Walk-on girls give Formula One that Hollywood sparkle
OBVIOUSLY, in a perfect world, every young woman will have better career options than standing next to Michael van Gerwen looking pretty. Then again, in any overview of the current employment market, it’s tough out there. You take what you can. And there are worse ways to make a living than having your photograph taken with Lewis Hamilton. Glamour. That is what ring girls, or walk-on girls, or grand prix girls, are about. Not subjugation, or debasement or even sexism. Glamour. The presence of women looking fantastic takes a very masculine, sweaty, dull environment, and sprinkles it with stardust. If you like the sport, you don’t really notice they are there, and if you don’t, hey, it’s Hollywood. Take the women away and you’ve got a fat bloke walking out to play darts; or Lewis Hamilton smiling — or not, depends on his mood — while wearing a cap. The girls are what newspaper people call a page stopper. You’re flicking through the pages, not really concentrating and — bam. There’s Margot Robbie looking gorgeous. And you stop because the picture leaps out, and then once you’ve realised she’s only at another awards ceremony and it’s completely irrelevant to your life, you might dwell on that page or the next because your furious skimming has been interrupted. I would imagine, for instance, that this will be the column item accompanied by a large photograph, because we can put someone glamorous on the sports pages. All papers do it. Even The Guardian. Arty nymphs on page three yesterday — good inside joke, that — vintage swimsuits on page six, and like the rest of the industry they’re not averse to a photograph of Kate or Meghan Markle, even if what accompanies it is a po-faced op-ed. By the way, it works with men, too. David Beckham; anyone who takes his shirt off while playing a horny farm-hand. They can stop pages turning just the same. Grand prix girls don’t prevent women becoming drivers, engineers or owners. They don’t stop a woman practising in a back room every night and taking the darts world by storm. They do not limit the ambition of women to be anything they want to be. They just transport a darts match, or a garage at the back of a circuit, to Hollywood briefly, while the cameras click. And no, strictly, they’re not needed — but then neither are the sparkles on a ball gown. It just seems nicer that way.