​It is the day before the day we have longed-for since the start of the season, for some, as with me, since the end of last season, the flat being for me only an interlude that must be tolerated.
Given how this sport can so easily shoot itself in the foot, let’s hope and prayer neither poor stewarding or the weather is the lead story on any of the next four days. Crossed fingers for Wednesday.
The B.H.A. have made some pretty diabolical decisions this season, with the fiasco at Sandown on Saturday yet another calamity for the sport that could have been avoided by the simple expedient of removing one of the finishing posts. Surely someone must have thought it a good idea since the last cock-up. If you can’t make the job idiot-proof then, as they say, employ a better class of idiot!
To my mind, things haven’t really improved since Saturday. Why, for instance, were there two jumps meetings on the Sunday before Cheltenham and three on the Monday, all of them, on the Monday, at southern courses. Shouldn’t we be wanting all of our top jockeys to be fit for the biggest meeting of the year? Why put them to unnecessary risk of injury by programming five meetings in the run-up to Cheltenham? Shouldn’t we be wanting them fresh in mind and body? Wouldn’t the trainers that employ them prefer to have them at home helping to put the finishing touches to their Cheltenham runners?
Sunday would have been the perfect opportunity to have two all-weather meetings, with two more on the Monday. The three jumps meetings for Monday would serve the sport better spread over the next four days to give jockeys unwanted for Cheltenham plenty of good rides to help boost their careers and bank balance.
But then what do I know? The men and women at the B.H.A. are intelligent and educated, no doubt with a satchel-full of university degrees spread amongst them. Some may have even ridden a horse. Or at the very least know which end to offer a carrot. If only I had attended my secondary modern more often and listened more intently when I hadn’t anything better to do and chanced to go along to classes, I might have used the intelligence I had when younger to more lucrative effect and found my station in life helping the B.H.A. make up silly rules that even a stable lad with zero-years’ experience of the trade might comprehend as flawed.
Did anyone think through the ‘no horse can run twice at the festival’ rule? Because if they had given it the deep thought required, they would have realised it was compromised by the enticement of a bonus to the winner of the Imperial Cup to run at the Festival. In fact, any horse that ran over the weekend, or even on the Monday, could run at the Festival, even on the following day. To stop highly professional trainers from running a fit and healthy horse twice at the festival is plain wrong, especially if it is allowable on every other day of the year.
And why stipulate that trainers must figuratively jump through hoops to prove their horses are fit and able to compete at Cheltenham? Firstly, it is simply a P.R. exercise and secondly it is an insult the Trainers Federation should complain about to suggest that any trainer would take a horse to any race meeting, let alone Cheltenham, that is unfit to be there. It is nothing more than getting their defence in first in case something horrible should happen, which undoubtedly it will. It is pandering to the ignorant whilst taking opportunity away from owners, trainers and jockeys, all of whom have the welfare of the horse as their first priority.
On to matters more vital than chucking mud at racing’s powers-that-be. Anyone who reads ‘Old Moore’s Almanack’ will know that at the end of their predictions for world events each month, they attempt to point readers toward the winners of the big races to come. It is on the lines of ‘a nine-year-old will likely win the Gold Cup at Cheltenham’. And ‘the favourite will win the Champion Hurdle’. Mind you, in this year’s volume they are also making suggestions for the Tote Gold Trophy, a race not run under that name for a year or two. Perhaps someone at the B.H.A. is their racing advisor.
So, I will predict that a mare bearing the name of a fruit will win the Champion Hurdle. There will be a massive upset in the Champion Chase. A big outsider will win the Stayers Hurdle and an older horse will win the Gold Cup and be retired there and then. I also expect Neil King to have his first Cheltenham winner, though it will not be the rider’s first Cheltenham winner.

​March 12th in 1924 fell on a Wednesday. It was the historic date for the inaugural running of the Cheltenham Gold Cup. The Cheltenham executive, under the chairmanship of Mr.F.H.Cathcart (the race that bore his name for so long is now the Ryanair. Too easy we forget the pioneers of our sport) were experimenting, in the same way as the present-day executive have experimented with the cross-country race and the mares hurdles.
We now accept without any other consideration that the Cheltenham Gold Cup is the race the majority of jockeys, trainers and owners of National Hunt horses would wish to win. In 1924 and for decades afterwards it was in fact a bit of a novelty steeplechase, a useful race to put the final touches of fitness on horses before a tilt at the race that really mattered, the Grand National at Aintree.
It's hard to believe that the thinking behind the Gold Cup was that National Hunt needed an equivalent steeplechase to the Ascot Gold Cup on the flat, which tells us how much flat racing has changed down the decades. Long distance flat races have acquired protected status in recent years to keep them alive while the Cheltenham Gold Cup has become the supreme race in the National Hunt calendar. Perhaps flat racing needs a 3 and a quarter mile conditions race to remind enthusiasts of the beginnings of their sport!
In 1924 there were only eighteen races in the whole National Hunt calendar worth more than £500 to the winner and only two worth more than £2,000, the National Hunt Chase, what we now term the 4-miler, an amateur race then as it remains today, and the Lancashire Chase, the race I suspect that has metamorphized into the Betfair, which carried a value to the winner of £1,780. In 1924 the Cheltenham Gold Cup carried the grand total of £685 to the winner and was seriously out-ranked as the main race of the meeting by the amateur-riders 4-mile maiden chase, which it remained until comparatively recently. Somewhere in the calendar the 4-mile maiden chase should be revived, just for old times’ sake.
At the time of the inauguration of the Cheltenham Gold Cup conditions races were as rare as hen’s teeth and its first running was not exactly a level weights contest as the weights were set at 12st and 11st 5lbs for five-year-old. Proving that novelty will always prove popular the race had a healthy compliment of runners from the get-go, with Red Splash, a five-year-old carrying 11st 5lbs winning by a head and a neck from Conjuror and Gerald L, both carrying 12st.
At the time National Hunt racing desperately needed a spectacle, a race to savour as the Grand National was virtually the sole reason for anyone to own chasers, train chasers or to ride them. Aintree completely dwarfed the rest of the season. It was, and remains, National Hunt’s biggest attraction, yet the best chasers rarely won the race. It was a hard task for any horse just to finish the race. Even when Golden Miller won in 1934, giving him the legendary accolade of being the only horse to win both the Gold Cup and the Grand National in the same year, the exertion was so imprinted on his mind, even though he won two more Gold Cups, he began to hate the big black fences and the greatest steeplechaser of his era could not be cajoled to put his best foot forward, making his views plain on his final visit by refusing.
It was only in the early 1950’s when the Cheltenham Gold Cup became a race distinct in name and prestige, when the winners were rarely asked to attempt the Gold Cup/Grand National double. I will venture to say that no horse competing in this year’s renewal of the race will be asked to run at Aintree.
This year’s race? Even before Cheltenham last year I tipped Presenting Percy as this year’s winner. I have got cold feet just recently about him, though now it seems he’ll get his ground so at least he will be running. Back on Boxing Day the idea came to me that come March Thistlecrack would finish in front of Clan Des Obeaux and as the King George winner has undoubtedly been the most impressive chaser of the season so far I am staying loyal to the Boxing Day impression and suggest Tom Scudamore will achieve what his grandfather achieved and his father did not by winning the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
But if Presenting Percy wins I will claim it as a moral victory as I honestly tipped him, look through the archive, to win this year’s Gold Cup before he even ran in the R.S.A.

​No surprise that from Saturday  the cover price of the Racing Post will be going up, after all overheads for the Post always sky-rocket the week of the Cheltenham Festival. I am sure this is purely coincidental and not simply the most convenient time of the year for the Post to increase the cover price to pull in extra revenue. By how much the cover price is to rise may, as it did with me when I discovered the ‘bloody Nora’ and sharp intake of breath news, take the wind from your sails. From Monday, to get your essential daily fix of racing stories and form, the price of the Racing Post, Monday-to-Sunday, will be £3.20p, a humungous rise in my personal weekly cost of living of £2.10p, more than the cost of every other daily newspaper.
Look, I know the Racing Post is in financial dire straits; it has been for a long while. Yet at a time when they should be seeking new readers, when they will lose income from the gathering pace of Betting Shop closures, they put up the cost of racing’s only daily newspaper by a whopping 30p a day! And I thought when it went up to £2.90 this time last year, they were stretching the elastic is bit too tightly!
Is this hypocritical of them? They are seemingly supportive of the boycott of Arc racecourses because of the falling level of prize money on offer, yet have no compunction in increasing the financial pressure on trainers, jockeys and enthusiasts like myself, by adding (excuse my math) £97. 20p to their annual outgoings. Though I dare say the on-line charge for the Racing Post will remain unchanged.
No one loves the Post more than me. If for whatever reason I do not receive a copy of the paper my whole day, from breakfast to evening when I look-up the results on Cee-Fax (or is it Teletext?), is diminished. When it comes to racing, other papers do not hack it, though the Western Morning News, in variance to its London counterparts, have increased their coverage of the sport.
Once again, regrettably, the sport, and the Racing Post is very much an integral part of the sport, has acted as if racing is solely a rich man’s plaything, giving no thought to the working class at all. Horse Racing is very much a working-class sport underpinned by the wealthy of society. From stable staff, to racecourse workers to betting shop staff the wheels of this sport are greased by working-class men and women. For this sport to grow stronger, to have a rewarding future, it has to be grown from the bottom up. It is why the level 4,5 and 6 races at the all-weather tracks are so important. It is also important for the working man to be able to afford a copy of the newspaper that feeds the industry.
£3.20p for a daily newspaper is plain ridiculous. It is, very often, a good read. I have vowed to read the paper until my death. I would like a copy of the paper placed in my hand when I am dropped into my grave as The Racing Post is the very essence of my identity. But can anyone on a meagre income justify paying £3.20p for a daily paper? No, is the answer, by the way.
Already, once the Festival and Aintree are done and dusted, I have decided to forego the paper on a Saturday, the day it is the least value for money, and buy in its stead either the dull Racing Paper or the Western Morning News. At least for the duration of the flat season, anyway.

​On Saturday week, the day after the final day of the Cheltenham Festival, arguably the most important and competitive of the British regional Nationals is run at Uttoxeter, the Midlands National, the trophy for which is possibly the most impressive presented to a winning owner in the entire calendar, with the possible exception of the Foxhunter’s trophy at the Festival which is so large no single jockey can life it above shoulder height.
There is an element of ‘after the Lord’s Mayor Show’ about the Midlands National coming as it does the day after the greatest show on Earth. As anyone who has read my thoughts in other pieces on this website will be fully aware by now, ( I do go on about it, it must be admitted) I am a vociferous advocate of a fifth day at the Cheltenham Festival. Not an extra Festival Day but more of a ‘Heath meeting’, as was once the case on the Saturday after Royal Ascot, to allow the Cheltenham executive plenty of wriggle room if any of the four days should be lost to the weather. I simply think it a sensible insurance policy, especially as it gives Cheltenham space to run races that might in time become part of the Festival itself.
But if this perfectly feasible suggestion were to be taken up, it would, even as a ‘Heath meeting’, overshadow the Midlands National. I.T.V., obviously, would not up-sticks, as they do now, and present their Saturday programme from Uttoxeter but remain at Cheltenham. As it is, much of the talk on the Saturday revolves around reviewing the past week’s racing. To my mind, Uttoxeter and the Midlands National deserve more than second consideration.
I would like to see Uttoxeter swap places in the calendar with Wolverhampton, with the Midlands National run on the same day as Sandown’s Imperial Cup and the pointless and unnecessary ‘Lincoln Trial’ meeting transferred to the Saturday after Cheltenham. To muse for a moment on the ‘Lincoln Trial. The actual Lincoln, which I propose would give the start of the flat season greater significance and interest if it went back in time to be a forty-runner race started from a barrier, is run on turf over a straight mile. Wolverhampton is an all-weather surface without anything like a straight mile. Surely this race, if it is at all necessary, should be staged at Newcastle where there is a straight mile?
There is further merit in staging the Midlands National a week earlier as it would allow any horse due to run at Aintree a longer period to recover from its exertions, perhaps making the race a better proposition to trainers. I would also suggest, given we are about to enter the heartland of the jumping season, that Sandown and the Imperial Cup and Uttoxeter and the Midlands National make for a better menu than an only slighter better than average card from Wolverhampton and Sandown.
It might be, of course, that Uttoxeter prefer their present date in the calendar. How many racegoers from Ireland go on from Cheltenham to Uttoxeter I can only hazard a guess at? But if Uttoxeter were to join forces with Stratford and Warwick, both courses having meetings on the Sunday and Monday prior to the Festival, a joint marketing strategy might be agreed upon in an attempt to persuade the early-bird Festival-goers from over the Irish Sea to try their luck at all three meetings before beginning their betting spree at Cheltenham? This triumvirate of courses could market the three days as either ‘The Midlands Festival’ or perhaps ‘The Little Festival’. Just a thought.
Uttoxeter, by the way, is one of the most under-rated racecourses in this country. It was transformed back in the day from decay and uncertainty by Sir Stanley Clarke of Lord Gyllene and Grand National fame. The first building renovated at the course was not the grandstand or the weighing room, I believe, but the public toilets. I remember him saying that ‘you should never be embarrassed by the state of your toilets’. If only such a philosophy could be adopted by every public venue.
 

​I understand and sympathise with the militants wanting to force ARC, and very soon it will be all the racecourses not owned by them, to return prize money to the levels of the past twelve months. For the long-term future of the sport a solution to this problem must be found and found sooner rather than later. I just cannot believe, though, that boycotts are the best strategy for establishing a harmonious conclusion to the problem.
In my previous piece on this website I made the point that the solution is to make the present funding system more fit for purpose and to come up with alternative funding streams. I proposed one in particular, though cleverer people, people like Ralph Beckett and Martin Cruddance should be able to put their better education to good use and develop a strategy tinged with less naivety than my well-meant contribution to the debate.
The people who should not be vilified, as seems will be the case if the thoughts of racing professionals on WhatsApp remain potent in the real world, are the jockeys, trainers, owners and stable staff who shun the boycott, especially those who put on the show at Lingfield tomorrow. If it is acceptable that ARC must make their business profitable, and racehorse trainers likewise, why should it be wrong for jockeys underused by trainers to take advantage of the situation. I bet you all the tea I drink in a year that the Good Friday meeting is not targeted. Can’t see Frankie, Ryan, Jolly G and others foregoing the big money of that day to make their point! Perhaps they should?
Everyone agrees that prize money in this country is embarrassingly low when compared to other countries round the world. There is also too much racing altogether in this country, something everyone except bookmakers also agree on. And this reflects harder on the journeyman jockey lucky to get a ride a day and the small trainer having to work every daylight hour just to stay financially afloat. If Ralph Beckett gets all high and mighty with people for refusing to back his boycott, he should think about spending a day working in their shoes, working to their profit and loss margins. Yes, if the boycott succeeds in improving prize money in theory everyone wins. But racing is not an equal playing ground. The real winners will be the owners and trainers at Ralph Beckett’s level and above. They are the trainers who scoop up the majority of the level 4, 5 and 6 races, the races that this dispute is all about.
Tomorrow Danny Brock will earn a decent pay packet. He has six rides and the prospect of at least a couple of winners. As he said, he is not playing scab but earning money for his children and wife, perhaps earning enough so that this month’s mortgage payment does not amount to a family whip-round. Good luck to him. Good luck, also, to Ralph Beckett and his campaign for better prize money.
 
I am rather old, too close to hearing the ominous thump of a pension book falling through the letterbox than I care to admit to. For twenty-odd years I worked with racehorses and for the twenty-odd, and more, years since hardly a day has past when the thought of returning to that lifestyle has not wandered through my head with the same seductive temptation as a lottery win, sex and the fantasy of a big buck’s publishing deal.
In fact, to be truthful, for six weeks about ten years ago I did actually grasp the nettle and worked for a trainer close, about twenty miles away, to where I live. The reason the adventure only lasted for a short period of time was no one’s fault, not even mine. I cannot say it was a success, though it was certainly enjoyable.
The first surprise was how inflexible my body had become. I used to be able to vault on to a horse with alacrity but twenty years after my prime my body had become as rigid as a tree-trunk and not once in that period was I able to get on a horse without using a mounting-block of some description. The second surprise was how things had changed over the time I had been away. The working day was more regimented than I remembered, with a lot more rush and tear about the day. There was a clocking on time and a clocking off time, with overtime payed if extra hours were required. Something the trainer in question was very keen to avoid.
To have taken advantage of my strengths, the trainer should not have relied on me as a rider but used me far more as a stableman or yardman. That, I am sure, would have come about, and if it had I suspect I would still be there, ever reliable, always willing. But in a freak accident I rather badly broke my leg. No one’s fault, though on reflection I should not have been told to take this particular horse round the roads on his own, as all the other staff acknowledged. Though horse and rider did arrive safely back at the yard. It was getting off a horse standing perfectly still, landing on uneven ground, where my left leg broke in two places. The only broken bone of my entire life.
Do I have regrets? No, only disappointment that fate chose to be so unkind to me.
Even now I cannot but think, in a limited capacity, I would not be of some help in an understaffed racing yard. Unfortunately, there is no one other than my last racing employer in my local vicinity to take advantage of this willing and very fit for his age old ‘un.

​Prize Money is and during my life-time always has been a source of embarrassment to the sport when compared to the purses on offer in other leading horse racing countries. The top-end of the sport is, as you would expect, well-served, with all the most prestigious races having prize money commensurate with similar races abroad. Of course, the simplest method of boosting prize money at the opposite end of the scale would be to siphon off 10% from every race worth over fifty-thousand pounds. The powers-that-be aren’t keen to take that road for fear of the major owners taking their large strings of horses to France where the sport has a very sound method of achieving appropriate levels of prize money for all sectors of the sport.
As no one, seemingly, in high places has any truck with treading a similar path to the French, and with the present system of funding made unsustainable in the long-term due to the nasty Government, no doubt in their ignorance, turning off the tap of unlimited funds coming our way via the Fixed Odd Terminal jobbies – though to my innocent eyes this did seem a close relation to living off immoral earnings. In my precious piece I suggested alternative avenues might be tried to source extra funding for our sport, as well as to raise money for equine charities.
I freely admit that my proposal for an industry supported ‘Big Bet’ on the lines of the Scoop 6 is not entirely the answer as the B.H.A. cannot be expected to fund the sport when they have no clear notion of how much money such a bet would generate over a 12-month period. Yet I do not propose the ‘Big Bet’ should be expected to fund the sport on its own. I see no reason why the present system cannot continue to be the foundation stone of funding, with the ‘Big Bet’ in existence to bolster the prize fund pot. Other ideas should also be welcomed to this end. Individual racecourse Totes seem a workable idea to me. And to my knowledge lotteries and scratch cards have not yet been considered to bring extra revenue to individual racecourses. Also, in this electronic age why hasn’t the powers-that-be considered some kind of on-line Tote?
The sport is crying-out for some ‘blue sky thinking’, an entrepreneur with a deep-seated love and understanding of the sport.
As was pointed out in today’s Racing Post, the situation at the moment is exacerbated by ARC owning too many racecourses, having 40%, apparently, share of the race programme. But that does not necessarily make ARC the true baddy in this debate. It can be argued that without Arc many more racecourses would have gone the way of Wye, Stockton and Folkestone (Shame on you ARC). If ARC do not turn a profit, they will no doubt sell their main assets to developers, selling unprofitable land being the safety-net of their investment in the sport. I refer you again to Folkestone.
Trainers, too, must make their businesses profitable. And owners must be given a chance of breaking even. Unlike some, though, I do not believe it is important for owners to make money out of our sport. If they choose to spend six-figure amounts of money on a horse they cannot expect any sort of a guarantee that they will win their outlay back in prize money. And the public will pour scorn on us if we use ‘the plight of the money-to-spare owner’ as a way of winning their sympathy and backing when it comes to boycotts and internal strife. To the public-at-large a boycott by racehorse trainers will be portrayed in newspapers like the Daily Mail as ‘rich boys throwing the toys from the pram because they can no longer afford the best champagne and cavier’.
It is not only the ARC board who need Arc to thrive. Racing as a whole needs Arc to thrive. And ARC equally needs racehorse trainers to thrive. As of this month a sticking plaster has been applied to the open wound that is prize money. But a sticking plaster will not heal either the division between ARC and racing professionals or what is, sadly, the self-inflicted injury of inadequate and longstanding funding of our sport.
Everyone directly involved in this dispute, which is anyone who cares about the future of our sport, must now get together on a regular basis and thrash out a long-term solution. The present system of funding must be shored-up and made fit for purpose but alternative ways to increase the funding-pool must also be established. Otherwise, and I do hope this is just scaremongering and not a vision of the future, the small-field cards that the boycotts have produced of late might be standard fare some time in the near future.
 

​The National Lottery is a Government rubber-stamped scam, isn’t it? It is an in plain sight money-making machine that from its conception was designed to raise funds, firstly for Camelot and the British Government and now for the latter and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, the current proprietors of the British National Lottery. It also provides funding for ‘good causes’, mainly, or so it seems to me, large and village-sized civil engineering projects that otherwise would have to paid for out of the public purse. Occasionally, it must be admitted, someone wins a life-altering amount of money.
Because of the lackadaisical approach by the powers-that-be to ensuring the sport they are charged with caring-for is adequately funded, horse racing is facing the very real possibility of falling off the edge of financial black hole. This embarrassment is in need of a speedy and long-lasting solution. I offer now a partial solution to a crisis that if left unresolved will become a recurring backdrop to the sport we all love.
In my previous piece on this site, I proposed starting the flat season with six ‘kick’ass’ valuable handicaps, headlined by the Lincoln, with the six races forming a ‘Scoop 6’ type national bet with a guaranteed prize fund of £1-million pound. Starting the flat with a bang rather than its traditional whimper. This, of course, would need to be marketed and promoted through advertising and the media, with High Street bookmakers offering their support and guidance.
I would go as far to suggest that such a ‘Big Bet’, if it could be organised on a regular basis, could inject much-needed revenue into the sport. Ideally, if it were to stand a chance of competing with the National Lottery, the ‘Big Bet’ should be every weekend, with special ‘Big Bets’, to give greater prominence to the major race-meetings, organised for Cheltenham, Royal Ascot and Goodwood, etc. Outside of the closed-shop that is the racing world, races of the importance of the 2,000 Guineas, Cambridgeshire and the Ebor, to name but three such historic races, are unknown to the general public. In fact, away from the Grand National and the Derby, and the event known as Royal Ascot, even the sporting public are to a man ignorant of our sport. If the last leg of a million-pound ‘Big Bet’ was to be the 2,000 Guineas, the Wokingham or Cambridgeshire, we could start to introduce the public to our sport, to educate and excite their curiosity.
If such a ‘Big Bet’ could be established, money raised through the price of entry, I would suggest £1 per go, could help to fund prize money and to raise money for equine charities, as well as providing the punter who presently gambles weekly on the National Lottery, with a more lucrative and exciting alternative.
The top prize, or indeed any of the four-figure and above prizes, are rarely won on the National Lottery. If half-a-million pounds or even a million could be guaranteed by a horse racing ‘Big Bet’ it would be seen as an easier opportunity to win big. As I know from my own experience, people only stay loyal to the Lottery because after investing so much over so long a time-period they feel they are owed a good pay-out. It is also a matter of habit, as with buying alcohol or cigarettes. It is just something we all do. We chase a fantasy lifestyle.
The powers-that-be need to be looking for innovative ways to boost funding. If my ‘Big Bet’ proposal, selecting the winners of six races or something similar, only generated £50,000 per month, it would add over £600,000 to the prize money pot. And think what amazing work the equine charities could do if a similar amount could be donated to them?
This sort of ‘super-bet’ has failed in the past, of course, and I am neither naïve or bold enough to suggest this is racing’s silver bullet. But short of nationalising bookmakers to ensure all profit from betting goes into racing’s coffers, I cannot see how prize-money can be subsidized that does not ask owners to contribute more in entry fees. The Grand National provides evidence to tell you that the greater British public are prepared to enter a betting shop if the incentive is seductive enough to tempt them.
I would urge the powers-that-be to talk to experts in this field in an attempt to find the right formula to give the proposal of a ‘Big Bet’ a good opportunity of raising money to bulk-up prize money, to raise money for equine charities and to offer the public the opportunity to win a life-changing amount of money. It need not be £100-million or even £5-million. A guaranteed £500,000 would still be more than is normally won on the National Lottery.