It’s painful, I know... but sport NEEDS the glitz of the Grid Girls
IKNOW what I should say about Formula 1 calling time on its tradition of ‘grid girls’ (those leggy models who hold signs in front of cars or stand on podiums for the money shot – being sprayed in the face by a driver with a magnum of champagne). I should say that, as we hit the centenary of the female vote next week, women in 2018 stand on the shoulders of suffragettes. After a hundred years of the struggle for equality, we should aspire to more than being paid for being pretty.
The F1 decision was not just inevitable given the moral tsunami that is breaking over every institution in turn – it was also correct as the girls are ‘at odds’ with austere modern-day values in the #metoo era.
After all, I should continue, feminists started throwing flour bombs at Miss World competitions as long ago as 1970, so they’re all throwbacks: not just the grid girls, but the walk-on girls at darts with their Ladbrokes sashes, the boxing ‘ring girls’ who parade around at fights in wet-look bikinis… they’re all for the ash-heap of history. And quite right too. Hurray!
Inside, I’m not quite so on-message though.
One, I think that a woman has the right to choose her career, whether it’s as a hostess at a grisly black-tie dinner, or doing Rachel Riley’s job on Channel 4’s Countdown (another gig that’s idiotically supposed to be destined for the chop for being in some way demeaning).
Two, sport is a commercial business. It’s all about razzmatazz, and if you take away the spritz and fizz, you’re going to lose punters. And audiences.
My husband is, inexplicably, a fan of the Tour de France, and he admits he is partly glued to the race because at the end of each stage the winners are embraced by a brace of ‘absolutely gorgeous girls’ (his words) on the podium. The knobbly cyclist is bookended by one knockout blonde and one brunette, wearing matching demure frocks.
‘They wear yellow dresses for the yellow jersey winner, they wear spotty dresses for the King of the Mountain winner, and green for the winner of the sprint,’ he explained, with a faraway look.
HE WENT on: ‘They’re always local to the town where the stage ends, so serve as ambassadresses for the place – I imagine probably chosen in a competition like our Rose or May Queens we have in provincial towns – and are an integral part of the spectacle.’
The National Football League, I might point out, is returning to the UK this autumn. Are we going to have to endure whole games of mystifying American football – all that thudding and grunting – without the light relief of cheerleaders and their pom-poms? Will the Seattle Seahawks and the Oakland Raiders have to leave the strutting girls back home, even though the official NFL website boasts: ‘The Superbowl isn’t complete without cheerleaders.’ In the wake of the F1 decision, one grid girl complained that the moral panic was stopping women from doing a job they ‘loved’ and were ‘proud’ to do. ‘You have to wonder if the modern world’s become a little odd itself,’ she said. Indeed. Of course, ‘la lucha’ for equality and fair play for all must ‘continua’. But there are more important injustices out there. As the Fawcett Society, named in honour of my distant ancestor Millicent Fawcett, points out, it will take 100 years to close the gender pay gap at the current rates of progress. Given that, we women must pick our battles. ‘Grid girls’ and their ilk aren’t worth the fight.