There is a particular species of retired billionaire who cannot accept that their era has ended. Bernie Ecclestone, the man who spent four decades treating Formula 1 like a personal fiefdom, has apparently decided that clay pigeon shooting needed his competitive genius. Last week, Portuguese airport officials discovered him attempting to enter the country with a shotgun intended for a shooting competition. The incident itself was routine—a firearms permit issue, quickly resolved. The thinking behind it was not.
Ecclestone’s approach to clay pigeon shooting appears identical to his approach to F1: treat every minor sporting endeavor as though the survival of civilization depends on your personal victory. He did not simply enter a competition. He arrived with a shotgun like a man preparing for battle, as though the pigeons had wronged him personally and needed to be held accountable. One imagines him briefing his shotgun before the match, discussing tire strategies and pit-stop timing with a piece of sporting equipment that has no capacity to understand him.
The real comedy is not that he brought a gun to a shooting competition—that is literally the point of shooting competitions. It is that a man accustomed to controlling multi-billion-dollar racing empires saw clay pigeon shooting and thought: this needs my special touch. This needs the Ecclestone treatment. This needs cutthroat negotiation tactics applied to what is, fundamentally, a person trying to hit flying discs.
The pigeons, one suspects, will recover from this threat to their sport’s integrity.