Formula 1

Formula One: grand prix grandees steer past Bahrain’s bloodstained realities

October F1 race threatens to join Hitler's Olympics and the Mexico City massacre among annals of sport's political blindness

The small demonstration was already breaking up when Bernie Ecclestone walked towards a Mayfair cinema opposite the Saudi Arabian embassy on Wednesday evening. He was on his way to attend the London premiere of a new documentary about the life of Ayrton Senna, the grand prix world champion who died at the wheel in 1994. The demonstrators, penned behind steel barricades while waving red and white flags and holding up photographs of people with bloodied heads, had been noisily protesting against the role of 1,200 Saudi soldiers of the Gulf Peninsula Shield Force in the attempted suppression of the recent unrest in Bahrain.

On the face of it, this was not the best of weeks for the international sporting bodies. But for Ecclestone, a man virtually impervious to criticism, a seemingly unpromising situation was about to work out just fine. Two days later, as a member of the world motor sports council of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), Formula One's 80-year-old ringmaster joined a meeting in Paris at which the decision was made to restore the Bahrain Grand Prix to the calendar of events. To the dismay of those who believe that international sports bodies should not, in effect, be endorsing a government apparently prepared to detain and mistreat its citizens merely for protesting, the race will now take place on 30 October.

Originally due to be held in mid-March, it was cancelled in reaction to violence surrounding the demonstrations against the government. According to the FIA, which sent a fact-finding mission to the kingdom last week, the reinstatement reflects a "spirit of reconciliation" in the country, while the chairman of the Bahrain International Circuit greeted the news by writing on his Twitter account: "As a country we've faced difficult times, but stability has returned."

Yet while the members of the FIA's council were sitting down to consider their decision that morning, news agencies were reporting further confrontations at the Pearl roundabout in Manama, with rubber bullets and teargas being fired at demonstrators.

So far at least 30 people have been killed since the protests began in February. Among 800 arrests, 108 were of members of the circuit's permanent staff, all of them members of the country's Shia majority; more than 20 of them were detained and mistreated, according to reports. Human rights groups allege that women have been particularly badly treated in detention, subjected to physical abuse and threats of rape.

All this did nothing to deflect Ecclestone, who is in the habit of getting what he wants, usually in deals done behind closed doors. Whereas Sepp Blatter, president of Fifa, football's world governing body, won his latest four-year term by harvesting the support of 186 delegates out of 206 in front of the world's television cameras during Wednesday's election in Zurich, Ecclestone could take satisfaction from a vote in which all 26 council members, including himself and a member of Bahrain's ruling family, are said to have voted for reinstatement.

What Fifa and the FIA have in common is a structure and membership based on the model of a gentlemen's club. While a semblance of democracy is maintained, admission is granted to the right sort of chap (the world motor sports council is all-male, while Burundi's Lydia Nsekera is a rare female in the Fifa delegates' ranks), favours are granted and reciprocated, rocking the boat is not encouraged, and all activities are deemed to exist on a supranational plane, supposedly untainted by political influence.

Now the 2011 Bahrain Grand Prix threatens to take a place in sporting history alongside the Olympics of 1936 – "Hitler's Games" – and 1968, when 44 people, a mixture of student and civilian protesters and bystanders, were killed by soldiers in Mexico City's Tlatelolco massacre 10 days before the Games began.

Ecclestone is sport's own Duke of Edinburgh: his pronouncements are clumsy, insensitive, and unaffected by contemporary thought. He tends to attack the symptom rather than the problem because the symptom is all he sees, and usually it is costing him money. In this he is not untypical of the men who ran sport in the 20th century. It took an international boycott in 1971 to persuade the administrators of cricket and rugby that playing against the representatives of South Africa's apartheid regime was unacceptable; the grand prix circus, however, continued to pitch its tent just outside Johannesburg until 1985, when it, too, succumbed to the inevitable.

It is seven years since Ecclestone made the deal with Bahrain's ruling family to hold the Gulf's first grand prix. The negotiations were conducted with the Crown Prince, Sheikh Salman, who sanctioned the expenditure of £100m on a 3.3-mile circuit in the desert. The crown prince is a petrolhead, and Ecclestone fed his enthusiasm by sending cars from his own priceless collection for demonstration runs in front of the Bahraini spectators each year, a gesture never extended to the sell-out crowds at humble Silverstone.

This year the race in Bahrain was to have opened the world championship series, a privilege for which the government pays Ecclestone's company a reported $40m, less than half of it shared between the 12 participating teams. A month before the scheduled date of 13 March, however, Shia demonstrators gathered in Pearl Square and the race was swiftly cancelled.

On Wednesday, 48 hours before the world motor sports council met to consider the fate of this year's Bahrain Grand Prix, martial law was lifted in the kingdom, thus nudging the delegates towards a decision that would serve two sets of interests: firstly, that of the al-Khalifa family, rulers of Bahrain since 1820, and members of the power-wielding Sunni minority, who would be able to show the world, and their own people, a sign of their continued hold on the population of 1.2 million, and, secondly, that of Formula One, which would be guaranteed its $40m fee.

None of the 12 teams that make up the grand prix field, it seems, was in favour of holding the race in the present circumstances, but their reservations were based on concerns over simple logistics and personal safety rather than a high moral vision. The new date means shunting the inaugural Indian Grand Prix back to a date in December, thus extending a season already eight and a half months long, and introducing another long-haul leg of a championship which was due to end in São Paulo on 27 November and will now finish a week or two later and 8,937 miles away.

There were also questions concerning insurance cover, a major consideration in a business that travels the world with hardware worth millions of pounds, and commitments to international broadcasters whose fees form a significant proportion of the sport's revenues.

The decision to end the state of emergency probably prevents the teams from invoking a "civil strife" clause in their broadcasting deals as an excuse for staying at home without paying a penalty – unless, of course, strife can be shown to have broken out again. Now they will be trying to put pressure on the FIA to reconsider its decision, knowing that Ecclestone can crack the whip by threatening them with the consequences of broken contracts.

Damon Hill, the 1996 world champion and current president of the British Racing Drivers Club, was one of the few within in the motor racing community willing to express an opinion on the ethics of the matter. "The situation is very grave," he told the Today programme before the decision was announced. "I think that Formula One can be seen, if it's not careful, as endorsing methods of restoring order which perhaps are questionable. Formula One has to be very careful to show that it is concerned about human rights."

Only one current competitor, the forthright Australian driver Mark Webber, felt able to speak freely on the issue. "When people in a country are being hurt, the issues are bigger than sport," he wrote on Twitter. "Let's hope the right decision is made."

Like Hill, he was to be disappointed, but probably not surprised. Sport – a thing of innocence and joy that long ago became entangled in the brutal demands of commerce – was simply providing yet another demonstration of its inability to identify a winning strategy when confronted by the moral imperatives of the modern world.

BahrainFormula OneArab and Middle East unrestBernie EcclestoneMotor sportRichard Williamsguardian.co.uk