THE TOTE

I understand that Betfred’s licence, whereby the bookmaking megalith has control of the Tote, comes to an end in the not too distant future and that a new licence will be “up for grabs.”

This situation gives me an opportunity to express my great joy at the resignation of Prime Minister Cameron, quite the worst occupant 10 Downing Street has ever had. Even worse than dear Tony. It is painful to think that you and I will be keeping them both in luxury (instead of in prison) for the rest of their lives. O tempora, O mores!

One of Cameron’s many sins was to put the Tote “on the market.” In 1927 Winston Churchill (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) created the Tote specifically to provide racing with an income from betting.  Not a penny of public money was ever used to set it up or to finance its operation.

Cameron, brought up in a racing family, undoubtedly knew the facts and decided to ignore them. Why? Perhaps he thought his “All in it Together” image would suffer if he was perceived to be doing favours for the racehorse-owning community.

Whatever his motivation, the Tote was put on the market, racing was fobbed off with £90 million and Betfred’s Fred Done walked away with the crock of gold.

Well done, Fred Done. Treachery on the part of the Prime Minister. Criminal Negligence on the part of the racing industry’s leaders, who made no attempt to buy the Tote on behalf of the industry. As for the various syndicates that sprang up and claimed to be acting “in the best interests of the sport” – they were unable to combine “in the best interests of the sport” because (I suspect) all the movers and shakers involved wanted a handsome cut for themselves.

That is history. Today, looking ahead, the BHA should perhaps be doing the groundwork for a legal challenge designed to liberate the Tote from the embrace of entrepreneurs and government, and to return it to the role that it was originally intended to play.

DISCIPLINARY PANELS AND APPEAL HEARINGS

Christopher Quinlan’s report is most welcome, particularly the suggestion that the panels should be more representative of the sport, and should include former racing professionals, with an open and transparent recruitment process.

Perhaps racing’s stakeholders (owners, trainers, breeders, stable staff, jockeys etc) should be invited to nominate suitable candidates, to form a pool of potential panellists.

From the third paragraph of the report, I understand that a person who has been much involved in all the drama that has surrounded disciplinary arrangements has been appointed to oversee disciplinary, integrity, regulation and stewarding matters.

I think this is a mistake. It suggests that the problems with the justice system have been matters of perception and purely superficial, whereas in fact the system has been rotten to the core for a number of years, and those responsible should be dismissed, or at least found employment far away from the scene of the their previous activities.

Besides, the justice system is but the tip of the iceberg in this connection. The same department’s fingerprints are all over the Whip Rules, which are a mess, and all over NH Starting Arrangements, which are another mess.

Here are the facts:

whip rules

1. Jockeys are required to achieve best possible placing, and the whip plays an essential part in meeting that obligation.

2. Use of whip is not a problem, because it is pain-free.

3. The problem arises from the rule which decrees that whip-abuse can be identified by the number of blows struck. That simply produces a stream of fines and bans, and bad press for British racing. There are better ways of dealing with abuse.

starting arrangements

At the start, pre-race business is done in an atmosphere of peace and quiet. A principle that is respected worldwide. Only in Britain is there an exception to this rule.

The exception applies to jump races featuring more than about a dozen runners. The number of big-field races is few, but includes most of the prestige races. So the number of races may be small, but their importance is huge.

These big fields are subjected to a process (the Rolling Maul) which renders those starts unfair and dangerous.

Question: if peace and quiet at the start is accepted as essential worldwide, why is it that just one group of British horses is subjected to an extra process that is exactly the opposite of peaceful and quiet? And quite unnecessary.

If I was advising the BHA on these two matters, I would suggest that it should seek advice from Olympic gold medallist show-jumper Nick Skelton, whom I have admired from a distance for thirty years. He knows all about the pain-free whip, having publicly endorsed it from the beginning. He also knows everything about the kind of treatment horses require if they are about to be asked to jump obstacles at speed.

If the BHA got his advice, and took it, there would be two areas in which the totally ignorant were not calling the shots. That would help, would it not?

CC

On Saturday evening (about 11 p.m. our time), at Santa Anita, California Chrome continued with his preparation for the Breeders Cup by winning slightly less than a quarter of a million pounds sterling (the Awesome Again Stakes, Group 1, nine furlongs).

The tenacious Dortmund (half a length behind CC two races previously) had the blinkers on this time and set out to harass CC who had jumped off in front. Jockey Espinosa (on CC) decided not to let him have the lead. Result: both horses went a bit too fast in the first quarter of the race. Halfway down the back straight CC established a two/three length lead and kept it to the finish, but the final straight wasn’t scintillating – they had both done too much early on.

A year ago (or was it two?) Espinosa rode American Pharoah to win the Triple Crown, but was then beaten in the Travers. Why was he beaten? He was taken on from the start by a horse that was bent on making life difficult for him (Frosted) and Espinosa tried to stay in front, instead of allowing the “nuisance” horse to have the lead. Result, American Pharoah takes lead at the beginning of the final straight and is mugged close home (by Keen Ice) when the gas runs out.

Espinosa needs to remember that most of his victories on CC have come from jumping into second/third place at the start (two off the rails) and then playing it by ear –  not making too much use of his horse until the sharp end of the contest. I hope trainer Sherman will remind him of that.

GOLF

I suspect that, if Mr Ryder had known what half of his Ryder Cup matches were going to turn into, he would have stopped his cheque. I tend to think that the hullaballoo, created by 50,000 braying American supporters and orchestrated by a number of their team, is so loud and ugly that it can probably be handled by professionals trained from childhood to ignore distraction. However, watching what goes on from a distance of several thousand miles is so unpleasant that I doubt if actually playing can be very enjoyable, unless one is a dedicated masochist.

You either cancel the fixture or you simply turn the ordeal into a joke or you appoint a referee to each game and…. and if it got to that stage cancelling the fixture would become an irresistible option.

Thought: supposing one announced the likelihood of cancellation, is that going to bring the Americans to their senses? I  doubt it. Plenty of them are charming. Those who come over with their horses and win races in Europe are absolute sweeties, but en masse they really do need another hundred years to settle down, stop carrying guns and relax a bit. Europe must be patient. Having said that, the thought that golf, of all games, can be turned into a demented nationalist rally is not attractive.

Incidentally some of the golf was out of this world and quite a lot of the best bits came from two European “rookies” (Rafa Cabrera-Bello, a Spaniard, and Thomas Pieters, a Belgian, the first rookie to score four out of four – that is golf speak for winning every game he took part in, on his first appearance).

PRIX DE L’ARC DE TRIOMPHE

Mr Aidan O’Brien is one of the wonders of the age, Coolmore another (or the same one, it doesn’t matter which). How does Aidan do it? Well, he doesn’t keep his horses wrapped up in cotton wool, and yet they keep on improving, so the magic must be the result of a really satisfactory home environment. If I were to set up my telescope on an eminence and point it at Ballydoyle, I guess I might see quite a lot of horses turned out in little paddocks when the sun is shining. If at dusk on a Saturday I heard a chorus of whinnies and saw a large metal container being wheeled into the feed-house with steam gently rising from under the clean dry sacking keeping the contents warm, I would know that the grub was very popular. If the wind was in the right direction a strange aroma would convey the same message. In part it might come from a dark chocolate-coloured powder capable of doing wonders (more wonders) to the taste buds of distant watchers, let alone hungry horses with their bibs on. I forget its name, but simply thinking about it causes me to salivate and wish I was a horse with visiting rights.

Now for something different. I was very impressed by Chantilly Racecourse (seen for the first time, on TV). When the gates opened, the horses hung left and then hung right, and it seemed to me that this provided lateral latitude, allowing lots of horses to find room to manoeuvre. A bit like the first two furlongs of the Epsom Derby. There followed the big right hand bend which seemed to be reasonably kind to the majority, followed by enough of a finishing straight to allow a great number of changes to take place as the charge for the line developed.

This was my first view but I would fancy it to be as good as Longchamp, if not better. Am I mad?

I know I am sane when I say that Ryan Moore is the best jockey I have seen since Messrs Piggott and Francome. It is a privilege to be around to enjoy his intelligence, nerve, strength and artistry.

As for the torrent of winners from this side of the Channel, it was wonderful to witness. France may be richer, but Britain and Ireland know how to do the business.

RUDISHA

Now for something even more different. Skip it if athletics and history are not for you.

One of the truly great strides of our times is that of the Kenyan David Rudisha, the world record holder for the 800 metres and Olympic champion in 2012 and 2016. I remember seeing him lead from start to finish in a race some years ago, when four of his opponents (possibly from a rival African nation) planned to bring about his downfall. Anticipating that he would try to lead from the start, three of the conspirators were designated to sacrifice themselves by making the first, second and third 200-metre stages suicidally fast. The plan was that the fourth (dropped in behind) would then move to the front and poleaxe a Rudisha who was by this time a shadow of what he had been two minutes previously.

Rudisha saw off the first, then the second, then the third, and when the last of the four loomed up to take the prize he saw him off too. Throughout the race the longest stride in the world was at full stretch and constantly being asked for more, and at every stage it answered the call. I thought he was going to kill himself. Thank god he didn’t, but I suspect it took him a few months to get over that race – I have a feeling that it was when he set his world record.

I watched the video of the Rio final several times, mainly because I was so angry that BBC TV made highlight viewers watch an abridged version of the race – what kind of lunatics is it employing these days? You don’t abridge two minutes of perfection! (Oh yes we do!) Eventually I found an Australian version which showed most of the race.

So there I was, mesmerised by the Rudisha stride, and it occurred to me that I had seen something like it before – on film, long ago. I searched the internet, spreading my cyber-antennae throughout modern history and across the entire world. Eventually I found it, in spotty flickering black-and-white.

When? 1954. Where? Oxford, England. Who? R. Bannister. The First Four Minute Mile. Good for you, You Tube! Check it out for yourself, oh lucky reader. Am I wrong? Is it wishful thinking to suggest that the stride of Bannister was a prequel to that of Rudisha, and was of the same almost superhuman quality?

I tried to find a horse that could compete, but the “stretch like a greyhound” action does not seem to be characteristic of the thoroughbred. Even Ribot was not up to the standard of our human champions. POSTSCRIPT: Arkle 1964 Gold Cup is the nearest to “eating up the ground” that I found – in a race that reminded one how good a horse he was and how good a horse he beat in MILL HOUSE.

Thank you, broad band.

Best wishes.

DONEC

 

 

 

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