What do MotoGP fans really, really want? – Motor Sport
This takes us onto yesterday’s announcement that MotoGP will soon follow other sports by staging events in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is punishable by death and where a young woman was recently sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account that followed and retweeted dissidents and activists.
Oil-rich Saudi Arabia has a £400-billion sovereign wealth fund that splurges money at all kinds of sports, hoping to distract attention from its human-rights abuses. So far the country has welcomed F1, golf, boxing and WWE (wrestling), with MotoGP next and no doubt a football World Cup coming soon.
Does Dorna’s Saudi announcement make the case of Bagnaia’s Misano helmet irrelevant? Absolutely not. Perhaps it places a great onus on riders to open their minds to the wider world and find their own moral compasses.
And what of Dorna’s decision to go to Saudi? Because I certainly saw no mention of this in the fan survey. Where was the question, “Which nations do you want to host a MotoGP race? 1) Saudi Arabia, 2) North Korea, 3) Russia?”
In my opinion, racing in Saudi is wrong. However, I do see the other side of the argument (which doesn’t mean I agree with the decision taken according to that argument).
Over half of Formula E’s income is said come from its Saudi Arabia race deal
Germain Hazard / DPPI
Much of the world is in financial crisis and I’m sure Dorna isn’t exempt. Massive increases of costs and loss of revenues due to the global pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rampant inflation have battered Dorna like everyone else.
A colleague who works in the electric single-seater Formula E championship tells me that the 11-nation series makes more than half its money from its Saudi round. So it’s not hard to see why other sports are bedazzled by the country’s sovereign wealth fund.
Three to four thousand staff work in the MotoGP paddock, a number dwarfed by those further down the line (working in factory race departments, manufacturing motorcycle components, cooking tyres, sewing leathers, moulding helmets, building race trucks and so on). The total? Who knows, but let’s take a wild guess at 25,000, which makes 25,000 families needing feeding, clothing and housing.
However keen the bosses at Dorna are about buying their own golf courses I suspect they do feel some responsibility for these people. At least I hope they do.