​10) I want to never again see people at racecourses, or anywhere, wearing face-masks. Pure theatre, nothing else. There is not one scientific study that gives any credence to the myth that masks prevent transmission. The holes in masks are in the region of 50-microns, the particles of virus in the air are 1-micron. Go work it out. I am sick of horse-racing and other sports being used for government propaganda.
9) Given the exploits of Rachel Blackmore and Bryony Frost in National Hunt racing, it is hoped that during the coming flat season Holly Doyle will bring down the next glass ceiling and win a classic. Given soft underfoot conditions for the Thursday of Royal Ascot there is a big chance she might make some racing history by winning the Ascot Gold Cup but what is really needed is for her to win a classic, preferably the Derby, to get racing back on the front pages of the national newspapers.
8) I would like to see, if initially only on a trial basis, a ban or restriction on the use of the whip. Personally, I want the whip restricted to one strike as this will put greater emphasis on jockeys keeping their mounts balanced and running in a straight line. I believe there will be two benefits from such a prohibition, one is that horses will suffer less injuries through not having their weight thrust one way and the other when unbalanced and secondly, I believe horses will not be soured so easily and in the future there will be less ‘monkeys or rogues’ . Jockeys will object, of course, but in short order they will adapt.
7) I would be happy if the B.H.A. announced a full review of the race programme, incorporating the views of trainers, jockeys and owners.
6) There needs to be more imaginative conditions for races. Winners of one, as they have in Ireland, hurdle and chases. Proper maiden races. Novice hurdles restricted to horses that have run on the flat. Handicaps where horses at the top of the handicap are balloted out, not those at the bottom. Just more imagination.
5) Restricting jockeys to one meeting a day has been one of the best innovations of modern times and diminishes my next wish, though I still think there is merit in having a certain number of races per week restricted to jockeys who have ridden less than 10, 15, 20 or 30, choose your own number, winners in the previous 12-months. With occasionally whole meetings restricted to such jockeys. The sport has a duty of care to jockeys, to allow each and every one of them the opportunity to make a living from the sport.
4) Instead of banning jockeys for minor transgressions – 2-day bans, for instance, that stop a top rider from participating at a major meeting – escalating fines should be imposed. 10% of whatever value the race concerned was worth, perhaps. 10% of £3,000 wouldn’t sting a leading rider too much, though 10% of £1-million might focus his or her attention to a greater extent than a 4-day ban. I believe this innovation should be debated, not though by jockeys.
3) This next innovation has been a dream wish of mine for many years and though on the surface it appears daft, I believe it is exactly what the start of the flat season needs to give it a bit of a punch. The Lincoln – a race, if you read any biography by a trainer or jockey from between the wars or before the 1st World War, that was once as important as the Grand National and which now is little more than a handicap with inflated prize-money – should be given a make-over. My idea is that it needs to be relocated to Newmarket and should be allowed 35-40 runners and started from a barrier. The Grand National, though changed from its early days, still has the buzz and feel of those days. There is an element of watching history every first Saturday in April. It is different from all other jump races. It sets the imagination on fire. The flat does not have such a race. A 40-runner Lincoln should be that race for the flat. A vision of what flat racing for most of its history looked like.
2) I would like to see all of racing ‘stakeholders’ (I hate the term), and I mean every sector of the sport, to come forward with ideas on how the sport should be governed. It is my contention that the B.H.A. and the present structure of the sport is unfit for purpose as all that is created at the moment is angst and confusion. Both A.P. McCoy and John Francome favour a Chairman of the Board type scenario, a Barry Hearn type leadership, and I agree.
1) All I really want is for the sport to thrive and prosper. For many years now the aim of those at the head of the sport has diminished to that of ‘get through the day and survive until tomorrow’. Their strategies seem to suggest that someone wants the sport to be slowly run-down, with the final destination extinction. There is broad agreement that there is too much racing and that prize-money at the lower levels is an embarrassment. In the House of Commons recently, Steve Baker said he wanted the government to produce a Covid road-map to heaven and all the country was getting was a road-map to hell. I get the same impression from the B.H.A. and other members of racing ‘stakeholders’.

​I do not celebrate the start of a new year; it is why at five in the morning I am able to sit behind my laptop still believing my imagination is at its fullest setting before the rising of day’s new dawn. My ambivalence toward New Year festivities is born out of a work-life of pre-dawn starts, long days working with the minimum of breaks, with the resulting closing down of faculties long before the dying of the sun. It was the lifestyle forced upon Neanderthals through their inability to either invent artificial light or to develop a method that allowed them to carry burning embers to illuminate their immediate surroundings. As with Neanderthals, I rely more on instinct than any inherent ability to improvise my way through life. It is why research is such a hardship to me and why I prefer the ‘stream of consciousness’ form of writing. Laziness comes into too, I suspect.
The opening paragraph, a contrivance that is a more scenic route to move the narrative forward than simply by getting straight to the point, I hope you appreciate, is to escort you to my thoughts on the Challow Hurdle run at Newbury last week and the race programme in both Britain and Ireland. 
I do not like the Challow Hurdle. Or the Tolworth Hurdle at Sandown on January 8th, 2022. There must be, of course, races with conditions that allow trainers to run their better novice hurdlers outside of the hurly-burly of commonplace novice hurdle races. Yet races like the Challow and Tolworth are given status and prize money way beyond their worth to spectators and punters. The Challow, for instance, holds the unique position of being the last Grade 1 of the year in Britain, yet can anyone put their hand to their heart and claim it is worthy of such a position in the race programme? It’s place should be as a subsidiary event to the Mandarin and run as a Grade 2 at best.
Yes, Paul Nicholls and Nicky Henderson would shed tears of frustration if the two races were downgraded to Grade 2’s or limited handicaps as I believe would be more beneficial to the sport. Similar races in Ireland equally soak-up prize money and can only be tolerated as Mullins and Elliott are not scared to run 2, 3 or 4 horses against each other, allowing them to determine on the racecourse the pecking order of their novices. This is not enough, though, for me change my stance that outside of the Cheltenham Festival there should no Grade 1 novice hurdles. Or Grade 1 novice chasers, for that matter. Such high-octane races should be reserved for mature horses of proven calibre. 
I contend that part of the reason why the Irish are becoming more dominant at both the Cheltenham Festival and in the major jumps races in general is because British trainers as a whole have so few top-notch chasers and hurdlers the races in the calendar for these horses are becoming less and less competitive, meaning that come the battles of the Festival the British-trained youngsters are found out for want of battle-hardened experience. Winning the Challow Hurdle on the bridle, as Stage Star did last week, offers no clues as to what he might achieve against the battalion of Irish novices that will arrive on our shores next March.
This leads me on to my wish for 2022.
I would like there to be a complete and thorough review of the race programmes in Britain and Ireland, both flat and National Hunt, with the aim of the harmonisation of race-meetings in both countries so that there is no clash of races as happened over the recent Bank Holiday with the Welsh Grand National and the Paddy Power at Leopardstown, the two most competitive races of the whole week, and which occurs with more minor races on an almost daily basis.
You so often hear trainers critical of there being, as an example, no 2-mile races on the flat for 10-days and then to have 2 on one-day. And when a trainer complains, as Nicky Henderson is wont to do, that he can’t run a horse because there are no races for them, he should be listened to and the race programme for the following season adjusted and perhaps as a stopgap a race invented so that for the benefit of the sport the master of Seven Barrows can get a run into that good horse. The sport has an obligation of care and should exercise its duty to keep Nicky Henderson as stress-free as possible during the period between the King George and the Cheltenham Festival. Like him or loathe him, we need him as much as Churchill needed Montgomery.
And this brings me back to races like the Challow and Tolworth. Why these races are given protection from change, when races that were once considered trials for the Gold Cup like the John Bull at Wincanton are demoted to handicap status, is beyond me. British jumps trainers are hindered either side of the Christmas Bank Holiday by a race programme that limits options. Take 2 of Nicky Henderson’s horses. He obviously planned for Shishkin to have 3 runs before Cheltenham in March. Because of a setback, that plan had to be revised to the Desert Orchid and either the Clarence House that might come too quick after Kempton or the Game Spirit that Henderson believes is too close to Cheltenham, with no other option available to him. If Ascot comes up heavy and he backs out of the Clarence House, that leaves Henderson caught between a rock and a hard place and that should not be the case. It is just melodrama if we collectively wring our hands and take a woe-is-me attitude at the drubbing by the Irish last March if our trainers are offered no help by the race-programme.
Now, I accept that Henderson is the most finicky trainer on the planet but he also happens to train many of our leading hopes in defeating the Irish at Cheltenham. He should be helped by the race programme, not hindered. Yes, he has had plenty of opportunity to have run Chantry House more than once, and that was in a no-contest event, before the King George, and as the horse is in need of more experience in the top-flight it should be possible for Henderson to plan 2-more races pre the Gold Cup – he could find a handicap for the horse, of course, a strategy that would not frighten Paul Nicholls – and even if he chose the 2-race option, it is possible the weather might make the obvious route impossible to achieve. It is why races like the old John Bull were so invaluable.
I rest my case.
For now.