STRAIGHT TALK
Mark Gallagher on the addition of Saudi Arabia to the F1 calendar
We live in an imperfect world, so while the news that Formula 1 is to hold a race in Saudi Arabia next autumn prompted howls of protest across mainstream and social media platforms, it is worth pausing to reflect on the championship’s past before slamming the door on its future.
The media likes a good story about greedy sports bosses hoovering up money from corrupt regimes. It makes for great headlines and sneering prose, never mind that Formula 1 management has to find the cash for both the championship and its teams from somewhere. Imola and Portimão’s pockets are full of fluff.
Back in 2011 I recall being invited on the Nicky Campbell Show on BBC Radio 5 Live by a researcher keen to have me talk about Formula 1’s decision to continue visiting Bahrain, a country whose majority Shia population were staging protests against their Sunni rulers. What the researcher did not tell me was that I would be pitched against a Shia protester whose father was on hunger strike.
“How can you spin your wheels on the blood of my relatives?” was the first question, and the interview went downhill from there. In the interests of balance, the BBC had set out to find two extremes, breaking the scales of media justice in the process.
Formula 1 has long taken the dollar from any quarter and we have all had plenty of time to decide whether we want to support a multinational sport run by capitalists or not.
For 40 years Big Tobacco paid the bills. To this day Philip Morris remains F1’s and Ferrari’s biggest customer, while Mclaren has reignited its passion for the sector with British American Tobacco and its ‘nicotine delivery systems’. I spent a decade writing PR materials for Marlboro and promoting Benson & Hedges at Jordan. If flogging cancer sticks is not a threat to a human’s rights, I don’t know what is…
When the tobacco era began to wane, Bernie Ecclestone’s decision to generate untold millions for Formula 1 and its constituent teams by selling world class sports events to governments meant beating a path to Malaysia and then that bastion of human rights, China.
Homosexuality is illegal in Malaysia, and was throughout Sepang’s 19-year residency on the Formula 1 calendar, and the same is also true of Singapore. You could be fined, imprisoned or caned in either.
Saudi Arabia applies strict Sharia Law, with the death penalty the ultimate punishment for homosexuality, although fines, imprisonment and ‘lashing’ are more typical.
LGBTQ+ rights campaigners are rightly unhappy at the prospect of Formula 1 ‘sports washing’ Saudi’s reputation, but if Malaysia and Singapore didn’t already highlight that topic then F1’s annual visit to Putin’s Russia ought to have. Here’s a country where it’s legal to be gay, but you are not protected by law, as vigilante beatings and prison sentences demonstrate.
Personally, I have always found Brazil problematic – Interlagos is a fantastic track, nestling alongside São Paulo’s appalling favelas where you might be robbed or worse by destitute people stealing to survive. Even the electricity has to be nicked to power their slums.
Instead of complaining about next year’s race in Jeddah, critics should use the powerful spotlight of F1 to do the thing which we in western democracies can practice with impunity: speak out as loudly as we want about whatever we wish.
This is precisely the moment to use the freedom and tolerance we cherish as a weapon against the intolerance we so dislike.