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 come across quite a few in sports. Individuals with enormous egos, so attached to their own lavish publicity that they simply cannot realize how deeply unattractive they look.

Christian Horner was the last on Saturday. The self-styled star of F1’s Drive to Survive Netflix show was apparently convinced that parading around the Bahrain paddock with his wife Geri Halliwell, surrounded by camera crews, would help him defuse a crisis.

That one short, choreographed scene, five minutes in the making, would counteract a flood of WhatsApp messages.

Anyone with a modicum of self-awareness would have found that walk in the paddock unbearable, because from the outside it certainly was.

Horner grabbed Halliwell’s small hand as he walked her onto the tarmac. Horner placed his hand on her lower back and around her waist as he maneuvered her around the area.

And Halliwell just stared into space, with the bewildered look of a woman wondering what on earth had happened to her. This was Geri Halliwell, one-time symbol of girl power, reduced to a non-speaking role in a scene of personal humiliation. No Netflix treatment in the world can refine a look as terribly as this one.

It’s easy to empathize with Halliwell, who landed in Bahrain on Friday with news of those reports. It is just as easy to sympathize with ‘the complainer’, as Red Bull described her in a cheeky 89-word press release in which Horner was acquitted.

That press statement, with its icy formality, without a word of remorse or regret, must have hit Horner’s accuser like an express train. She is an individual who has achieved respect and popularity with a number of motorsport organizations, including Red Bull, during a career in which she has invested 15 years of her life.

She now has the right to appeal the outcome of the investigation that Horner released. Well, good luck with that. Her name was published this week, possibly against her will. And it only takes a cursory glance into the social media cesspool to be reminded of the abuse that befalls a young woman in a situation like this. She could be forgiven if she ran a mile.

Horner, meanwhile, exudes the same air of breezy invincibility he’s carried throughout. Completely unrelenting, it seems, given the extremely detailed reporting by Erik van Haren of De Telegraaf, who is close to star driver Max Verstappen.

If Horner is concerned about the effect on Red Bull’s sponsors, he does not show it. He wore his usual gear for Saturday’s paddock walk, parading the logos of Tag Heuer, Mobil, Castore, Bybit and Oracle. The names of these companies are casually dragged into the controversy.

The calculation for Red Bull will be that every saga has an expiration date and that it will quickly die out because F1’s approach does not suggest otherwise.

A progressive sport, which proactively wants young women in its employ to feel safe and welcome, would be banging on Red Bull’s door and wanting to know what weight is given to those WhatsApp messages in the internal investigation, and other aspects of the reasoning of it.

But no one wants to know. The sport’s governing body, the FIA, has backed Horner, and F1’s owners, Liberty Media, have had nothing to say publicly about the matter.

Attention was diverted from Horner yesterday by FIA president Mohammed ben Sulayem, who faced an investigation for allegedly distorting a race result, which he denies. With no one in F1 showing any semblance of remorse during the bleak controversy, it’s hard to avoid the depressing prospect that in twelve months’ time this will be nothing but Netflix material. A conspiracy theorist would say that the current series Drive to Survive is already making money from it.

Is it a coincidence that episode two, part of which was shot at the Horner family estate in Oxfordshire, is titled Fall From Grace? It opens with footage of Santa Claus – filmed in December 2022 but deftly 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 on the screen during a shot of Horner in a helicopter.

Halliwell’s own response to Santa Claus when asked about her husband’s behavior is unequivocal. “He won a championship, I think he’s been great,” she says. In the next scene they discuss F1 in their lounge.

However, the messy, uncomfortable details of real life can’t be wiped away this way. The raw, uncomfortable truth is that Horner – and his sport – are a disgrace.

Silence is not as easy as it seems!

On Saturday, during ‘Silent Support’ weekend, there was a different kind of challenge on the side of the pitch, for those of us watching our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Our instructions, set out in an FA initiative, were ‘to show your support only with applause’, with the idea that it is disorienting for the children if we and their coaches all shout at the same time.

In theory it was a very good idea, although reader John Cross emailed me to say he thought it was ‘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 instil respect in children for referees and opponents has been one of the joys of watching under 9s football this season, although I must confess that when my grandson came off the bench in the second half , scored a goal during our 9-3 victory and sprinted back across the pitch in unbridled joy, all thoughts of ‘silent support’ disappearing from my mind. I failed the test.

The next generation

I hope Christine Benneworth has done a better job than me in adhering to the FA rules.

Her photo here of six-year-old Charles, her great-grandson, whom she loyally supports, is one of many you have submitted. ‘He plays every weekend at the age of six. Man of the match last Sunday,” she reports proudly.

Forest owner lost the plot, but is also smart

If Brian Clough had still been with us, he would have forcefully told Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis to stay in the boardroom, rather than bring the club into disrepute by tearing down the tunnel behind referee last weekend Paul Tierney on.

But Tierney’s mistake, which led to Liverpool’s goal, was nonsense and a testament to how officials can influence survival and relegation.

Credit goes to Marinakis for appointing Mark Clattenburg as referee analyst. Clubs are investing heavily in data and science, but it’s surprising that more and more clubs haven’t recognized the value of having that kind of expertise on board.