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How Upper Class Sport Manage a Humanity Campaign

Since COVID-19 was stated as a pandemic, people around the world need to stop their outdoor activity. Most of us start to work from home, leaving materialistic business voluntary or forced. The usual high mobilization that we’ve been doing needs a break in order to delay spread of COVID-19 virus. In order to occupy our social activity that we used to do, social media is a savior kit for people around the world to connect with other people socially.

Social media surely is an important equipment for people to do activities that should be done face to face. But, like the rest of things in this world, social media can turn out to be a weapon for people’s mental health. Many people still couldn’t control the power of social media wisely, so it just made them be controlled by it. Many people do inappropriate things and end up hurting people easily and it’s a big issue that people need to struggle in the middle of an uneasy situation like this pandemic.

There are so many types of virtual activity that intentionally hurt and make other people vulnerable. Bullying, sexual harassment, and hate speech are examples that we can find easily on any of social media platform. Bullying basically consists of intolerant situations between different values that individual or group worship. Another example is racism toward certain race, nationality, skins, and ethnics  have been a crucial issue these days. Movements such as black lives matter and Asian lives matter just show how ignorance around society perfectly hurts many peoples.

To show how precarious this issue is, many institutions tried to support the humanity movements by doing a sort of campaign along with their event. Formula 1 under FIA, The Federation Internationale de l’Automobile joined this movement by making one big campaign which runs through a whole season. The campaign is called ‘We Race as One’.

To be honest, it’s a pretty sensitive decision to play around this campaign because the exclusivity in Formula 1 world surely made this campaign a bit of a contradiction. As we all know, Formula 1 or F1 is one of the most expensive sports in the world. This sport is one of sport categories that the upper class ‘made’ for either their entertainment, wealth demonstration, network channel or instrumental purposes. There are tons of reasons why Formula 1 is just in league for upper class and wealthy circles.

The production of a Formula 1 car itself is just beyond affordable. There are so many components in a Formula 1 car which need more than 600,000 dollars, thus athlete and team in F1 mandatory to search support backup like sponsor, economy or political power to be able survive in this sport. By knowing this nominal, we could predict how much financially F1 needs to be on track and so on. We are supposed to know why the seat, merchandise, media access, and more in F1 cost excessive for normal audiences. There is no wonder why most F1 connoisseurs came from wealthy backgrounds.

This exclusivity might be a huge question for some of the people who saw how F1 was definitely a “non-public” sport. But, pragmatically this campaign just turned out well by the inclusion of many representations from athletes’ images. In the 2021 season, we could find the diversity in grid formation. The slogan ‘We Race as One’ emphasizes the diversity and equality between every driver supported by the presence of different skin color drivers like Lewis Hamilton from Great Britain and Yuki Tsunoda from Japan. The appearance of Asian drivers such as Rio Haryanto from Indonesia, Yuki Tsunoda and Takuma Sato from Japan, Narain Karthikeyan from India, etc recently breaks the stereotype of F1 being ‘european only’ sport.

Not only that, because of the pandemic, Formula 1 tried to make this sport in another level of public league. They used the power of social media advantages by making a documentary in netflix which was and still is a phenomenal social media platform in the pandemic period. The documentary called “Drive to Survive” aired in 2019 and it was a huge hit that triggered to make another seasons until this year. The documentary showed all behind the stages of F1 production, pre-race, competition, until into the driver’s personal life and routinity. By this documentary, finally the public could see that F1 is not always that ‘easy’ just because of a big money rotation in it. There are many drivers who do not come from wealthy families, Esteban Ocon from France is the example. Through this documentary, Ocon told the whole story of his and his family’s struggle and sacrifice for Ocon to be on the F1 seat. This image of a different family background from the driver perfectly completes the ‘We Race as One’ campaign into a reality campaign.

Owing to driver’s diversity these day, ‘We Race as One’ could be a perfect campaign to fight against COVID-19 and discrimination around the world. This campaign urge awareness toward inequality, discrimination and diversity around the world by performing diversity in athletes, staff, teams and also F1 fans which recently increasing-thanks to Drive to Survive and social media- and be a part of this humanitarian campaign. In the future, we hope the humanity campaign can be a part of any elements, unexceptional in upper class sports which need more effort to break negative sentiment and stereotypes.

Written by Widari

REFERENCE :

1. Ben Burd. 2021. The Most Expensive Sports in The World. The Sports Economist. Accessed on 25 oct 2021. https://thesportseconomist.com/the-most-expensive-sports-in-the-world/
2. Roy, Abhranil. 2021. F1 Car Price: What is The Cost of Formula 1 Cars?. Chase Your Sport. Access on 25 Oct 2021. https://www.chaseyoursport.com/Formula-1/How-much-does-it-cost-to-make-an-F1-car/2243
3. Hall, Taylor. 2016. Social Class and Sports.The Broken Clipboard. Access on 25 Oct 2021. https://brokenclipboard.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/social-class-and-sports-2/
4. Oliver Harden, (2014). Ranking Top 5 Asian Drivers in Formula 1 History. Bleacherreport.com. Accessed on 25 Oct 2021. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2032827-ranking-the-top-5-asian-drivers-in-formula-1-history
5. Formula 1 Launches #WeRaceAsOne Initiative to Fight Challenges of COVID-19 and Global Inequality. 2021.
6. Formula1.com. Access on 25 Oct 2021. https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.formula-1-launches-we-race-as-one-initiative.3s2AhNDApNDzrCoQDc1RY8.html