Hamilton: I was pushed around and bullied at school

Lewis Hamilton has revealed that at school he was a victim of bullying, hence dedicating his Canadian Grand Prix victory to the late great Mohammed Ali was a salute to a man who called the shots and did things his way.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Hamilton revealed, “I was pushed around and bullied at school, for example. Stuff like that. For young kids, it’s like a plant blossoming; if you keep it in the shade, it doesn’t grow as much as the others, a kid doesn’t grow as much as kid who doesn’t get bullied.”

“Ali was the greatest sportsman of all time in terms of the aura that he had and what he stood for and what he was as an athlete,” said Hamilton.

“The way he would go in and say: I’m going to whoop your ass and then he would go in and whoop their ass, that was amazing. I always wanted to have that. As a kid, I was generally very timid and very shy. I was kind of pushed in the corner and I stayed in the corner generally and stayed quiet most of the time.”

“So I saw Muhammad Ali and I always wanted to have that confidence. I wanted to be able to stand up and be the most confident in my ability so that I could whoop anybody’s ass. I wanted that. The time when I opened up and blossomed was delayed massively.”

“I wasn’t doing normal things. I wasn’t going out with my friends on the weekends, which is a different path. I was karting every weekend. I wasn’t doing those things with my friends, which I would have loved to do.”

“So I lost a large chunk of my childhood through that. Because of that, it wasn’t the easiest to socialise and all these different things carried on from there,” reflected the four times world champion who started racing karts at the age of eight.”

“I went to karate in order to defend myself when I was six because I was being bullied. I don’t know where I got that from. It might have been watching Bruce Lee. It was great but I wasn’t confident enough to be able to defend myself until I was 13 or 14 or 15 and I was a fully fledged black belt.”

“It’s a different journey. Some people never fully blossom and come out of the little pocket they’ve created, the comfortable corner they’ve created,” observed Hamilton.

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