The modern idea of sport has morality at its core

The Independent

With increasing lack of trust in politicians and church leaders, sports stars have filled the vacuum.

Formula One's presence in Bahrain this weekend was the result of the sport forgetting a very important principle: that sport is more than just athletic activity or, in this case, buzzing round a circuit in hi-tech cars. Above everything else, it has a moral dimension.



By choosing to race in a kingdom whose suppression of human rights has been so widely broadcast to the world, the petrol-heads are not only damaging their own sport but also the credibility of the wider sports movement.



Cynics will say this is humbug. Formula One is probably the most unabashed money-making machine in all of sport. It is also a most curious sport. Given the technology needed, many would even question whether it counts as a true sport. And, unlike other sports, the real controller is not the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile but the rights holder, Bernie Ecclestone.



And while publicly Ecclestone is careful to say little about wider issues, he doesn't appear privately to be driven by morality. Last year, as controversy raged around the Bahrain Grand Prix, he told Zayed Alzayani, the businessman who runs the competition, that "if human rights was the criterion for F1 races, we would only have them in Belgium and Switzerland".



But this is where Ecclestone is contradictory. Formula One's rise has been made possible because, with increasing lack of trust in politicians, men of science and letters, and even church leaders, sports stars have filled the vacuum. Sport has also become a rare source of trusted news in an intensely sceptical world; a sporting result is a fact about which there can be no argument. And sport can also be understood by all, regardless of language or culture or intellect.