Highlights

Schumacher can join elite retirement club

(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-09-08 09:12

MONZA, Italy, Sept 7 - Every champion wants to go out on top, yet few succeed.

"I got it made for the rest of my life, financially and in every other way," declared Muhammad Ali when he retired in 1979 as heavyweight champion of the world. "There's nobody in the world like me. I'm getting out just in time."

One year later, The Greatest was back in the ring -- shattered and humiliated as Larry Holmes reduced him to a battered wreck.

There is always one more race, one more championship, to be won -- in some cases one more big paycheck -- until one day the phone stops ringing and the opportunities dry up.

If Michael Schumacher does indeed announce at Sunday's Italian Grand Prix at Monza that he is retiring at the end of the season, it will be because the most successful driver in Formula One history feels the time is right and not because he is being pushed to go.

It will be his decision and, like so many things in his extraordinary career, he will stand out for it.

Not since Alain Prost in 1993 has a driver walked away as champion or announced that he is going while in the throes of a title battle.

Schumacher, 12 points adrift of Renault's Fernando Alonso, could yet get that eighth crown he craves. But even if he does not, he remains a winner.

At the very least, he will be runner-up after a year that has seen him back on top and adding to records that are surely destined to last for decades.

TOUGH DECISION

It could be that he decides to stay on, unable to resist the lure of the racetrack. In which case it could be that the Ferrari ace will be even more competitive next year.

But maybe, with world champion Alonso moving to McLaren and Kimi Raikkonen set to join Ferrari, it will be tougher than ever.

The decision, as those around Schumacher have intimated, is a hard one to make. Formula One has been the German's world for 15 years, with Ferrari his second family for 10 of them, and saying goodbye is far from easy.

Only a handful of men, Prost included, have retired as champions -- Argentina's Juan Manuel Fangio early in 1958 after winning in 1957 and Britons Mike Hawthorn (1959) and Jackie Stewart (1973).

The sport has grown more used to seeing champions linger on and then fade away.

Canadian Jacques Villeneuve left abruptly this season, suddenly replaced by Polish test driver Robert Kubica at BMW Sauber.