Depending on who you read today, the axing of Christian Horner by Red Bull this week was always coming or it was the biggest shock in sport since Liverpool signed Mario Balotelli.
What the Horner story highlights is not just the brutality of how decisions are taken at the highest levels of sport, but the thriving toxicity that pollutes the drive to be the best.
Let’s start with The Times, whose headlines on the story on Thursday were on the “this was always coming” side.
“Christian Horner’s victimhood and hissy fits exhausted Red Bull’s patience,” was the headline on Matthew Syed’s column, with a subhead: “Red Bull no longer ready to indulge petulant team principal. I am not sure there has been a leader in any sport who has alienated so many people.”
Owen Slot, chief sports writer at The Times, wrote a piece headlined: “Christian Horner caused Red Bull to rot. No tears — he had it coming.”
Well, there have been sports leaders who have alienated more, Matthew, loads. I have a list. Horner has his friends and, according to De Telegraph of the Netherlands and Martin Brundle, former F1 driver and Sky Sports commentator, among others, the Verstappen family, dad Jos and son Max, are not in that number.
Speaking to Sky News, Brundle said: “It’s completely out of the blue, given things that are going on and the sort of problems in the team, words were getting out of team Verstappen and others. I believe it’s probably performance-related as well. I think perhaps it makes it more likely that the Verstappens will stay there. I think that became quite personal, in some called it ‘Team Verstappen’.”
More will come out over the next few days, weeks and months, but all fingers point to Verstappen Snr being part of the “coup”. Verstappen Snr said last year the team would “explode” if Horner remained after the text allegations, or, as he called them, “coercive behaviour”.
This would be the same Jos Verstappen who kicked Max out of the car when he didn’t win the Karting World Championship in 2012 and who was forced to deny abusing his son: “People say how bad a father I was to him, to abuse your child. I never abused him, I was teaching him. I was hard on him and that was also the plan for him, to learn, to think. A lot of people have no idea what you have to do to arrive to the top of a sport.”
Jos Verstappen has the stench of a bully. In 1998 he fractured a man’s skull at a karting track and agreed to an out-of-court settlement to avoid a jail sentence. In 2008 he was charged with assaulting his wife and sending threatening texts while under a restraining order. He was arrested in January 2012 after being accused of hitting his former girlfriend with a car and spent two weeks in jail until the charge was dropped.
Bullying and toxic behaviour is, sadly, a way of life in sport, the koppestamp (butting heads) mentality. A Google turns up several academic papers on toxicity in sport.
Breaking athletes or staff down does not build them up, it suppresses and destroys and is the ugliest of ugliness.
“Raised for success: the toxicity of being the best, all the time,” is one opinion piece by Katherine Kaiser on CampusTimes.org. There are many more. “Toxic leadership in high-performance sports.” “An athlete’s guide to recognising toxic sports relationships.”
Danny Care, a former England rugby player, wrote in his book, in detail, about how the players and coaching staff lived in “constant fear” under coach Eddie Jones. “Did Eddie rule by fear? Of course he did, everyone was bloody terrified of him.
“The way Eddie treated his coaching staff was horrific — it was unreasonable, obnoxious, unfair. There probably wasn’t a day when I wouldn’t think about punching him,” reported Slot in The Times at the time the book was launched.
John Mitchell, the defence coach under Jones at England, left abruptly three months after signing an extension to his contract, denying he had fallen out with Jones despite reports to the contrary in The Times. Jones stopped Mitchell from leaving camp to watch his son Daryl play for Middlesex. Mitchell told Jones: “I’m going to the cricket.” “No, you’re not,” replied Jones and wanted him to do some work. Mitchell left anyway.
But, toxic is as toxic does. Mitchell was no saint as a coach. He left the Western Force under a cloud after an inquiry into complaints from players and staff about his treatment of them. When at the Lions, Mitchell was suspended in 2012 for “among other things … allegedly using abusive language towards players, pressuring injured players to train and play.”
The list goes on, but this column cannot squeeze them all in.
Horner’s axing was a shock but it wasn’t entirely surprising. The win-at-all costs culture in sport is destructive, not constructive. Breaking athletes or staff down does not build them up, it suppresses and destroys and is the ugliest of ugliness.
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