​More than any other human in the history of horse racing, Lester Piggott stamped his name and will on the sport and the legend of Lester will survive for as long as the sport of horse racing survives. Perhaps for much longer. Very few top sportsman become known by their first name, especially outside of the sport that was their career. Yet even outside of sport, the public today will almost certainly recognise the name, with the majority knowing his profession. He was a jockey; he won all those Derbies at Epsom. He was the housewives darling, wasn’t he?
I have to admit he was never my favourite jockey. I admired his achievements, the sacrifices he made to keep his weight under control. But his style of riding, relying too much, too often, on the rat-a-tap-tap of his whip, did not sit well with me. His riding of The Minstrel in the Epsom Derby, although it drew amazement and admiration from his peers and journalists, was as ugly a picture of race-riding as imaginable. Looking back, Lester commented that in today’s era he would have received a week of suspension. He knew himself he was excessively hard on his mount, not that it would have bothered him. He won and made the horse the stallion his owners required. In today’s era, he would have received twenty-eight days, not seven.
I didn’t care also for the way he forced his way onto the backs of horses in the big races, always at the expense of another jockey equally deserving of winning a classic. But that was Lester. He was who he was. It was what he did and he was forgiven because of his stature in the sport.
For all my criticism of him, by God was the sport lessened by his absence when he retired. For a good long while nothing jumped off the page when perusing the day’s runners. The sport was punctured. The king was out of his counting house and the void was chasmic, unbridgeable, it seemed. Of course, the sport had survived during his many suspensions and periods on the side-lines when injured. But this was different: he would never be coming back. Top jockeys breathed a sigh of relief, no doubt, at the announcement of the long-fellow’s retirement: no more worrying that he would nick their rides when classics and Group 1’s came around.
Yet after a spell failing as a trainer to replicate his achievements as a jockey, and that infamous and unfair 12-months imprisonment – as Lester quite rightly commented, ‘what good did it do anyone’ – he returned to crown his career with a Breeders Cup victory at the age of 54. A comeback as unlikely and breath-taking as Muhammed Ali knocking out George Foremen in the Rumble in the Jungle.
There are many books written about Lester, a few with his blessing. What is now needed is a proper biography of him written by a professional biographer, not by a racing journalist, so that his family can paint a picture of him as he was as a man, a family man, not simply as a jockey. Someone in today’s Racing Post is quoted as saying that he knew Lester for twenty years but couldn’t honestly say he knew him very well at all. Now he is gone from us, this is something that needs to be rectified.
What is my abiding memory of him? Nijinsky. Not so much his Epsom Derby win but the ridiculous ease of his King George & Queen Elisabeth romp and the beautiful ride he gave him to win the St. Leger. And the Arc disappointment, of course. I was naïve back then. Far more than now. I thought Nijinsky was unbeatable. I now know that the horse had suffered a bad bout of ringworm leading up to the Arc and his preparation was far from perfect. But I remember the astonishment at the great 3-year-old’s eclipse by a horse I had hardly heard about. It was a defeat that was hard to accept, though part and parcel of life’s learning curve. It was good to know that it was Lester’s biggest disappointment as a jockey.
Lester always believed Sir Ivor was superior to Nijinsky. He should know. But not in my eyes. Sir Ivor got beaten too many times to justify his superiority but then who am I to question Lester’s opinion. 
There will never be another like him and the world of horse racing cannot be the same without him. He was Lester.

​The title of this piece is also the title, with the added subtitle, ‘The Life and Times of Jack Colling’, of Susan Colling’s book about the career of her husband.
I am reasonably sure that the author set out to write a biography of her husband, the trainer Jack Colling, and in her own mind that was what she achieved. The book, though, is less of a biography and more a memoir of her life as the wife of a successful trainer. The narrative is random, heading south and north in one chapter and then east and west in the next. That is not to condemn the book as amateurish or of no value. In fact, the less than professional approach is what gives it the charm of a loving wife wishing to send her husband off into the hereafter with good and honest references should he meet anyone of importance in the spiritual realm. That’s how the book came across to me, anyhow.
The book is self-published. Deliberately self-published or as a result of the author being unable to find a publishing house willing to take the book on, I cannot say. No book is made worse for being self-published. In fact, it takes greater effort to self-publish than to have an agent and publisher take the strain. I should know. I have been that soldier. You must undertake the task of proof-reading at a time when, as the author, you are pretty sick and tired of the ’baby’ you have conceived and nurtured, dressed as well as your ability will allow, and given to the world as a gift of your soul. The author is also his/her own editor and to appreciate the work of a professional editor just read a self-published book. But I digress.
The preface to the book was dated 1993, with the place of composition Monterana, Italy. Susan Colling does not inform the reader if she moved to Italy after Jack’s death or whether she was on holiday or merely visiting friends. Perhaps it is to her credit she omitted to tell us anything about her life after her husband passed-on as ‘Jack of His Own Trade’ is a book about her husband, his career as a jockey and trainer, and not about her, as interesting and entertaining as she might have been.
Jack Colling died in 1981. The sport held him in enough esteem for there to be an apprentice race run in his honour at Newbury for a good while, though not anymore, I believe. Colling was apprenticed to his father and rode his first winner in 1912, when only eleven-years-old. Times have changed since then. It wasn’t many years before Jack’s birth that kids of eleven and less were being thrust up chimneys with a broom and absolutely no P.P.E., even before the fire was dead in the hearth. Weight beat him as a flat jockey just as he was on the verge of moving into the big time as first jockey to a major yard.
The book, if I recall correctly, does not give the number of winners he rode as a jockey, though when he retired from training his winning total was 1,532, the highest in many a long year. The record was not his for long, though, as Sir Jack Jarvis out achieved him by two.
As Susan Colling writes in the preface, ‘It’s rather interesting that the horse who gave Henry (Cecil) his first big success, Wolver Hollow’ was originally bought by Jack on behalf of Henry’s stepfather, Sir Cecil Boyd Rochfort. The book has a good many interesting facts dotted throughout, though the majority are now dated, the characters long dead. Jack, for instance, trained Trelawny, a great favourite of mine, before George Todd took over the training of one of the most popular long-distance horses of his time.
I mention the above to give evidence to any reader too young to recall Jack Colling that he was during his lifetime a ‘someone’ in the sport, a top man, with a racing lineage to be proud about.
As Susan Colling is honest enough to admit, the narrative lacks cohesion as one story leads her to not always seamlessly to another and as memory is neither numerical nor ordered an anecdote from 1914 may be followed in the same paragraph by an incident set in 1935 and concluded in 1944. That is not an exact description of the text but it holds true as a warning to anyone who has the good fortune to come across a copy of the book and who has a hankering for structure, that this a competent attempt at biography though by a long chalk not a mirror-image of a professional one. That is not criticism, by the way, but the observation of a writer who after long suffering at the keyboard is yet to produce a literary offering as worthwhile as ‘Jack of His Own Trade’.

​I suspect the ways people become interested or fascinated with horse racing are as many as the differing aspects of the sport itself. I was plonked down in front of a black and white television one Saturday in April while my parents went up the road to buy me a birthday present. I have no recollection of what that present turned-out to be but the opening sequence of B.B.C.’s Grandstand, with the four barrels of the camera showing four images of a library shot of a race from Ascot, burns bright in my memory some sixty-years later.
What caught the imagination of an introverted city boy, someone with no experience of horses, with no close relative ever being involved with horses or horse racing, is not easy to fathom. It was a black and white television, so I cannot say it was the vibrant colours. I also had no appreciation of the intricacies and nuance of the sport. On that particular Saturday, I had no knowledge of the jockeys, the horses or even Peter O’Sullevan, who I am sure was the B.B.C.’s commentator. I cannot remember a single name from that day, horse or jockey, yet it was an unplanned event that changed the course of my life. Of course, as the only horse-racing lover in my village, so to speak, it did put me down as some kind of odd-ball or Energumene. Yes, this sport also teaches people foreign languages.
In those days, days of school and beyond, the two divisions of the sport were of equal fascination to me and my party piece, if you like, was naming the previous fifty Epsom Derby and Grand National winners. I could recite them in order yet, as now and all my life, if you asked me if I could name the winner in 1938 or 1957, I would struggle. These days I have to think pretty hard to name the winner two-years-ago.
What marks out horse racing from all other sports, I believe, even from other equestrian sports, is all the varying aspects of the sport that all come together to make one diverse and nuanced entertainment.
How large a boardroom table would you need to accommodate a single representative of every aspect of the sport? A flat jockey, a jumps jockey, a point-to-point rider, a trainer, flat and jumps, an owner, jumps, flat and point-to-point, a groom, a blacksmith, a vet, a bookmaker, boards, betting shop, on-line, spread-betting, punter, small-time betting shop devotee and professional gambler, clerk of the course, groundsman, starter, racecourse commentator, television presenter and pundit, breeder, small time and commercial, flat and jumps, journalist, and the list goes on.
Anyone can come to this sport through breeding, betting, hunting/point-to-pointing, from living in close proximity to a racecourse or stables, through a works or celebratory event at a racecourse either on a race-day or non-race-day. I came to the sport through the medium of television, and aren’t we fortunate that for over sixty-years we have had the sort of publicity many other sports can only dream about?
Someone can bet on our sport or not. To some it is a form medium, with hours spent with their nose in the form pages of the Racing Post, whilst others rely on instinct and what the eye and experience can tell them. This a sport when the ‘expert’ can lose heavily, while someone with no knowledge of the sport, who has never visited a racecourse before, can win quite big with only a token gamble. I’ve been there, someone betting a fiver on the nose on a 100/1 shot on the basis of its ‘nice name’, ‘my dad’s middle name was Henry’ or ‘he looked at me. I have to bet on him’. We advise against backing a no-hoper, a horse with an alphabet before its name in the race-card. We are affronted that our better understanding of the sport will be ignored. Yet … But that’s the beautiful uncertainty of the sport, isn’t it? Very few of us backed Mon Mome or Norton’s Coin, yet do we regret their winning? A moment, in retrospect, to cherish, moments that will live long in the memory.
I wish I could have the confidence that the people who run the sport were aware that horse racing is all-encompassing, that we are not a sport of the elite but a working-class sport merely underpinned by the fabulously and just ordinarily wealthy. They, the B.H.A. and the racecourses, seem dead-set on the foolish policy of stabilising the sport’s decline by building from the top of the pyramid, rather setting in place firm and long-lasting foundations, doubling or trebling prize-money levels at the basement, rather than doubling or trebling prize-money at the sport’s summit. An Epsom Derby worth £½-million would attract the same horses as an Epsom Derby worth twice or three-times that amount.
There seems a multitude of ways to improve the sport’s finances yet no one is moved to set anyone of them in motion, whilst all the while ignoring the most difficult concept, though the one that would draw-in the greatest reward.
Although there is somewhat a lack of ethnicity when it comes to spectators and the participants at the coal-face of the sport, jockeys and trainers, for instance, the openings are there and the sport is trying to open doors for the Asian community or indeed people from any walk of life. And gender equality is, perhaps at last, thriving, with females to fore in every aspect of the sport.
I do worry that after my life on this Earth whether there is a future for the sport, whether there will be another Bristol eight-year-old who will be enchanted by the thrill and spectacle of the sport through the rabbit-hole wonder of television. I fear that the sport’s long-term future will be what it was in its infancy – wealthy men, though with women alongside them, betting on whose horse is faster over an unrailed distance of ground on a heath somewhere.

​When it comes to the serious stuff in the Racing Post no one on the staff is better than Lee Mottershead. I admire him as a writer and I suspect as a bloke, if I should ever become familiar to him. Unlikely. His ‘Seven Ideas to Tackle British Racing’s Big Problem’, though, was too coldly efficient to generate even a spark of hope in me that British racing will ever overcome its financial plight without going down a road that assigns its history and traditions to the trash can.
The problem is not the problem of achieving any of the seven ideas put forward by Lee Mottershead. The problem is in the title of this piece. The answer by the way is £400-million. The treasure chest at the long road to some form of a Tote Monopoly is an estimated value of £400-million, a figure far higher than if any of the other six ideas put forward become reality yet Mottershead only gives a 1/5 feasibility chance and 0/5 to be attainable.  He gave 5/5 feasibility of gaining extra revenue from increased racecourse attendance, for example.
New technologies, most of which go beyond my understanding, are considered by Mottershead as more feasible to attain than a Tote Monopoly, though would generate far less value to the sport. Of course, what he did not propose is that a Tote Monopoly and New Technology would make good bedfellows, especially with all those apps people can have on the phones and in finger-licking proximity. 
In the table of top-level prize-money presented in his article, Britain lags far behind the U.A.E., Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, the U.S., and France. Of the world’s richest races Britain lies sixth, with six races. Twenty-seven of the richest races are staged in Australia. South Africa, to my surprise, owns four of the richest races world-wide. Not that the richest purses interest me. You do not grow a sport, or indeed any sport or any industry, from the top down. To grow, a good, solid and dependable foundation is required. It is this that British racing lacks.
The Epsom Derby carrying £1.5 million pounds in prize-fund does nothing but alienate us from a population that cannot begin to imagine such an amount of money can be won from someone’s hobby. Coolmore/Ballydoyle is a business, it is not something ‘the lads’ play at. We know that. But do the public at large? Horse racing is largely seen by the public as a plaything for the rich and fabulously wealthy. The public only know our sport through what they perceive as huge prize-money, expensive suits worn by wealthy men, Royal Ascot frocks, glossy horses, the fast cars driven by seemingly everyone with a stake in the sport. They do not recognise that in its greater part, British horse racing is a working-class sport. Stable-staff are working class. Jockeys are working-class, even if some of them are wealthy working class. The same with even the top echelon of trainers. Bookmakers are working class. People who work at racecourses are working-class. Need I go on?
Reform of the levy? Good idea. Get on with it. Estimated value £50-60-million. Change bookmaker funding, estimated value £23-70-million; far short of what might be achieved by limiting bookmakers to racecourses. Grow racecourse attendance? Brilliant idea? Lay on free coach services from local towns and cities. Give discounted rates to people living in local post-code areas. Increase the sport’s fanbase? Well, shouldn’t that be on everyone’s mind on a daily basis? But why the fixation on Formula 1 and the documentary ‘Drive To Survive’? It is a boring sport which requires rainstorms and crashes to give it jeopardy and interest. On a bright sunny day, it is simply fast cars being driven nose-to-tail round a track designed to limit overtaking to braking zones. And cars when they crash do not die, they simply deform and derange. It is a sport that has zero to offer horse racing. Simon Bazalgette is quoted as saying. ‘Racing doesn’t have the narrative other sports have and it doesn’t have the jeopardy’. Has he ever attended a race-meeting? People and horses can die in our sport. How much more jeopardy is required? Horse racing has its own narrative because it is both a sport and an industry, and it has its own narrative because it is more than sport and industry to the majority of its participants as it is firstly an all-consuming life where the horse comes first.
Of course, the television rights should sell for more than at present, though one shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I.T.V. in particular, but also the other channels, are an envied outlet for publicising the sport.
The problem this sport has is this. It is prepared to turn away from an estimated jackpot of £400-million simply because it might be too hard to achieve. I swear to God that there are people in our sport, especially in journalism and at the B.H.A., who would rather see horse racing diminish to the standard of a point-to-point rather than work as one to achieve a funding model that insures the U.A.E., Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, the U.S. and France outrank us worldwide in every aspect of the sport except in prestige. The bird hasn’t flown. The ship hasn’t sailed. It’s within the reach of the ambitious, those who really care about our sport and the industry that feeds it. God dammit, this is the country that turned the obvious defeat of World War 2 into a hard-won victory. Churchill loved horses especially, and racing. He wouldn’t turn turtle but face the challenge straight-on, imploring everyone to travel to victory besides him. £400-million. Not worth the endeavour of giving it a go?

​As my car yesterday suffered what might yet to prove a catastrophic (to my bank balance) mechanical failure, I had to inform my employer (I am old and only work to supplement my meagre pension) that I will not be reporting for duty today (May 18th) and perhaps for the rest of the week. Due to the horrendous possibility that I may have to plunder my savings to buy a new car to enable me to continue to work, I forgot to ask my employer to have a Racing Post delivered to my door. Yes, I have to work into old age to be able to afford this one luxury of my life. Without a daily dose of Racing Post, my life is greatly lessened. 
This review of yesterday’s paper is a sort of top-up to the hour of warmth and certainty that the Racing Post provides me with each day.
The top news of the day, apparently, is the decision Buckaroo’s connections have to come to as to whether to run in the Irish 2,000 Guineas or the Epsom Derby. It is not stated what the differing factors might be between running in one or the other and so we cannot know the extent of their dilemma. I just know it is the interests of everyone not that they make the right decision, because they will never be certain if they chose correctly, but a speedy decision, to allow the betting market and journalists in good time the likely composition of the Derby field. Not that Joseph O’Brien needs my input, but I would go to Epsom. There is no stand-out horse travelling to Epsom, though the Godolphin’s 2,000 Guineas runner-up, Native Trail, looks rather mighty. Or is it Coroebus who is heading to the Curragh? Though he too looks mighty mighty.
Since Frankie’s first ride in the Epsom Derby in 1992, jocking off a lesser jockey in favour of the Italian maestro has never borne fruit. This year, Frankie is to be parachuted onto Donnachie O’Brien’s Piz Badile at the expense of young Gavin Ryan. I understand the owner’s reasoning, even if there is no historical fact to back-up the decision.
We are continually informed that in the spring Inspiral had a small set-back; the reason she missed the 1,000 Guineas at Newmarket and why she will miss the Irish version at the Curragh and head to Royal Ascot and the Coronation Stakes. ‘Missed some days of training at a critical stage of her preparation’ does not suggest a small, inconsequential injury if it has prevented her from seeing a racecourse for 2-months.
I didn’t see the point of Julian Muscat’s Tuesday’s Column feature on the successes of Desert Crown and Baaeed, highlighting how greatly missed both of their breeders, Hamdan Al Maktoum and Prince Khalid Abdullah, are to the sport. That said, it was, as one has come to expect from Muscat, a very professional written article.
I wish journalists would take a breath before honouring flat horses, indeed horses from either code, with the mantle of ‘greatness’. Baaeed is a very good horse, of that there is no basis for debate, but as yet he has achieved little to warrant elevation to the top strata of the racehorse pantheon. And no comparison with Frankel or Brigadier Gerard is yet deserved. Not by a long chalk.
Though I agree with Peter Scargill that I.T.V. should dedicate more time to horses in the parade ring and less time to informing us of what we already know, I am not totally enamoured with the quality of those chosen to furnish us with their expertise on how a horse looks, walks and behaves. Adele Mulrennan, though, is showing great promise.
Here's a thing: if 10 or 20% of racegoers object to cashless payment at racecourses, potentially that could become a similar number of people choosing to spend their cash elsewhere. At a time of declining racecourse attendance, this is a worrying direction to be taking. Just give racegoers the choice between card and cash. It is a no-brainer. Oh, don’t be fooled by statements from racecourse executives claiming cashless is customer-driven. It is government-driven; cashless societies being a major part of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’, something our government signed-up to in 2019.
Lydia Hislop is the latest racing celebrity to throw her toys at the suggestion of a 5-day Cheltenham Festival. No, ‘this is a way it might work’ or ‘let’s give it a go for a few years and judge where we are when we have facts and figures at hand’. Or even ‘that ejit Keith Knight idea of ‘Cheltenham Week, incorporating the National Hunt Festival could be interesting’. No, just ‘I don’t like it, it won’t work and sod the commercial rewards if its does work’. Though she is right in her opinion that racing has gone wrong.
Lee Mottershead, who after the singular Patrick Mullins, is fast becoming my second favourite racing writer. His ‘Seven ideas to tackle British racing’s big problem (see, Lydia Hislop was right) deserves a piece of its own and will get it. Lee will be thrilled.
Page 9 was dedicated to sprinters. Winter Power to return at Haydock this Saturday. Suesa to go for the King’s Stand, the race that used to be the main sprint at Royal Ascot but is now second-best to the Diamond, or is now, the Platinum Jubilee Stakes. And Roger Teal has reported Oxted to be out of action this season due to a tendon injury. See, trainers can be open about the extent of injuries to their horses. A big blow to one of the smaller trainers.
And to finish, two minor niggles of my racing life. When a racecourse uses the word ‘National’ in a race title, as with the Killarney National, shouldn’t the actual race resemble, if only in distance, proper staying chases and not be run over a distance less than, say, 3-miles 5-furlongs. A ‘National’ run over 3-miles 2-furlongs or less, should be defined as a ‘short national’, surely.
The ’Birthday Column’ is always filled by names of people unfamiliar to me, usually very old people, with rarely anyone young, like the sons and daughters of jockeys and trainers or first-year owners or anyone who might inspire anyone youthful to take an interest in the sport. And anyway, birthdays are for children, not wizened old men and women. I would prefer the sport remembered and celebrated the lives of the dead. ‘Dead but not Forgotten’ as grave inscriptions usually read.

​I purchased ‘The Spoilsports. What’s Wrong With British Racing’, by Tim Fitzgeorge-Parker, from Greg Way of Newmarket, with little idea of its content. The title suggested it might be a dire read; a personal and perhaps biased catalogue of all that was once wrong with British Horse Racing. The book was published in 1968, the era in which my fascination with the sport flowered into a life-long love-affair.
Of course, in 1968 I was ignorant of racing politics and could only internalise the bravery and courage, the colour and grandeur, the grand lottery of sporting endeavour. Apart from the threatened demise of Aintree and the Grand National, a constant thorn in my adoration of the sport, I had no conception of the financial collapse that might destroy the sport in the coming years.
And you may think, considering the present plight of racing’s finances, that it is a case of ‘as then, the same now’. But the tardiness in forward thinking and positive action did not begin with the B.H.A. Nor was the decline at its starting post in 1968 under the auspices of the The Jockey Club, as the opening two sentences of ‘Spoilsport’s’ makes plain.
‘Britain is no longer a first-class racing nation. Since 1947, (my emphasis) British racing, once both the mine and crucible of the thoroughbred horse, sport of the rich, recreation of the rest, long recognised as such by successive governments, has been slipping towards disaster.’
Prize money was a contentious issue even in 1968. As Fitzgeorge-Parker, quoting Peter Willett, the Sporting Chronicle’s breeding expert, informed his readers. ‘How much happier a lot have the breeders in France. There the leading owner received more than two-hundred-thousand in stakes and more than twenty-five-thousand pounds in breeders’ prizes last year (1965) in contrast to this country, where the leading owner, a Frenchman, won sixty-one-thousand pounds.’
With the exception of the classics and other major races, mainly due to sponsorship, we have made no progress in equalling-up our prize-money with that of France, let alone the ‘Third-World’ countries that now boast a racing and breeding empire.
The problem of prize-money has stifled the racing and breeding industry in this country for decades. According to Fitzgeorge-Parker, once an assistant trainer before he turned his hand to journalism, Atty Persse confided to him that he was losing ‘one pound every week on every horse in his stable on his training fees’. And that was in 1950. I wonder how many of the modern-day successful trainers could tell a similar tale of woe?
And as with the terminal length of time it is taking the B.H.A. to come to a conclusion about the whip in racing, the same can be said for the slowness of the Jockey Club during their long period at the helm of the sport to get to grips with the necessity for starting stalls, ensuring stable-staff were adequately rewarded for their dedication and expertise, and to bring to book the dopers who got away with their crimes for decades, possibly tens of  decades.
Money was always the driving factor in the decline, as it is today. Not enough of it to fund the necessary, let alone the fripperies. Of course, the golden grail, the answer to the financial conundrum, was given scant consideration, even though Tote Monopolies of one sort or another was the revenue stream that allowed all our competitors to have state-of-the-art racecourses, amazing prize-money that we can only dream about achieving, with money to spare for fripperies and the expensive necessities required by any thriving industry.
Writing in the mid-sixties, Tim Fitzgeorge-Parker wrote effusively on the common-sense of funding our sport in a similar way to other successful racing nations. He favoured, I believe, and his argument has swayed my thinking on the matter, of only allowing bookmakers to bet on-course, with all High Street betting shops becoming Tote-only outlets.
Those people who argue that a ‘Tote Monoploy’ is a ship that has long sailed should get out their binoculars and scan for that boat moored close to the horizon, in wait to become the White Knight that saves our sport from a disaster long predicted.
Which way your thinking is on this matter, I urge you to track down a copy of ‘Spoilsports’ so that you are aware of how long this problem of funding has hung over our sport like a grim reaper.

​In today’s (May 2nd) Racing Post, Lee Mottershead quite rightly bemoaned the drop in attendances at our biggest meetings. Without dwelling on the point, Lee highlighted the rash of uncompetitive, small field sizes for what should be informative races, both flat and National Hunt. He emphasised the drop in attendance from the *pre-covid years, without referencing the impact all the fearmongering and propaganda has had throughout the population, especially to the elderly. There are still people who believe that covid remains all around us and perhaps will never be normalised.
The drop in racecourse attendance is not, though, a black and white issue. I don’t think it is appropriate to compare the numbers who attended, for example, the King George meeting at Kempton last Christmas with figures for the years *pre-covid. And this is a problem that will be on-going. In fact, it may get a whole lot worse!
The cost of fuel is rising at a speed that is unprecedented in my lifetime. This time last year, I was using, approximately, £50 of petrol per week. Now it is close on a £100. The cost of petrol alone will make racegoers think twice about travelling very far to a race-meeting. Petrol and diesel, of course, are just one notch on the barrel of rising prices, including, I suspect, the cost of admittance to a racecourse and all the goodies on offer once the racegoer is through the turnstiles.
I have long-argued the point that contrary to public opinion, horse racing is a working-class sport underpinned by the rich, the wealthy and the fabulously wealthy. Those at the coal-face of the sport, stable staff, jockeys, trainers and betting-shop staff, are all working-class. Even the likes of Matt Chapman is working class; he works every hour of the day, it seems. He is certainly more working-class than those at their desks earning blue-chip salaries at the B.H.A. Yet the sport is manufactured to suit the small majority who are by many millions of pounds far removed from the coal-face of the working class. It is a truth that needs to be acknowledged.
The race programme also hinders any solution to the problem. If I lived, for example, equal-distance between Southwell and Wolverhampton, when both racecourses race on the same-day, albeit one during the afternoon and the other in the evening, I would have to choose which one to attend. If they raced on consecutive days, I would be able to attend both race meetings. So often you see Lingfield racing on the same day as Epsom, Chelmsford or Sandown. Newcastle on the same day as Hexham. Nottingham on the same day as Wolverhampton. Back in the day this would never have happened as there was a department at the Jockey Club described as ‘race-planning’.
If Lingfield race on the same day as Kempton, for instance, race-goers have the choice of two venues and those who decide upon Lingfield for whatever reason become punters lost to Kempton. One small part of solving this decline in racecourse numbers is sensible race-planning and not allowing racecourses executives to stage racing whenever they think best for them and sod their near neighbours. The Horse Racing Industry needs to be thought of holistically, as one big potentially juicy orange and not cut-up according to who has the sharpest and largest knife. I read today that in sixty-years Rugby Union may not exist. If horse racing’s stakeholders do not get their act together quickly and act in the general good of the sport, I prophesise that we may not exist as a professional sport in a decade or two less than that.
It should also be said that though small field sizes may be of little good for betting turnover, small fields are a godsend to those owners who continue to patronise the sport. An owner with a horse of limited ability, if his trainer is on the ball, will be more likely to pay his bills on time if his horse jumps around to finish fourth of four in a £10,000 Kempton handicap, than he is if he finishes eighth of nine in a handicap at Ludlow. We must remember not to throw the baby out with the bath-water when we debate declining attendances and uncompetitive races.
To use Kempton on Boxing Day as an example again, what the course doesn’t have now what it had ten and twenty years ago is a Kauto Star or a Desert Orchid. This is due, in part, to all the big-named chasers being trained in Ireland. The King George this year could be a cracker when you consider all the possible horses that might turn-up, yet not one of them is a household name and as such have no pulling power.
The situation will improve. In all walks of life there are peaks and troughs, with the trough this time around caused not by the sport but irrational decisions made by a government in league with outside forces. Racecourses must be more inviting, that’s a given. It must be a venue for all-comers, for the informed and those new to the sport. It just needs a marketing guru to come along to spice things up a bit. Though, of course, the horses and racing must always be at the heart of the day.