As F1 visits Sochi, Putin embraces platform it creates
SOCHI, Russia — On the track, the race belonged to the British driver Lewis Hamilton, who has won 9 of the 16 Formula One races this year and placed himself in contention to win the 2014 world driver’s championship.
But in every other sense, the inaugural Russian Grand Prix, run on Sunday in this Olympic city on the Black Sea, belonged to Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, who made a carefully staged entry into a VIP enclosure on the main straight, three-quarters of the way through the race; collected a lifetime pass for Formula One races around the world; and presented Hamilton with the winner’s trophy.
Putin’s aides like to tell the story of him driving a Renault Formula One car on an open road near St. Petersburg four years ago after the deal to hold a Russian race was signed. Perhaps advisedly, he left the driving on Sunday to the professionals, restricting himself to a somewhat stilted conversation with the first three finishers as they toweled themselves down.
In Russian, Putin, 62, asked how much weight the drivers lost dur- ing a grand prix. “Three liters,” the runner-up, Nico Rosberg, replied, referring to the dehydrating effect of the 90 minutes of racing. Rosberg, Hamilton’s German teammate at Mercedes, had provided what little excitement there was in an otherwise processional race by climbing through the 21-car field after pitting with flat-spotted tires at the end of the first lap.
For Putin, like Hamilton, the Russian race was a start-to-finish affair. The grand prix was conceived several years ago at a meeting in his Kremlin office with Bernie Ecclestone, the secretive autocrat who runs Formula One out of his back pocket, and was contested on a new 3.6-mile, $200 million track wound around the Olympic stadiums from the Winter Games held here in February. Many Russians have seen the tens of billions of dollars spent in Sochi as Putin’s monument to himself as the man with the vision to make Russia great again.
That, at least, was the official script, which, despite deep unease in some quarters of Formula One, Ecclestone, 83, has seemed happy to support.
Long before
Putin’s
arrival, standard Formula One startingline procedures were set aside for an elaborate tableau that included hundreds of performers skipping down the main straight with quarter-mile stretches of fabric in the colors of the Russian flag. The drivers were then lined up like an honor guard at the front of the grid — awkwardly, as some said later — for the Russian national anthem, followed by a short silence for Jules Bianchi, a French driver who sustained severe brain injuries last weekend in a race in Japan.
The piece de resistance, though, was a Cossack-themed performance in which dozens of dancers whirled down the starting grid with flashing swords — perhaps a self-conscious reminder that Russia’s czars used the combative Cossacks over the centuries to push the frontiers of their empire south to the Black Sea and east to the Pacific.
But there was another narrative not embraced by Ecclestone or Putin, and it pointed northwest about 320 miles, to southeastern Ukraine, where a Malaysian airliner crashed on July 17. U.S. officials said at the