg managed to get a midfielder Williams in the podium.
This is what they’d dreamed of, of competing together, of sharing a podium.
Rosberg remembers being about 14 with Hamilton in Greece. “He came on holiday with us on my dad’s boat,” he says, describing how, one evening under the stars, they talked about how cool it would be if they ended up on the same F1 team, fighting it out for the world championship. “And that’s what happened,” he says, shaking his head. “Insane.” — The Sunday times, December 2021
They were outspokenly close, any time one of them would get interviewed he’d mention the other.
Brocedes
In 2012 it was announced that Lewis Hamilton would be leaving McLaren and going to Mercedes, making him Nico Rosberg’s teammate once again. In 2013 is when the tension between both men started to build, especially in the Malaysian Grand Prix where Mercedes implemented team orders for Rosberg to hold position behind Hamilton in fourth place.
In 2014 they began to have issues with each other since they were both battling for the championship. In April, right at the beginning of the season, they said their bond wouldn’t change, but they quickly stopped referring to each other as friends.
"It's very simple. People are constantly talking about us being friends and all that stuff. Nico and I, as with anyone, can count our friends on one hand. Nico does not come into those five friends I have, and I don't come in the five friends he has. "We're colleagues who have known each other for a long time, longer than any of the other drivers, and we have a great amount of respect for one another. We work in the same team and we have a great working relationship." — Lewis Hamilton, ahead of the 2014 Bahrain Grand Prix
Before the Monaco Grand Prix Hamilton said it was hard to stay best friends being so competitive, but they’d always be close, because they’d known each other for so long.
Both drivers had a rough weekend, during Q3 (the final session of qualifying), Nico Rosberg went off track and caused a yellow flag, preventing Lewis Hamilton from setting a faster lap time. This secured pole position for Rosberg, as Hamilton had to back off due to the yellow flags. Both fans and drivers suspected Rosberg had deliberately gone off-track to prevent lewis from getting pole position.
Rosberg went on to win the race from pole position, with Hamilton finishing second. The atmosphere within the Mercedes garage became increasingly tense, with Hamilton feeling that Rosberg had "played dirty" to gain an advantage.
In a post race interview for that same race, when asked about his relationship with Rosberg, Hamilton said “well, we’re not friends, we’re colleagues”, at the same time his teammate, talking to a different journalist said “We've always been friends, we always will be friends. But friends is a big word. What exactly is friends? We have a good relationship and work well together.”
In the last race of the season, the Abu-Dhabi Grand Prix, both men were fighting for the championship; if Lewis DNFed (did not finish the race) Nico would have won, and vice versa. Hamilton started on pole, and had a perfect start. He ended up winning his 2nd world title, while Nico finished 14th due to an ERS problem on his car. Rosberg insisted on finishing the race, and he did, although he had a lot of issues in the last lap.
After the race and before the podium drivers go to the cooldown room, a small room where they can watch replays of the race, drink water and talk to each other. Only the podium finishers can go into the cooldown room, technically.
In 2014 Nico Rosberg showed up to the cooldown room to congratulate Lewis Hamilton after the race. Both of them were extremely petty and competitive, especially Rosberg who has admitted to crashing on purpose just to spite Hamilton, so the fact he showed up is nothing short of extraordinary.
They were no longer best friends by then, but their bond was so strong that didn’t really matter.
The silver war (2014-2015)
In the Belgian Grand Prix Rosberg crashed into Hamilton, he later publicly apologized but Lewis said "We had a meeting about it and he basically said he did it on purpose. He said he could have avoided it, but he didn't want to. He basically said, 'I did it to prove a point'."
After the 2015 US Grand Prix, where Lewis pushed Rosberg off track on turn 1 to claim the world championship, there was some animosity between the two. They shared the podium with german driver Sebastian Vettel who was close with both men. Rosberg spoke to Vettel only in german so that Lewis wouldn’t be included in the conversation.
In the cooldown room Nico Rosberg threw his P2 cap at Hamilton, which stirred up a lot of drama regarding their relationship.
Rosberg world championship (2016)
At this point the two drivers had stopped talking to each other.
The tipping point that turned them from “competitive friends” to rivals was the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix.
In Barcelona Lewis started P1 with Rosberg coming right behind him. Nico managed to pass him on turn one but his car was slower than Hamilton’s, who then took the lead. Nico, trying to catch up, forced the british driver onto the grass, who then lost control, and spun into him, pushing them both out of the race.
They both blamed each other for the incident, but the stewards claimed that it was a racing incident.
After that Rosberg said sometimes friendships had to be sacrificed for a championship.
In the Austrian Grand Prix they crashed into each other again, Hamilton managed to regain positions and won the race, Rosberg finished P4.
Nico Rosberg has a 12 point difference with Hamilton by the end of the season, and he wins the last race, meaning he’s won the championship. Five days later he retired. Both men didn’t speak for years, and when asked about it later Hamilton completely avoided talking about Nico and their friendship.
Last year, in an interview with SkySports (in which Rosberg was a part of the reporters) Lewis was asked if he was a better driver than in 2016, his answer was “Yes, and teammate”.
On friendships
We tend to treat friendships in sports as one would treat fictional characters, but we forget too soon they are human. Their years of friendship and their fallout were all completely real.
There’s also the obvious issue of parasocial relationships. Fans tend to get emotionally invested in certain atheletes’(or celebrities) personal lives—especially their love lives, which they mix up with the athlete or celebrity’s professional life—. With “brocedes”, since a lot of Rosberg and Hamilton’s interactions were public (which I am grateful for, because I could write this and get it out of my head, finally) fans believed they were part of it, of their friendship, their fallout.
The problem with parasocial relationships is that they create an illusion of intimacy, we believe these celebrities are relatable to us, we believe they’re good people, we think we know them deeply, but we really don’t. We are seeing deeply curated images and refined conversations, all made for consumption.
Per example, with the Rosberg-Hamilton rivalry, these men were once best friends, and the media ignored the possible emotional turmoil they were going through to sensationalize their situation, to make it shocking and appealing for consumption.
With that illusion of intimacy fans get emotionally hurt by the actions of celebrities such as breakups or rivalries, as they would if a loved one went through it. In Brocedes’ case their fans were hurt as if a romantic relationship ended, and began hating either one of the drivers and loving the other.
It should also be noted that high pressure environments affect friendships, and that of professional sports is an extremely stressful environment. Athletes are driven to outperform every other competitor, friends or not. Like I quoted earlier, Nico Rosberg said sometimes friendships had to be sacrificed to win world championships. The brocedes feud happened because of a conflict of interests, both drivers were extremely competitive, both wanted to stand on the top step of the podium, both would do anything for that.
Athletes’ friendships, especially when they’re of the same sex, are extremely scrutinized and dissected by the media (just as I have done, I know I’m a hypocrite). Every small interaction between Hamilton and Rosberg after their fallout has been deeply scrutinized and commented on either by twitter fan accounts or motorsport magazines (which comes to show fangirls are no less than all the middle aged male fans, really).
And there’s obviously the team dynamics issue, which both Niki Lauda and Toto Wolff have commented on, saying that both men were immature when they crashed into each other, or hit the brakes early so that the other driver would crash into them.
Rosberg and Hamilton’s friendship deteriorated quickly because of the competitiveness of both drivers and the industry. Friendships are fragile and competition acts as a sort of hammer that breaks them down. The fact this relationship was both so fetishized and so scrutinized only tells us we need to see more male friendships in media, and that our society has a problem with male vulnerability.
I’ll end this with a quote from Ted Kravitz when describing Lewis and Nico’s relationship, this is the quote that inspired this essay, and the quote that gave this a title.
“friends, teammates, childhood buddy; rivals, anything but a lover”
HAPPY BDAY LUCIAAAAAAAA
Nobody is saying happy birthday to the bestie 😤😤 guys you are my loyal followers, guys, comment happy birfday for Lucia!!!