An open letter to Dorna: it’s time to promote diversity and inclusivity in

Everyone, everywhere, lives as they please, [so long as they are] harming no one.

This time no one in MotoGP rushed to the rider’s defence.

How Dorna could stand by while one of the championship’s biggest stars was attacked by hateful people and not offer any public support is mind-boggling. A total disgrace.

And it wasn’t only Dorna that left the 2021 MotoGP champion to suck up the hate alone. While most of the public was supportive, where was the support from the paddock community — from Yamaha, from Quartararo’s sponsors, his fellow riders and MotoGP’s major media players? Many of these people know how distressing it is to be attacked on social media, yet they all let him hang, in the season of goodwill to all men.

All it would have taken was a few words on social media, “I stand with Fabio and against the haters”.

MotoGP family? My arse.

The only personality who did offer support in public – which is crucial because it comforts the victims while discouraging the aggressors – was French actor and author Henry-Jean Servat.

“Friendship and support to Fabio Quartararo, forced to delete this photo, under jeers and threats,” wrote Servat on X, alongside the photo. “This nauseating hatred has no place in Nice [where Quartararo was born], nor anywhere else. Everyone, everywhere, lives as they please, [so long as they are] harming no one’.

Most major sports and championships – football, Formula 1, rugby and so on – do their best to support their athletes, so why not MotoGP?

Thankfully things are changing, on four wheels, at least. Motor sport now has Racing Pride, an organisation established in 2019, in association with the well-known LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall, by young racing driver Richard Morris and renowned F1 journalist and comms/PR guy Matt Bishop, the first openly gay man in F1. Bishop received more than his fair share of homophobic abuse in the paddock, so he resolved to create something that might make life easier for other LGBTQ+ people working within motor sport.

“Allies – in other words straight people within motor sport who make their support of LGBTQ+ visible – are crucial,” says Bishop. “In F1 we used to have Sebastian Vettel and we still have Lewis Hamilton: both straight, both superstars, both not only willing but also eager to show that they and their sport can and should welcome all people, whether they be fans, media, sponsors, team people and of course drivers, whoever they are and whomever they love.

“I’ve worked with both Lewis and Seb, and I admire them both as much for their courageous initiatives off track as for their extraordinary successes on track. Seb once said to a bunch of F1 journalists, on the record, ‘Everyone, absolutely everyone, has an inalienable human right to…