an easy solution to prevent a staffing revolt.

​As per usual when a new concept is proposed, controversy follows. I have little idea why the Sky Bet Sunday Series must be staged as a twilight event rather than start and end as would be common for an ordinary Sunday or why no one thought racing staff might not greet the concept with open arms. It should have been obvious where the flaw in the concept lay.
Over 3 consecutive Sundays Sky Bet are sponsoring a day’s ‘quality’ racing with a start time of late afternoon. We are promised good prize money, great racing, with grooms awarded best turned-out prizes of £250 per race. The National Trainers Federation only gave the concept the thumbs up because of the enhanced prize-money, as did the groom’s Union, the National Association of Racing Staff.
Now, there is a bundle of prize-money promised, for that we, especially, owners, should be thankful. £600,000, to be exact, with £200,000 in bonuses at 3 meetings starting with Musselburgh on July 25th, with further fixtures at Haydock on August 8th and Sandown on August 22nd. While this is generous and a seriously needed boost in prize-money, what is not so generous is expecting racing staff to work late into Sunday evening, when the majority will have to report for work before dawn the following morning, with the only incentive on offer the chance to win £250 for best turned-out.
This is the big fail in this experiment. Yes, 18 grooms, I am basing the number on 6-races per meeting, have the opportunity of a £250 bonus for their long day but as anyone who has worked with racehorses will be aware, this is not a game with an even playing field. Some horses hate to have their manes plaited. Some trainers do not like to have the manes of their horses plaited and some, the clever ones who know something about horses, will not trim tails as the longer the tail the less irritated and upset the horse will be by flies. It is why ‘God’ gave horses tails that left to their own devices will grow down to the ground, the longer the reach they have.
The answer is simple. Pinch a £1,000 or even £2,000 from the first prize money and divide it between every groom leading up in each race. A financial incentive, rather like a fee or bonus for working anti-social hours, regardless of best turned-out prizes, to every groom, in the same thought-process that every jockey is paid to ride in a race. It is perhaps an idea that could permeate into every sponsored race run the length and breadth of the country. Dangle a carrot to incentivise every groom to want to go racing on a Sunday evening. Once upon a time £250 would have been seen as doubling a groom’s monthly salary. These days it will hardly stretch to pay the gas bill.
And the B.H.A., which it never is, could have been proactive by only scheduling National Hunt racing on the Mondays following these twilight Sunday meetings. In fact, they could take the strain off flat yards at the busiest times of the year by having a day a week without flat racing. I don’t know whether the B.H.A. ever communicate with its Irish counterparts but if there were to be 2 Irish meetings on a day when there is no flat racing in Britain, plus 2 National Hunt meetings, the betting industry would feel no pain.
To quote the B.H.A. spokesperson in today’s Racing Post, flannelling as per usual. ‘Developing the fixture list is a constant balancing act between delivering revenues for the sport and its participants, while also safeguarding the well-being of our workforce’. As I said, flannelling. The fixture list is allowed to grow like Topsy and as every trainer will tell you is out-of-control and if ‘safeguarding the well-being of our workforce’ had any sincerity about it the fixture list would have breathing spaces as a matter of routine built into it.
This sport needs as a matter of emergency to solve the leakage of staff and to persuade others to enter the industry. Working staff to the point of burn-out is about the worst way to go about it. At the moment it is, as someone looking in sees it, all take and very little give.