With protests engulfing the Arab state, the motor racing fraternity understood that the show must not go on
Formula One is the most introverted, the most self-obsessed, even solipsistic, of all the important sports. Trackside last summer no one seemed to have any interest in the football World Cup that was going on in South Africa.
It's not that the petrol heads are daft. In fact it is difficult to think of a brighter, more articulate and boffinish bunch in all sport. It must be the money and glamour that turns everyone's head. Or it could be the awful din that drowns out all other noises.
That is why the decision not to launch the new season in Bahrain on March 13, as scheduled, was particularly welcome. Not that the drivers or their teams had anything to do with the decision-making process, of course. The move to pull the race was made buy the crown prince of Bahrain himself and it was conveyed to Bernie Ecclestone, the commercial rights holder.
But the judgment was a popular one the whole length of the paddock, and not just because of the potential dangers of entering a county that has seen so many anti-government protests in recent days, with at least six deaths and countless injuries.
Mark Webber, that fine driver and Anglophile Aussie spoke for most people in the sport when he said ? before the decision had been made ? that this was not the best time to stage a major sporting event in Bahrain.
We may not have heard the last of this issue. As the centre of gravity of F1 moves away from Europe and towards the Middle East and the far east there are one or two venues on the current calendar that will have Amnesty International twitching uncomfortably.
I remember the time, in January 1990, when I was slung out of South Africa and banned for life by a government that didn't quite share my take on the apartheid system. Nelson Mandela was released a few weeks later. It was the seventh, last and most reprehensible of all the rebel cricket tours to South Africa and I will never forget the words of our own Frank Keating when Mike Gatting's men returned home.
"No more inglorious, downright disgraced and discredited team or sportsmen wearing the badge of 'England' can ever have returned through customs with such nothingness to declare," he wrote.
The daft old argument then was that politics and sport should be kept apart, as if politics didn't play a part in every aspect of life.
Well, we know better now. But after the Bahrain cancellation we also know that there are people throughout Formula One who take views based on plain old morality. Even when the money jingles ? and it does so more flashily in Formula One than any other sport. I'm not talking about the Bahrain government here, or Ecclestone or the FIA ? but the drivers and oily rags scattered throughout the paddock for whom the prospect of going to Bahrain in the current circumstances felt, instinctively, the wrong thing to do.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/feb/22/formula-one-bahrain-grand-prix-cancelled
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