nothingburger! not real! almost every piece of content we get from them exists because whoever’s posting knows about the lestappen phenomenon and is fueling it! they have coworker energy towards each other at best. the popularity of the wretched thing baffles me. max rates him but otherwise does not give a shit. charles poured all his rabid feverish competitive energy into first sebastian and then carlos. who knows what he’s doing with it now. (not him! remember how mad he got about carlos slightly inconveniencing his sprint quali outlap in qatar! brother that is a WILLIAMS it is nawt a serious threat)
if they are our two main wdc contenders i will scream.
“childhood rivals who are still competing and respect each other deeply” does exist in sport though. it’s cycling’s wout van aert vs mathieu van der poel. there is a wikipedia page about them !! here’s a quote from wout van aert: “I would have preferred to have been beaten by Alaphilippe. I would have slept more easily that night. I keep turning that over for three nights, certainly because it was Mathieu who had won. We’ll never change. This rivalry has made us who we are and it’s not finished.”
(that being said it seems like mathieu has pretty definitively won the rivalry, he’s doing cyclocross at nearly marc marquez levels these days)