Gripping Geri Halliwell’s tiny hand, Christian Horner carried his usual air of breezy invincibility. But the truth is he’s an embarrassment, writes IAN HERBERT

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 one on Saturday. The self-styled star of F1’s Drive to Survive Netflix show was apparently convinced that parading round the Bahrain paddock with wife 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.

Anyone with a modicum of self-awareness would have found that paddock walk 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 ahead, wearing the dumbfounded look of a woman who wondered what on earth had hit her. This was Geri Halliwell, one-time symbol of girl power, reduced to a non-speaking part in a scene of personal humiliation. No Netflix treatment on earth can finesse a look as terrible as that.

It is easy to empathise with Halliwell, who landed in Bahrain to news of those messages on Friday. It is just as easy to sympathise with ‘the complainant’, as Red Bull described her in a brutal little 89-word press release, exonerating Horner.

THAT press statement, with its ice-cold formality, lacking a word of remorse or regret, must have hit Horner’s accuser like an express train. She is an individual who has garnered respect and popularity at a number of motorsport organisations, including Red Bull, across a career in which she has invested 15 years of her life.

She now has a right to appeal the outcome of the investigation which cleared Horner. Well, good luck with that. Her name has been published this week, quite possibly against her wishes. And it takes only a cursory glance into the social media cesspit to be reminded of the abuse which rains 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 by the Dutch paper De Telegraaf’s Erik van Haren, who is close to star driver Max Verstappen.

If Horner is worried about the effect of any of it on Red Bull’s sponsors, then he is not showing it. He was wearing his usual gear for that paddock walk on Saturday, parading the logos of Tag Heuer, Mobil, Castore, Bybit and Oracle. Those companies are having their names casually dragged into the controversy.

The calculation for Red Bull will be that every saga has a shelf life and this one will soon die away, because F1’s approach doesn’t suggest otherwise. 

A progressive sport, proactively wanting young women in its employment to feel safe and welcome, would be hammering down Red Bull’s door, demanding to know the weight attached to those WhatsApp messages in the internal investigation, and other aspects of its reasoning.

But nobody wants to know. The sport’s governing body, the FIA, have thrown their lot behind Horner, and F1’s owners, Liberty Media, have had nothing to say publicly on the matter.

Attention was deflected from Horner yesterday by FIA president Mohammed ben Sulayem facing an investigation for allegedly interfering with a race result, which he denies. With no semblance of contrition from anyone in F1 throughout the dismal controversy, it’s hard to avoid the depressing prospect that this will be nothing more than Netflix material 12 months from now. A conspiracy theorist would say the current series of Drive to Survive is already making capital from it.

Is it a coincidence that episode two, some of which is shot at the Horner family’s country pile in Oxfordshire, is entitled Fall From Grace? It opens with footage of Father Christmas — filmed in December 2022 but adroitly woven in all these months later — arriving to ask the couple’s children: ‘Has Dad been good this year?’ To which Horner’s daughter Olivia, 10, replies: ‘Let me think about that.’ Fall From Grace flashes up on screen during a shot of Horner in a helicopter.

Halliwell’s own answer to Father Christmas on the question of her husband’s behaviour is unambiguous. ‘He won a championship, I think he’s been amazing,’ she says. A subsequent scene captures the two of them discussing F1 in their lounge.

The messy, inconvenient details of real life can’t be airbrushed away like this, though. The unedited, inconvenient truth is that Horner — and his sport — are an embarrassment.

Silence is not as easy as it might seem! 

There was a different kind of challenge at the side of the pitch on Saturday, on what was ‘Silent Support’ weekend, for those of us watching our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. Our instructions, laid out in an FA initiative, were ‘to show your support with applause only’, the idea being that it’s disorientating for the kids if we and their coaches are all shouting at once.

In theory it was a very good idea, though reader John Cross emailed me to say he found it ‘baffling’ and not ‘representative of the real world of football’. I see where he’s coming from.

The efforts of coaches in youth sport to engender respect among children for officials and opponents has been one of the joys of watching Under 9s football this season, though I confess that when my grandson came off the bench in the second half, scored a goal during our 9-3 win and sprinted back down the pitch in unbridled joy, all thoughts of ‘silent support’ went out of my head. I failed the test.

The next generation

I hope Christine Benneworth did a better job than me of adhering to the FA rules. 

Her picture, here, of six-year-old Charles, her great grandson, whom she loyally supports, is another of the many you have sent in. ‘He plays every weekend at the age of six. Man of the match last Sunday,’ she proudly reports.

Forest owner lost the plot but is shrewd too 

Had Brian Clough still been with us, he would have robustly told Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis to stick to the boardroom, rather than bring the club into disrepute by tearing down the tunnel after referee Paul Tierney last weekend.

But Tierney’s error, leading to Liverpool’s goal, was rank rubbish and evidence of how officials can influence survival and relegation.

Credit is due to Marinakis for appointing Mark Clattenburg as a referee analyst. Clubs invest heavily on data and science, but it’s surprising that more have not identified the value of having that kind of expertise on board.