George Russell and Maria Sharapova: Pressure Is a Privilege
F1 Driver George Russell and five-time Grand Slam winner Maria Sharapova at LIONS Sport, Cannes Lions 2026
Sport appears at Cannes Lions each year as a stand-in for something larger. After several years of Stagwell’s Sport Beach, the festival made its own deliberate move into the business of sport this year with the launch of LIONS Sport. The two LIONS Sport panels I attended made that ambition clear, drawing parallels between elite athletic performance and senior business leadership.
The first panel brought together IBM VP for Sports and Entertainment Kameryn Stanhouse, Wimbledon Marketing and Commercial Director Usama Al-Qassab, and five-time Grand Slam champion Maria Sharapova to discuss how technology is reshaping the fan and athlete experience. The second, moderated by Sportico Editor-in-Chief Scott Soshnick, paired Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Driver George Russell with Marriott International President and CEO Anthony Capuano to examine how high performers manage pressure.
Across both sessions, the same argument emerged from different angles.
The technology should disappear
IBM has been Wimbledon’s technology partner for 36 years, with a recent renewal extending the relationship into a fourth decade. The partnership began with a website in 1995, added an app in 2009, and introduced AI in 2017. Al-Qassab summed up the rationale in one phrase: “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
In practice, that means reaching people who cannot get to SW19, Wimbledon’s grounds in South West London, in their own languages and at their own level of tennis knowledge. For those on site, the aim is for technology to recede into the experience rather than interrupt it.
“Many out in tech want the tech to be the entire story,” “The players are the story; you are our actors and actresses. How can you achieve deeper engagement by using technology to enhance entertainment, enjoyment, and education? That’s what’s important to us.”
Usama Al-Qassab, Marketing and Commercial Director at AELTC/Wimbledon
IBM’s current Wimbledon work includes Match Chat, a generative AI tool that lets fans ask real-time questions during matches, and pre-match projections that combine ATP and WTA rankings, unstructured online discussion, and broadcast commentary to forecast outcomes. IBM cited an accuracy rate of about 80% for projecting the men’s final winner at the US Open over three consecutive years. New for this year’s championship is a “key moments” feature, designed to identify not just who was winning or losing at a given point, but when momentum shifted and why.
For Sharapova, the technological shift across her career has been stark. “The only piece of data I had in 2004 is probably how fast my serve was,” she said. At 17, she won Wimbledon with a coaching staff that spent hours manually reviewing film to produce a two-to-three-minute summary of an opponent’s patterns. Today, that analysis is generated automatically and live, while the match is still being played.
On what this does to the fan relationship, Sharapova said: “The more informed a fan becomes, the better your experience as an athlete, because you know that everyone in the audience knows the game. They know the momentum swings, they know a person’s favourite shot. That just makes you so into the game.”
Al-Qassab added a point specific to Wimbledon’s position. As the club approaches its 150th year, it remains a not-for-profit working tennis club, which shapes its approach to technology partnerships. Its player portal, now in development, is designed to give a qualifier ranked 200th in the world access to the same data as the WTA or ATP number one. “We think that’s vitally important to be able to democratise and help those players come through.”
Preparation reduces pressure; instinct handles the rest
George Russell’s framework for managing pressure is methodical, almost clinical, until he acknowledges where it breaks down.
“Anybody who says they don’t feel the pressure or relative nerves, they’re either lying or they don’t care. You care so much about this dream of ours.” His response is preparation: simulator time, strategist conversations, sleep, jet lag routines, and physical conditioning. “If I’ve ticked all those boxes, I then think the rest is almost out of destiny. I’ve done everything that I can in my power until this moment.”
He has worked with a sports psychologist for six years. He described the “emotional hangover” on the Monday after a race, regardless of the result, as one of the sustained psychological demands of competing in 24 races across 20 countries in a season.
The deeper tension he identified is between data and instinct in the car. Between races, he studies simulation data, weather forecasts, and historical race analysis. Once race weekend begins, that process stops.
“Whatever I have learned, I am going to rely solely on my instincts for the next three days. As soon as you start driving consciously rather than subconsciously, that is when you lose that last sort of killer instinct.”
George Russell, F1 Driver, Mercedes-AMG Petronas
The distinction is not unique to motorsport. Al-Qassab made a similar point from the fan perspective: data can enrich the experience before and after the match, but the players are the story on court. When the ball is in play, the data steps back.
Capuano’s point about data took another form. Before a visit to Silicon Valley, Bill Marriott, the company’s long-standing Chairman, told him Marriott had what he believed was the deepest and widest data lake of any consumer-facing company in the world, yet had never properly used it. The intuition was clear; the organisation had not yet found its way into the resource.
Pressure is a team sport
Elite performance is not carried by one person alone. It is distributed across a team, and how that team operates under pressure determines the outcome.
For Russell, the example is literal: leaving the pit lane at more than 200 miles per hour on tyres fitted by people he trusts completely, in a car shaped by thousands of decisions he did not make. “You’ve got to have that trust in your team, but then they’ve got to have the trust in you to deliver the goods where the pressure is at its highest.” He has been at Mercedes for five years and part of the wider team for ten.
Capuano became Marriott’s CEO in the early weeks of the pandemic, after the death of his predecessor. Revenue fell 92% almost overnight. The company raised $10 billion in liquidity. The advice he received that night was blunt: “You’ve got to compartmentalise, because tomorrow morning 600,000 people are going to wake up, put on a Marriott name badge, and expect you to lead them out of the biggest crisis we’ve ever faced.”
His point about risk culture followed from that. Informed risk-taking must be celebrated as actively as success, or the only institutional incentive is to say no. “In most big businesses in the entire history, no one’s ever lost their job for saying no, and that’s a tough cultural norm to break through.”
Russell offered a parallel from the 2022 season. A year after winning the constructors’ championship, Mercedes tried to close the performance gap too quickly, without enough data to support its decisions. The team moved backwards. The lesson, he said, was patience: the courage to tolerate short-term pain when the analysis points to a longer-term fix.
Russell’s closing statement was the session’s clearest: “Pressure is a privilege. It goes back to the point of doing something that we love, that we care about, that we’re passionate about.”
Across both sessions, the gap remained visible between Russell’s framing and how most organisations treat pressure: less as proof that the work matters, and more as a risk to contain. Neither panel closed it.
