Singapore crash: F1 scandal is Bloodgate's nastier big brother
The Daily Telegraph, 19th September 2009
Sport depends on imagination and fantasy. For the majority, the overwhelming majority, that is as real as sport ever gets. Only a lucky few ever play elite sport in real life, but everyone can score for England or win Wimbledon in their dreams. Sport, like the movies, revolves around the democratic right to fantasize.
Imagination fuels the wonder of every fan. How would I cope with taking a penalty to win the World Cup? Could I have clung on to that steepling catch with the Ashes at stake? How would I like to be the protagonist, the hero, the man centre stage under the glare of the lights?
Those questions create the magic that we see in the eyes of the child sitting next to us in the stands. It lives on, though we may be too embarrassed to admit it, in the childish innocence of every real adult fan.
So it is with enormous sadness that we must admit there is a new, darker question creeping into the minds of sports fans. How would I respond to being pressurised to cheat? What would I do if my boss told me to crash a car at 200 mph, or to swallow a capsule of fake blood?
We once asked ourselves if we had what it takes to be a winner. Now, sadly, we must reverse the debate. Do I have what it takes to walk away? Would I have the guts to resist corporate bullying? Or would my dreams of sporting glory blind me to everything else?
Recent months have forced the question upon us. Bloodgate, we can now see, was just the forerunner. We debated how hard it must have been for Tom Williams, aged 24 and trying to make his way in the game, to have resisted the command of his boss Dean Richards to fake a blood injury – or even to admit what happened afterwards.
Richards held all the cards. Not only was he Williams’s boss. Richards also had the physical and psychological authority of having being a colossal international player. Williams found himself going along with the chain of command. Would you have done any better?
Now, in the light of Renault’s deliberate crash at last year’s Singapore Grand Prix, Bloodgate is suddenly looking like a pantomime version of the real thing. Singapore is Bloodgate’s much nastier big brother. The parallels are striking. A young, deeply ambitious sportsman – in this case Nelson Piquet Jnr – claims he was put under extreme pressure to crash his Formula One car so that his team-mate could win a race he didn’t deserve. Piquet acquiesced, he says, and by crashing risked not only his own life, but also the lives of fellow drivers, fans and officials.
Piquet was struggling to cut it in F1. Resisting instructions from the boss might have spelled an even earlier sacking. Once we asked ourselves the question: would you risk everything to win? Now it is different: are you prepared to risk everything to lose?
What kind of a man is Flavio Briatore? Given his perma-tan, paunch, graying mullet, alarmingly white teeth, blue-tinted glasses and model wife who is thirty years his junior – it is perhaps not altogether surprising if Briatore did not have the sport’s reputation and integrity at the top of his priorities. But this is not an ordinary tale of preposterous vulgarity and vanity. Instructing an impressionable young employee to lose a race deliberately is an abuse of trust. Ordering him to crash a F1 car in the middle of a race is an abdication of humanity.
The most disappointing difference between Bloodgate and Singapore was that Briatore’s scheme – if that is what it was – worked. It changed not only the result of the race, but the destiny of the championship. Without Singapore, it is unlikely Lewis Hamilton would have become world champion.
There are those who are rushing to announce the era of Bloodgate and Singapore is the inevitable result of professionalism. For too long, they argue, sport has deluded itself about integrity and paraded on high moral ground. It was easy for the Corinthians – they weren’t playing for money or fame. But sport is now big business. Honour and morals no longer apply.
They are wrong. Sport needs a new code of ethics, not no code of ethics. Trust – as a forthcoming book by the Master of Wellington College Anthony Seldon argues – is at the centre of all human systems. Profit and capitalism do not negate the need for trust, they depend upon it.
As Niall Ferguson explored in The Ascent of Money, even finance revolves around a human relationship. The word credit derives from the Latin credo – “I believe”. When belief collapses, you get a financial crisis such as the one we have just experienced.
Sport, too, depends upon belief: the belief that what you are watching is real. Without real sport there are no real dreams. Without dreams there are no real fans. It is a paradox sport must reflect upon while there is still time.