sport news Geri Halliwell, one-time symbol of Girl Power, is now a non-speaking part in a ... trends now
You encounter a fair few of them in sport. Individuals of vast ego, so wedded to their own bountiful publicity that they just can’t appreciate how deeply unattractive they look.
Christian Horner was the latest, on Saturday. The self-styled star of F1’s ‘Drive to Survive’ Netflix show was apparently convinced that parading up the Bahrain paddock with Geri Halliwell, surrounded by camera crews, would help him put the lid on a crisis.
That one short, choreographed scene, five minutes in the making, would counteract a dump of WhatsApp messages which, in a nutshell, had revealed a female employee’s desperate attempts to fend off her boss’s seedy approaches in a way which would not jeopardise her own employment prospects.
Anyone with a modicum of self-awareness would have found that paddock walk deeply excruciating because from the outside looking in, it most certainly was. We had Horner gripping Halliwell's tiny hand as he walked her up the tarmac.
Horner placing his hand in the small of her back and around her waist, as he manoeuvred her around the place. And Halliwell just staring straight ahead, wearing the dumbfounded look of a woman who wondered what on earth had hit her.
Christian Horner (right) and Geri Halliwell (left) walked up the tarmac hand-in-hand in Bahrain, despite the scandal surrounding the Red Bull team principal
Horner has attempted to deflect and shown little contrition following the allegations made against him
Mail Sport columnist Ian Herbert wants fans to not forget who the real victim in all of this is
This was Geri Halliwell, one-time symbol of girl power, reduced to a non-speaking part in a scene of deep personal humiliation. No Netflix treatment on earth can finesse a look as terrible as that.
It’s hard not to empathise with Halliwell, who had landed in Bahrain to news of those messages on Friday. But the real victim in this entire episode, of course, is the Red Bull employee who claimed coercion by Horner in the first place.
‘The complainant’, Red Bull described her as, in a brutal little 89-word press release, exonerating Horner, issued 24 hours before those WhatsApp messages of eye-popping detail first surfaced.
The press statement, with its ice-cold formality, lacking a single word of remorse or regret, must have hit her like an express train. She is an individual who has garnered respect and popularity at each of a number of motorsport organisations, including Red Bull, across a career to which she has invested 15 years of her life.
Her treatment, needless to say, did not remotely feature in the confected narrative of marital bliss paraded before us at that racetrack.
She now has a right to appeal the outcome of the investigation which cleared Horner, Red Bull has declared. Well, good luck with that. Her name has been published this week, quite possibly against her wishes.
Halliwell did not utter a word as she looked straight ahead in a scene of personal humiliation
And it takes only a cursory glance at some of the views being voiced in the social media cesspit these past few days to be reminded of the abuse which will rain in on a young woman, in a situation like this. She could be forgiven for running a mile.
Horner, meanwhile, carries the same air of breezy invincibility that he has worn throughout. Utterly implacable, it seems, in the face of the extremely detailed reporting of these matters by the Dutch paper De Telegraaf’s Eric van Haren, who is close to Max Verstappen.
If Horner is worried about the effect of any of it on Red Bull’s sponsors, then he is certainly not showing it. He was wearing his usual gear for that paddock walk on Saturday, and thus parading the logos of Tag Heuer, Mobil, Castore, Bybit and Oracle. Those companies, which care about their image, are finding their names casually dragged into controversy.
The calculation for Red Bull will be that every saga has a shelf life and that this one will soon die away, because
