Originally posted on The Guardian’s website, 7 August 2019
Was it really only last year that Formula One’s owner, Liberty Media, was making its pious announcement that “grid girls” would no longer be a part of its stewardship of this most woke of all sports? “We feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values,” intoned F1’s managing director of commercial operations back then, “and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.”
But which society? Formula One takes gazillions to race in so many different types of society. It feels difficult to apply any standard across the board. For instance, things that might be acceptable in the land of Silverstone, such as human rights and democracy, are less acceptable in the land of, say, the Shanghai International Circuit.
Even so, news that Liberty is in talks to hold an F1 race in Saudi Arabia adds real moral heft to its self-styled position as a leading sports progressive. According to the Times, this could happen as soon as 2021 if the teams agree, with talks already underway. One source tells the paper a “significant” number of concessions will be required. “Formula One wants to showcase as much as possible that sport is diverse,” runs another quote. “It doesn’t want to go there and disappear again with no impact.”
Well. There will certainly be an impact if F1 holds a race in a country where women were allowed to drive only last year, and where, up until last week, they were not permitted to travel without formal permission from a male member of their family, to say nothing of the imprisonments without trial, mass public beheadings and so on that characterise life in the kingdom. Or indeed of the devastating intervention in Yemen which has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
But it feels a shade more likely that such an impact would be in the arena of reputation laundering as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned and not in the field of diversity, or human rights, or any of the other things we are obliged to pretend a Formula One race might gift to a high-paying country. The idea that big-money sport heralds social change has been so comprehensively debunked by the evidence of recent mega-events from Russia to China to Qatar to Azerbaijan that it feels amazing its proponents have yet to come up with some other fig leaf for their money grabbing.
Still, Liberty is on safer ground with its apparent insistence that any race in Saudi would have to happen under strict conditions. Guys, pretty much everything that happens in the kingdom happens under strict conditions. That’s kind of their thing, so this feels like an easy win for you. I mean, right off the bat I think we can be confident no unsolicited bikini-clad ladies will be besmirching the good name of Formula One if they race in Saudi, as Formula E already does. Clearly, bikinis are at odds with the “societal norms” of Saudi Arabia.
Critical local press is also unlikely to be a problem – in short, there isn’t any. And internationally there was of course the matter of the murder and dismemberment of the dissident Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul less than a year ago.
But I’m sure we know what Formula One’s most idealistic minds are thinking: can’t a brutal dictatorial regime grow? Can’t a brutal dictatorial regime change? This is a question we are constantly being asked to consider as far as the crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, is concerned, given he has put a good nine-and-three-quarter months of clear blue water between now and the whole murder-and-dismemberment business, which he was concluded by the CIA to have personally ordered.
As for the shifting “brand values” of Formula One, this isn’t the first time the prospect of a Saudi race has been raised. Naturally, it was originally a scheme of the former F1 chief Bernie Ecclestone, as you’d have expected of a man whose managerial crushes included Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein. Bernie did manage to get the Bahrain Grand Prix up and running, reluctantly suspending it only once when the state was in the middle of a brutal crackdown against Arab Spring protesters.
That the Saudi proposal would be resurrected under the Liberty regime felt less predictable but perhaps it has been playing the long game. To mark the end of the driving ban last year, a Saudi woman, Aseel al-Hamad, drove a lap of the Le Castellet circuit before the French Grand Prix. “I believe today is not just celebrating the new era of women starting to drive,” she told reporters, “it’s also the birth of women in motorsport in Saudi Arabia.”
Maybe and yet maybe not. For all the guff talked about the healing power of Formula One, the chief beneficiaries of a Saudi Grand Prix would obviously be the Saudi regime and Formula One’s coffers. And, at another level, governments such as our own.
These things always suit the British governments of the day, who really prefer people’s attention diverted to a scandal other than their continued insistence on selling arms to Saudi Arabia, despite knowing exactly what they are used for. It’s a useful distraction. Yes, as the Bahrain rows have shown, a lot of politicians will be much happier fielding questions over whether British drivers should boycott a potential Saudi race than questions over why their administration continues to enable arguably the most gruesome regime on earth. All told the Saudi Grand Prix feels quite the inevitability in the not-to-distant future, when it will be absolutely in line with the “brand values” of the UK to concede the foreign policy brief to Lewis Hamilton.
Link to the original post: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2019/aug/07/formula-one-saudi-arabia-grand-prix-cash-reputation
