Racing to Disaster
Bernie Ecclestone’s views promoting the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix are quietly spoken, articulate, and morally reprehensible. There will always be a suspicion that his attitude is driven by money. Although the £25 million fee for the right to stage the race has already been paid by Bahrain to F1 and would be forfeit anyway if the race could not take place, the possibility of interminable and expensive legal action following a cancelation, together with the loss of all the ancillary revenue, must somehow be a factor.
But the central plank of his current pronouncement focuses on other issues. On the one hand that F1 is a sport and should have nothing to do with politics, but at the same time that different countries have different standards (in terms of China’s and Bahrain’s human rights standards, for example,) and visitors must modify their own standards as a result.
This is a view he should be ashamed of. Imagine that the venue was Damascus, rather than Manama. Imagine even that there was a secure compound inside which the race track lay, and that safety was not an issue. Would the Ecclestone philosophy still hold?
In 1936 the Austrian National Women’s Swimming Team mainly comprised members of the Vienna Maccabi Swimming Club, a Jewish sports club (formed because the Jewish members were blacklisted from belonging to gentile swimming clubs). Several refused to swim for their country at the Olympic Games in Berlin because they objected to the way Jews were being treated in Germany. They were stripped of their status and their national medals by the Austrian authorities, who did not apologize for this appalling behavior until 1995.
Of course there are matters of relativity, and there has to be a pragmatic acceptance that we cannot protest every infraction everywhere