Following Lewis Hamilton’s victory at the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai on Sunday, he indulged in a rather peculiar post-race celebration by dousing one of the competition’s hostesses in champagne. The resulting images of the celebration have appeared online, sparking no small amount of vitriol lobbed in the direction of the Formula One racer.
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The images depict the clearly uncomfortable unnamed hostess being sprayed in the face by the champagne, leading to calls of sexism and claims that Mercedes driver Hamilton has embarrassed the UK due to his antics on the podium.
Of course, it’s impossible to accurately gauge the hostess’ reactions from a handful of images… but let’s give it a try.
“What am I doing here?”
Maybe hostessing at the Chinese Grand Prix is a lucrative career move, though it’s one that, in an ideal world, probably shouldn’t exist. In a male-dominated sporting event, hiring women to simply stand around and look pretty is more than a little outdated, reminiscent of embarrassing tech events where companies hire super models in order to pedal new hardware, operating under the assumption that their clientele solely consists of mouth-breathing men who will pre-order a notebook just because an attractive woman is flogging it. While many will see Hamilton’s actions as a bit of harmless fun, if I was trying to do my job only for a multi-millionaire to spray alcohol in my face, I’d probably be a little pissed off, too. It’s embarrassing for both sexes, and it should probably stop. It won’t, of course. But it should.
“How old is this boy?”
At this point Hamilton is making a “thing” out of spraying hostesses in the face with champagne, the millionaire equivalent of pulling a girl’s pig tails and making fun of her in the playground because you fancy her and want her to notice you. Lewis Hamilton is 30 years old.
“Oh God, this is going to be all over the internet tomorrow.”
When you have the world’s most famous F1 racer spraying champagne in your face from point-blank range, and in response you assume the facial expression of someone who is immediately questioning their life choices, rest assured you’re going to be plastered all over the internet by the following morning. What the hostess presumably wasn’t expecting, however, was that rather than the headline reading “Lewis Hamilton Does Silly Thing”, they instead read “Lewis Hamilton is Probably a Massive Sexist”.
So is Lewis Hamilton sexist? I have no idea. I’ve never personally held a conversation with the man, let alone questioned him regarding his thoughts on gender equality, but I don’t think a selection of images of him embarrassing himself are enough to deem him a willful misogynist. There are certainly problems with the concept of hostesses in general, but in all likelihood this was probably just an example of an excited man making a very poor decision, and as that happens quite frequently in modern society, maybe everybody should calm down just a tad.
Photos: Getty Images
