: Saudi Arabia Faces Accusations of ‘Sportswashing.’ For Young Saudis, It’s a Chance to Enjoy New Freedoms #WorldNEWS Standing in a luxury spectator stand on Saturday night, Abdullah Sarhan stared

Saudi Arabia Faces Accusations of ‘Sportswashing.’ For Young Saudis, It’s a Chance to Enjoy New Freedoms #WorldNEWS
Standing in a luxury spectator stand on Saturday night, Abdullah Sarhan stared down at the newest track on the Formula 1 series, as the world’s top race-car drivers roared past in a blur, during this past weekend’s Grand Prix event.
His amazement was not the race itself. It was where it was happening: His home town of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
“For years, if we wanted to see something like this, we had to travel,” said Sarhan, a 29-year-old with long curly hair, wearing jeans and T-shirt, who works for his family’s hotel company in the Red Sea coastal city. “Now it’s happening five minutes from my house. ”
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The sense of the world opening up has—at least for many Saudis—injected a palpable excitement and a giddy sense of newness. In numerous interviews with TIME in the kingdom over the past week, young Saudis—nearly 70% of Saudi Arabia’s 34. 8 million is younger than 35—said that their lives had markedly changed during the past three years, and that they were thrilled they could finally cut loose, after decades of cultural isolation and suffocating religiosity.
To anyone visiting Saudi Arabia after a long absence, as TIME’s correspondent did last week after four years, the change is evident.
Rules forbidding women to travel without a male relative’s permission, to work in public-facing jobs, to leave their heads uncovered—and most famously, to drive—have been scrapped in the past three years. Religious police, who until 2018 detained women for violating dress codes, have vanished from the streets.
Now, women with long flowing hair, some tinted pink or blue, fill the crowds at mass events like last weekend’s Formula 1 on Jeddah’s seafront. Even the women’s bathroom sign at the race featured a silhouette of a long-haired woman with bright lipstick.
At its first-ever Grand Prix, the kingdom celebrated with fireworks and crowds including top royals and government officials filling the venue to capacity. The race marked a milestone for Saudi Arabia, aligning the kingdom with top-level international competition and, by implication, cementing its perceived acceptability on the world stage.
It is that second prospect that has drawn fire from human rights groups in recent weeks, in the run-up to the Grand Prix. They accuse the titular Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, or MBS as he is universally known, of “sportswashing,” using Saudi Arabia’s vast oil wealth to buy its way into the biggest sporting events, and so gloss over mounting human-rights violations. The country reportedly spent about 0 million to secure 10-year hosting rights for Formula 1 and in November, its Olympic Committee announced it would spend 4 million creating about 90 sports federations, training athletes from scratch to be world champions, much as China did decades ago.