​Baroness Harding of Winscombe has worked for McKinsey & Company, Thomas Cook, the Woolworths Group, Tesco, Sainsbury, was CEO at TalkTalk and is presently, I believe, chair of N.H.S. Improvement, hence the peerage. She also has served on the boards of British Land and, I say wryly with a hint of facetiousness, more respectfully, Cheltenham racecourse.
Things went, to use the vernacular, ‘tits up’, for the Baroness when TalkTalk suffered a ‘significant and sustained cyber-attack’, to which her response ‘The awful truth is that I don’t know’, was described as ‘naïve and by Marketing Magazine as ‘her utter ignorance is a lesson to us all’.
The whys and wherefores of her woes at TalkTalk need not trouble us, nor that she received her peerage for her work at N.H.S. Improvement, which some may laugh at given that the word ‘improvement’ is only ever attached to the N.H.S. by Government Ministers batting off criticism of our health care service. The Conservative Party, like the Labour Party, shamelessly looks after their own.
What’s all this got to do with racing, you may be thinking. Quite a lot, actually. The Baroness is none other than Dido Harding, forever famous for owning Cool Dawn, the 1998 Cheltenham Gold Cup winner, and when she wrote her book ‘Cool Dawn. My National Velvet’, she had just starting out on what was to become a mega-rise to the top echelons of the world of high business. At TalkTalk she was being paid a cool £6-million quid a year. A far cry from the day she had to go to the bank to raise the £7,000 she needed to buy Cool Dawn.
Given her board-surfing path to wealth and influence – in 2014 she was 7th on the Woman’s Hour ten most influential women in the country – it would be easy to be snotty about her literary effort, especially the erroneous nature of the title, made wrong because National Velvet did not win the Grand National with Elisabeth Taylor in the saddle, whereas Cool Dawn did win the Gold Cup.
And that is really my only criticism of the book. In fact, I would recommend this book to anyone thinking of becoming a racehorse owner as within its pages are both the downs and the highs that come with owning thoroughbreds. Though it must be said that the highs experienced by Dido Harding are exceedingly rare.
She bought Cool Dawn to ride in point-to-points. Her highest ambition was to win a Ladies Open. At five-foot two she was at a real disadvantage when it came to riding, or riding to distinction, a horse with the size and strength of Cool Dawn and as she tells her readers she had many escapades both on the Alner gallops and in the hunting field. Say what you like about her privileged lifestyle but Dido Harding was one brave lady to keep getting in the saddle as there was no doubt she was rarely in command of Cool Dawn. Her bravest decision though was to heed Richard Alner’s advice and allow Andrew Thornton to ride her horse as without the assistance of a professional the horse would never achieve his potential.
What endears me to a book is when I learn stuff. Richard Alner did not want to jock the owner off her horse and to this end he arranged for her to have a week’s extensive schooling with Yogi Breisner, one of the world’s best trainers of horses and riders. He took one look at the way she sat a horse and basically told her everything she did in the saddle was wrong. He also explained, and this as someone who does not ride I found fascinating, was not to look for a stride going to a fence but to accelerate into it and allow the horse to find its own stride pattern. So when you hear a commentator saying that a jockey did not or did see a stride you know he is showing his ignorance on both counts. This also explains to me, at least, why Ruby Walsh and Bryony Frost do not seem to move going to a fence as they are allowing the horse to find its own stride pattern. Not that I am expecting to be hurtling toward a big black open ditch on top of an out-of-control racehorse anytime soon. But it brings a soupçon of comfort to know that I have the Yogi Breisner’s instruction in my head if I should ever need it.
When you finish a book and you wish there were more, what you have read was distinctly better than average and ‘Cool Dawn’ is one such book. Dido Harding, or Baroness Harding, as I suppose I ought refer to her, really should honour the life of her great horse – he died only a few months ago – by writing a sequel. Once retired we often lose track of horses, except when they occasionally appear in parades of old heroes, and it would be nice to know of her experiences hunting him for what I believe was fourteen consecutive seasons after he was retired from the racecourse. I am sure a good deal of interesting water has passed under the bridge of Dido Harding’s life since 1999. I just hope that she spent some of her £6-million quid salary on buying and racing racehorses. Not that she will ever have another Cool Dawn. He was that one-in-a-million chance that just happened to come the way of the Hon. Dido Harding. Lucky lucky lady that she is or was. Now there is a possible title of the sequel – Lucky Lucky Lady.

​As a child, though I played football on a daily basis, it was not, as it was with my friends, the central pivot of my aspiration and imaginings of life. For reasons only a psychologist could explain, my fascination as I grew up in a large city, was horse racing, and it began on my seventh or eighth birthday when plonked in front of the television set to watch ‘Grandstand’ as my parents went up the road to buy me a birthday present. If only they had known as they rode the bus that day that they had already given me the greatest present a parent can give a child – a life-long passion.
The formative years, seemingly, of both great and good riders are spent on ponies galloping carefree in the countryside pretending they are riding the favourite in the Grand National or Epsom Derby and living for the day they are allowed to ride a proper racehorse on the gallops. Bryony Frost’s father, to put an end to her pleading, promised she could ride a racehorse on her ninth birthday and found himself at the crack of dawn on the said day being hauled out of bed because the big day had literally dawned!
I suffered no such expectations. It did not even cross my mind that the jockeys life was for me. I didn’t even think for a moment to learn to ride. Or even to see a horse in the flesh. Horse racing for me, as a child, was something that came to me every Saturday through the miraculous invention of the television.
Strangely, and again defying all rational explanation, my hero at the time, almost my imaginary friend, was not Lester Piggott or even Fred Winter, but someone I doubt I would even had recognised if he had moved in next door – Bobby Beasley.
I suspect this allegiance, perhaps even worship from afar, was due to no other factor than I watched him win the Grand National on Nicholas Silver – I had an abiding love of grey horses at the time – and that catapulted him into centre spot in my imagination. Unlike the writers of autobiographies, I have little recollection of my formative years, only snapshots that have no context, and with a failing memory it is now almost impossible to remember how my adoration of this legend of the sport, as I now know, took shape. I remember once thinking how good it will be if her married Princess Anne, though why it would have been good escapes me. I suppose it is a case of what the heart wants the hearts yearns for.
The truth is, as everyone is now aware, that while a child in Bristol thought him worthy of hero worship, the man himself was self-destructing, his fall from grace beginning as far back as 1960 after winning the Galway Plate, a famous race I had no idea existed. Beasley was not even well-liked by his fellow jockeys and even those who recognised his great horsemanship and tolerated him because of it could find little better to say in his defence than he had a ‘strange personality’ fuelled by a persecution complex.
He will always remain in that elite club of jockeys to have won all three of National Hunt’s classic races, the Champion Hurdle on Another Flash, the Grand National on Nicholas Silver and the Cheltenham Gold Cup twice on Roddy Owen and Captain Christy. He was so highly considered as a jockey that both Fred Rimell and Fred Winter appointed him stable jockey, though he held neither position for more than a few months. Mercy Rimell described him thusly ‘he was difficult, and so temperamental that he took far more controlling than any of our owners!’ And this was the sort of a man I dreamed of marrying into the Royal Family!
His peers in the weighing room and the press, many of whom disliked him, could only applaud in wonder when he returned to the saddle five years after retiring to concentrate on becoming a full-time alcoholic. If asked, it is said by those who knew him best, that his proudest achievement in life was not winning the Grand National or Gold Cup but in beating the devil, by beating the drink that nearly and should have killed him. Later in life, just to have his triumph underlined, he ran a pub with his second wife and it is said some mornings he would turn on the lights and looking at the optics would say ‘I beat you bastards and am still beating you!’
Once free of the drink, when, as his first wife said, ‘the fight had gone out of him’, he became the good, gentle, quiet man I supposed him to be when he was my imaginary friend as a child. I admit it took me by surprise when I first learned he was not the saint of my childhood imagination and in reading ‘When Bobby Met Christy’, Declan Colley’s great book on his phoenix-like rise from the ashes of alcoholism, again I was disappointed with him for not bothering to tell Pat Taaffe, the man who above all others he owed the greatest debt, when he retired for the second time, not bothering to communicate with him on any level after riding Captain Christy to victory at Fairyhouse. But that, as I now know, was the sort of man Beasley was. Yet another Irish flawed genius.
 

​Horse racing must be one of the best recorded of all sports, with biographies and accounts going back to very nearly the time when the sport first had rules imposed upon it. Of course, what is one man’s account of an incident may not tally with another man’s account and this is especially true when it comes to controversial finishes to races. Yet it is good to have opposing views otherwise the first account would go into history as the true account. Horse racing is not war, where history is always penned by the victor. This is why I would encourage a jockey or trainer on retirement to pen their autobiography or memoir as their account of their career, and it matters little how successful they were, adds to the historical record of the sport. Truth, though, must be central to the stories told, with no story left in the shadows for the reader to interpret.
In what is an otherwise highly readable and enlightening book, ‘If Horses Could Talk’, the remarkable Gary Witheford writes about a northern trainer ‘someone regarded as a good trainer’ who during a compulsory stalls test for one of his horses, and witnessed by Gary and four stalls handlers, beat a young horse both during the loading process and when it was in the stall. This incident had witnesses; it was not simply a case of Gary’s word against this unnamed northern trainer. We need to rid the sport of such people. Indeed, if I were Gary, or one of the stalls handlers, I would be disappointed with myself if I did not report the trainer’s cruelty to an appropriate authority. By naming him in his book, Gary could have brought some kind of retribution upon this reprehensible individual. This is not personal criticism of Gary Witheford as it is possible he was advised by his publisher not to the name the man, though in the naïve way I see the world, truth should always come before either caution or reputation.
Some of the favourite biographies I have in my small racing library were written before I was born, or at least during my childhood, as they spark both interest and the imagination as I have little knowledge of the people, horses and in some cases racecourses, they highlight. ‘Men and Horses I Have Known’ by the Hon. George Lambton recounts the days of the early steeplechase meetings when he was a jockey, a time so far back Britain seems a completely different country. Yet George Lambton is known for being one of the great Newmarket flat trainers. Being a gentleman, a country gentleman with Lords and Ladies as family, I have no doubt Lambton refrained from scandalising anyone who he was associated with socially. But that does not infer he lied to save anyone’s reputation. He was a gentleman; he simply did not discuss in his book any subject he would not discuss outside of friends and family.
These days the World Wide Web allows any old nobody to achieve publication. I am a published author myself, which clearly demonstrates how easy it can be. All the writer has to do is to sit behind the laptop day after day until he has written to a point where no more can be written. Then it is a case of edit, rewrite and edit again. Do not, though, ask a friend or loved-one to read your manuscript. That will only complicate matters as they will be either overly complimentary or overly critical. If you are happy, you have reached the point when a professional is required.
Never publish, even if you have a masters degree in English, without having the manuscript ‘professionally’ edited, and by ‘professionally edited’ I mean by someone who earns their living by doing just that, and preferably by someone who for a good few years was employed by a publishing company as an editor. It is too easy when reading your own material to read what you meant to write and to miss the typographical error you might expect spellcheck or Grammerly or some such programme to highlight on your behalf. Don’t, though, get hung up on small errors, or whether the commas before and after ‘though’ are necessary.
It may cost upwards of £400 to employ the services of an editor but they are worth every penny. To publish as an e-book will perhaps run to another £300 and if you want to see your name down the spine of a paperback it will be perhaps £300 to £500. There are many companies out-there set-up to assist the independent author into print. It is always advisable to seek quotes from three or four before signing on the dotted line. Then there will be the cost of promoting and marketing your book, though as you are a ‘name’, with access to friends and colleagues who work in the media, they perhaps will pay you to talk about your career and your book.
Do not believe you do not have a story to tell. You do. Every jockey and trainer has lived a life worth recording, if only for cross-referencing with the tales told by the better-known, those fortunate to be better blessed. The journeyman jockey has lived a different life to the classic winning jockey, even if their paths criss-crossed a thousand times, and the trainer who struggled on with third-rate home-breds can tell about a life in racing far removed from the trainer who only knew thoroughbreds with the best of pedigrees.
These people, the dispensable ones, perhaps, are where the life-blood of the sport can be found. It is within the realms of their hopes and disappointments, their hard-fought victories and dedication to the everyday, where the racing truth must stem, even if we, the naïve enthusiast, find it as unpalatable as some of the chapters in A.P. McCoy’s ‘My Autobiography’.

​As with every other right-minded man or woman I like and admire Frankie Dettori. He is undoubtedly the greatest personality horse racing has ever produced. He is god-send to flat racing and is one of the best flat jockeys of all-time. He is also, I am led to believe, a superb father and husband and an all-round good bloke. That said, I will be disappointed if he either wins his appeal against his ten-day suspension or has the number of days reduced. It happened. He did not mean it to happen. But his carelessness could easily have caused the death of a horse and serious injury to one of his fellow jockeys. If a 4-day suspension is justified for a nudge, as with Oisin Murphy in the Eclipse, then 10-days, I would argue, might be a tad lenient for very nearly putting a jockey over the rails. Frankie’s riding at Newmarket dealt severe blows to every punter who backed the horses whose chances he scuppered. It can be argued that as his 10-day suspension will rule him out of the King George and Queen Elisabeth and Goodwood the punishment does not fit the crime. But if any of the jockeys he knocked about at Newmarket had suffered a serious injury they also would most likely to have missed the same two important meetings.
In general, I believe flat jockeys get away lightly with the rules as they stand. Going back to Oisin Murphy and his ride on Roaring Lion in the Eclipse. He made no attempt whatsoever to keep his mount running in a straight line, knowing that if he bumped the runner-up, as long as he won by a head or more, he could argue in the stewards’ room that he was on the best horse. And why shouldn’t he think like that? He was there to achieve the best possible result for his employer and the rules seemingly allow him to ride as he did. So why didn’t Donnacha O’Brien do the same? If he had pulled Saxon Warrior across toward Roaring Lion the intimidation might have acted to thwart his progress and Murphy would have had to stop riding for a moment to pull his whip into his other hand.
To my way of thinking, the benefit of the doubt in enquiries similar to the Eclipse should go to the jockey who kept straight, as a jockey is expected to do at every other stage of a race. If the powers-that-be want to encourage safe and proper race-riding they must not give the benefit of the doubt to the jockey who either broke the rules or came close to breaking the rules. Try explaining to someone new to the sport why Murphy was allowed to keep the race yet his riding was deemed unacceptable and given a 4-day suspension.
As there might be – you have to be optimistic – new eyes to my ‘racing rambles’ I will repeat my views on the whip.
The whip is the most contentious issue for the public, both knowledgeable and ignorant about racing. If we want to attract a new and larger audience to the sport over reliance on the whip must be ended. You can try to inform people that the modern whip is cushioned and you could beat your granny with it and she wouldn’t spill her gin and tonic until you are blue in the face and they will not believe you. A whip is designed, they will say, to be used as a form of punishment.
I have argued the case for there to be a trial of ‘hands and heels’ races for professional jockeys flat and National Hunt as there are for apprentices and conditionals. Some horses will, of course, not run up to form, though others may well improve for the prohibition. One day in the future Government legislation may bring an end to the use of the whip in racing and jockeys might benefit if such trials were brought in to prepare for a future when strength in the saddle will be all they have to get that last ounce of energy out of their mounts.
Personally, I doubt if Oisin Murphy cared a jot or a fig about the 4-day ‘holiday’ the Sandown stewards awarded him. He won the Eclipse and a healthy amount of spending money for his holiday. He may have even laughed all the way to the A.T.M.
I would not suspend a jockey for a whip offence, though I might issue a large fine. What I would do is allow him or her to continue riding but without the use of a whip. They could carry it but they would not be allowed to use it in anger, and if they did the prohibition would be doubled. If I ruled the racing world Oisin Murphy would not be suspended for 4-days but would be banned from using his whip for 4-days. Frankie would have received a large fine but would be able to ride at Ascot and Goodwood but would be disadvantaged as he would not be allowed to use his whip. Owners and trainers could then decide if a jockey can or cannot ride.
A rule of the road is that you always give priority to traffic coming from the right. A rule at work is that safety-boots must be worn at all times. These rules cannot be interpreted. They are a rule. An instruction. A law. Get my point?

​This will seem plenty dumb to the majority and perhaps impractical to others. I shall proceed, though, as I believe the idea, if taken seriously and debated in a similar manner, has the potential for changing hearts and minds in the world outside of racing.
I have long – campaigned is too strong a term – railed against the continued use of famous names, Coolmore’s use of Spanish Steps being such an example, and this piece is on similar lines.
The names of horses, especially those of our youth, are more than just names, they are strands of memory and building blocks of racing history. The name Spanish Steps links to Edward Courage, The Dikler, Captain Christy, Bobby Beasley, Red Rum, Crisp, L’Escargot etc. To reuse such names, names of horses that won important races such as the Hennessey, Ebor, Cambridgeshire, Royal Hunt Cup, any race at the Cheltenham Festival as examples, is to mix and mingle strands of racing history and to excite those of us who think it disrespectful, and in my case downright lazy when the possible names for horses is literally endless, to the horse, its connections and I would go as far as to claim the long-standing racing public.
Quite recently, after reading about the Irish National Stud and the ‘Living Legends’ that live in retirement there, I suggested British racing is missing a golden opportunity in not having a similar establishment. The Irish National Stud has a famed Oriental garden and people go there as much for that as for the horses.
It seems to me a perfect sort of venue to publicise British racing to an audience that might not be comprised solely of racing people, especially if the British version had an attraction not connected to racing as with the Irish National Stud’s oriental garden. Of course, it should have the British equivalent of the Irish Living Legends – Moscow Flyer, Hurricane Fly, Beef and Salmon to name but three – in retirement there. Can you imagine the draw horses of the calibre of Cue Card and Sprinter Sacre if they spent their summers at such a venue? Australia have such a place, America, too.
I also suggest such a venue might provide a resting place for all great horses. It may seem macabre to some, and perhaps downright silly to the cynics amongst us, to think anyone might be interested in the burial site of former racehorses. But that is not wholly the point of the exercise.
Believe me, I live outside of racing and people ignorant of racing believe racing people to be without sentiment, that they use horses for their own entertainment and for the purpose of gambling. If I campaign – again the word is a little strong for what impact I achieve – it is for the respect for the horse to be from birth to beyond death. Respect must not be couched in empty phrases said to impress.
The remains of Red Rum are to found near the winning post at Aintree; people regularly visit his grave, some even leave flowers. Fool-hardy romantic that I am, I believe a good number of people would like to do the same where Denman is buried or Kauto Star. If an equine cemetery were created at the British equivalent to the Irish National Stud we, the British racing establishment, would be making a brave and I hope heartfelt statement to racing’s critics – we respect the horse from birth to beyond death.
If such a place had existed for a hundred years imagine the horses that might be assembled there – Brown Jack, Persian Punch, Mill House, Foinavon – look the list is lengthy, the memories extraordinary.
I realise the establishment of such a venue, with stabling and pasture for the ‘Living Legends’, the creation of an arboretum, garden or park, the fuss and bother environment agencies make when it comes to the burial of horses, will be expensive and not done in a day. But such a venue would allow British racing to engage with people who might be paying at the gate to see the flowers, trees, wildlife and fauna and without being aware of it are also witness to a side of racing they did not know existed.

​The majority of people who read my ‘racing ramblings’ will either be annoyed by my oft-repeated views on Sea The Stars, and perhaps more so when I repeat the same argument against Dancing Brave, or they will pity my ignorance on matters equine. Yet I stand firm, refuting the opinion of experts and refusing to be dissuaded from my belief that true greatness can only be bestowed on horses exposed to the limitations of their abilities.  
Now, first things first, lets get one aspect of my argument out of the way before you all think me soft in the head. Sea The Stars and Dancing Brave were two outstanding racehorses. I do not deny that for a moment. But if we are to advance the quality and soundness of the thoroughbred breed and for flat racing to engage with the sporting public to the same extent as National Hunt, the media, and everyone else for that matter, should not make legends of horses who to all extent and purpose were here one day and gone the next.
When Sea The Stars was retired his trainer John Oxx made, at least in my opinion, the quite ridiculous suggestion that ‘Sea The Stars’ had nothing else to prove’. He had, in fact, a whole lot to prove and if given the opportunity he might have earned the plaudits given to him on the back of one triumphant season. The same applies to Dancing Brave. These two horses, as brilliant as they were, can only be honoured with the tag of ‘best of their generation’ as they were never allowed the opportunity to prove themselves against the following classic generation.
Anyone reading the archive of this website will be in no doubt of the contempt I feel towards the top breeders. Because of their investment and commitment to British and Irish racing the racing public, and I include myself amongst that number, should be eternally thankful for their contribution to our sport. Be that as it may, my contempt holds true. This is first and foremost a sport, yet to some it is an investment opportunity and money-making enterprise first and a sport second. To my way of thinking anyone entering this sport or who derives a living from it, has a duty of care towards the reputation of the sport, and this applies as much, if not more so, to the top breeders.
When someone has the good fortune to own a special horse, a horse with the attributes of Sea The Stars, for example, they have a duty to the sport to race that horse with the sport in mind and not financial considerations. Retiring a special horse to stud at the end of its three-year-old season borders on the gutless in my opinion and the media should not endorse such decisions by going along with such nonsense as ‘he has nothing else to prove’.
Sea The Stars never won a race where he conceded weight. He was never tested against the following generation of classic horses. We do not know how sound he would have proved. We will never know his limitations. It is like claiming Leicester City as one of the greatest teams on the back of one Premier League title. The horses he beat in the Epsom Derby turned out to be on the ordinary side of good and his two-length defeat of Youmzain in the Arc in retrospect hardly makes the heart beat faster. In fact, I would argue that Dancing Brave’s victory in the King George and Queen Elisabeth was better than anything achieved by Sea The Stars, even if the latter’s overall career was undoubtedly superior.
When the Racing Post asks racing celebrities to choose between Frankel and Dancing Brave or Sea The Stars it is only perpetuating the idea that short-lived deeds can be measured the equal to long-term valour. Frankel was unbeaten as a two-year-old, was a champion at three and four. The records of Sea The Stars and Dancing Brave fail by a wide margin when compared to a horse who was allowed to demonstrate his great ability past his classic year. The one criticism I have of Frankel’s connections is that they did not chance him at a mile and a half as if they had, especially if he had been kept in training as a five-year-old, the question of who the greatest horse in flat history is would be rendered moot for ever more.
To finish on a more positive note, what might not be known about Sea The Stars is that he was ‘started’ by Gary Witheford, the man trainers go to man to sort out horses with issues at the starting stalls. I use the term ‘started’ as Gary dislikes the use of ‘broken’ as it implies to ride a horse you have to first break its spirit. Sea The Stars was intelligent from the outset and Gary had his son Craig on his back and ridden away in twelve minutes. Now that was a day when human greatness aligned with equine brilliance.
 

​I am a little muddled as to why there needs to be a ‘steering group’ to guide horse racing toward achieving greater diversity within the sport. Don’t get me wrong, it is a splendid initiative that can only bring the sport good publicity, with Stonewall already congratulating the sport for making public its aim to stamp out prejudice in all its forms. I have already put forward my ideas for increasing opportunities for female jockeys to pass through the glass ceiling that remains prevalent within the sport, so I am neither ignorant of a bias that has existed for centuries nor am I suggesting that action is unneeded.
If ‘diversity’ in racecourse attendance is part of the aim of the ‘steering group’ I would suggest the easiest way to increase the number of British/Asian and other ethnic groups on race-days would be to organise free coach trips and free admission for this target audience. Perhaps Leicester, as one example, could entice the local British/Asian community with a ‘Bangra’ inspired night of racing. Nottingham, to give a second example, could stage an Asian Fair, with race titles befitting such an occasion.
If another aim is for there to be greater diversity of people amongst the workforce in British racing stables a similar strategy could be established, with the National Trainers Association, perhaps funded by the B.H.B., appointing someone to visit schools and colleges with large ethnic populations to give talks on why racing would make an exciting career choice. Of course, it would be useful if there were a successful British/Asian jockey in this country, though there are a great number of owners from India and the Middle and Far East for perspective applicants to identify with.
I have written on the problems of recruitment in racing stables before and my thoughts remain the same. To ride a racehorse takes great skill. It is not something that can be ‘shown’; it takes many years of falling off, being run away with and generally made to look a fool before the skills to prevent such incidents evolve. Yet the skills required to do the ‘on the feet’ part of the job, the mucking out and grooming etc, can be learned from being shown. It is a waste of a skilled employee to have a top-class work-rider mucking-out etc, when he or she could be on the back of a horse. And stablemen do not need to be under nine-stone or jockey-size. For most of the stable duties larger people would be more beneficial. Work-riders should ride horses, grooms should be the wheel that bears the load.
Of course, employers need to be educating young people to gain the expertise to become work riders and these younger employees would both exercise horses and groom before advancing to the role of work-rider. Yes, this would mean a far greater number of lots per day, though in my view of how a racing yard should operate work riders would only ride, with all the other facets of stable life carried out by people with those skills.
There must be thousands of unemployed people in the country or people disillusioned with the hamster-wheel routine of the nine-to-five day who could fill the empty spaces in racing’s workforce. Trainers, I suspect, would rather stick to traditional methods of running their business rather than experiment with something as shocking to the system as a new idea. It is, though, worth someone experimenting. Perhaps a young trainer, someone unfettered by tradition.
And just by watching horses in the parade ring it seems to be there is already diversity in the workforce, with most stables employing grooms of ethnicity.
The problem with discriminatory practices, if the clarion call becomes ‘diversity, diversity, diversity’, is that instead of the best applicant getting the job, the most politically correct person gets the job. It is not so much ‘diversity’ that should be championed but the need to rid the sport, and society in general, of prejudice. Of course, there should be a female jockey as well-known and successful as Frankie Dettori, there should be a greater number of racing pundits of non-white skin-tone, and being gay, Asian, Chinese or Inuit should not be a bar from getting to the top in a sport where the main character, the horse, really does not care a jot what you are or where you are from.
 
 

​It is a nice word, diversity, isn’t it? It means, and I quote my very old Cassell’s Concise English, ‘plea by a prisoner that he is not the person charged’. I didn’t know that. I suspect it is what footballers scream at the referee when he or she is about to be booked for a foul committed by a team-mate. A team-mate, you will notice, who rarely fronts-up to the offence.
Of course, when a Diversity Committee reports on the subject it is women they are talking about, or the lack of them in our sport, apparently. Incidentally, having no knowledge of the composition of the Diversity Committee I did think it would be ironic or perverse if it failed its own diversity criteria. Not enough cross-dressing non-orthodox Christians or transgender little people. I was going to say midget. Then I thought dwarf might be more politically correct. Now I wish I had not allowed my malfunctioning brain take me down this route. Anyway, diversity possesses strands of possibility that can easily lead to nonsense, as I have just proved.
I have no doubt their conclusions are correct, though during my lifetime women have successfully and to positive effect infiltrated into most corners of the racing industry. Should more be done? My answer to that is somewhere between perhaps and definitely.
Prejudice must be removed from all sections of the sport. But diversity should not be allowed to dictate decisions that could be bad for the sport. When people are interviewed for any job in racing from racecourse management, private trainer, head lad, managing director of any section of the industry, the best applicant should be employed, not the best female applicant. To do otherwise is to push standards and efficiency sideways and not upwards.
I have made the following comment many times in the short period I have written for this website, and previously I have had many letters published in the Racing Post to the same effect. When it comes to female jockeys, especially on the flat, there is every bit of a glass ceiling as there is in the boardrooms of big business and until one of the top trainers has the balls to give a female jockey a chance in Group and classic races the glass will never be cracked let alone shattered. I know Josephine Gordon is described occasionally as Hugo Palmer’s stable jockey but in effect she is no better off than the third or fourth in line at other big yards. When it comes to the important races James Doyle and others are above her in the pecking order. I am sure Hugo Palmer explained the situation when Gordon joined up with his stable but it is the best illustration available to me to prove the existence of the glass ceiling.
Over jumps the situation is slightly healthier with Rachael Blackmore in Ireland leading the jockeys table at present and with Briony Frost everyone’s sweetheart in this country. And as Bridget Andrews proved at Cheltenham last season, if given horses with winning chances female jockeys have the requisite skill to get them first past the post.
No legislation will persuade a trainer to put up Gordon, Turner, Doyle or Currie when Moore, Dettori, Doyle or Buick are available, and again you have to ask if any of the aforementioned female riders are at the same level as the aforementioned male jockeys? Yet if they are not given the opportunity to prove themselves how will we every know? And as Charles Bishop proved at Royal Ascot, there are just as many male jockeys who would appreciate the opportunity to prove themselves as female.
But with all due respect to Charles Bishop and his equally underrated colleagues, nothing would give the sport of flat racing better publicity than if Gordon, Turner, Doyle or Currie were to win a classic or Group 1. The problem is of course that the female rider is not ever even considered when the classics come around, indeed they must consider themselves lucky to get on a horse with a decent chance in one of the heritage handicaps. How many females jockeys had a ride in the Northumberland Plate this season? How many will take part in the Ebor?
Flat racing in particular, but National Hunt also, would benefit enormously for greater female participation at the top end of the sport. The 4lb allowance in France is obviously discriminatory and downright unfair to the male jockeys. The right road is greater opportunity. There needs to be a signature race for professional female jockeys at somewhere like Glorious Goodwood or Champions Day at Ascot. A race worth in excess of £100,00. The biggest race of its kind in the world, attracting the best female riders from around the world. There should also be more races in the calendar restricted to female riders. The Carlisle all female jockey evening proves how popular such races would be.
Diversity amongst jockeys will stumble against the prejudice of the top owners and trainers without the balls to suggest that it might be good for the sport if the best female riders were given an opportunity to prove their worth. This is where the problem lies and the Diversity Committee should not be shy in saying so.

​It occurs in other sports, of course, though to a lesser degree, that sons will follow in the footsteps of their fathers, daughters, too, but not to the extent that horse racing spawns dynasties of jockeys, trainers and occasionally owners, also. Ireland, in particular, has produced dynasties that seem to go back before 1752 when Mr. Blake raced Mr. O’Callaghan from the church at Buttevant to the spire of St.Leger church.
It would be fascinating if a member of the Moore family, or Carberry, Walsh or Dreaper, for that matter, featured on ‘Who Do You Think You Are’, to see how the various racing dynasties link-up through the centuries. As it was when Nina Carberry married into the Walsh family, the history of racing in Ireland must be founded on similar unions. Perhaps someone should give the producers of the programme – I dare say there is an Irish version – a nudge in the direction of Ruby Walsh, though to read his and other autobiographies it is clear the Irish seem to have a deeper understanding of family lineage than the British.
We, the British, have are own Moore clan, with Gary following in the footsteps of Charlie and giving to the sport a champion flat and two fine National Hunt jockeys. The daughter, too, contributes to the Moore reputation, being both an amateur jockey and racing commentator. It seems quite certain that the Pipes are on the way to laying down the foundations of a their own dynasty, the Johnstons, too. In fact, as long as financial costs in setting-up as a trainer remain prohibitive more and more dynasties will be founded, it being easier to take over the licence from the old man or mother than to start from scratch.
For no reason that makes sense I have always had a fondness for the Baldings of Kingsclere, particularly Ian, a flat race trainer not quite of the same mould as his contemporaries. Although from day one he was in the top rank of flat trainers, he never lost his passion for riding and continued competing in point-to-points well into his forties and even rode in the Aintree Foxhunters and had a burning ambition to ride in the Grand National. I would imagine he was often advised by his senior owners, as well as his wife, I suspect, that it might be the act of a wise man to find a less dangerous pastime. But horses were always his life and while at Cambridge he would ride in races as an amateur for his brother after playing rugby for his college in the morning. I very much doubt if he, or any of the Balding clan, can go half-hearted into any activity, except, perhaps, academic study!
Although he would hold cheap the accolade, I would describe Ian Balding, alongside his brother Toby, as being one of the great men of the British turf. He trained one of the greatest flat horses of my lifetime in Mill Reef, a horse whose career performances make him a far superior racehorse than either Dancing Brave or Sea The Stars, even if the younger generation seem never to consider him for such a position in the pantheon of great horses.
His father, Gerald, was a trainer of note, even if he did not ascend the ladder of success achieved by both his sons. Ian Balding was also related to Peter Hastings-Bass, from whom he inherited the famous racing yard at Kingsclere founded by John Porter, the trainer of 7 Derby winners, and which should have a preservation order placed on it as a fine representation of how a racing yard was built and operated in the days of yore.
Most trainers, and this is not a criticism, merely an observation, even the great and highly successful, run their stables as a business and adhere to the rules laid down by the powers-that-be whilst rarely thinking about the sport as a whole. Ian, and his brother Toby, were cut from a different cloth and to this day, I would imagine, Ian Balding has a concern for the sport that goes beyond self. For most of his training career he was a member of the Trainers’ Federation and was on the wages committee and was, and perhaps is, a director of Salisbury racecourse. And as his son continues to do, he built a reputation for Kingsclere as an apprentice academy, producing jockey after jockey year after year.
Many, during racing’s long history, have done as much as Ian Balding for the good of the sport, few, though, have done more. If he had given The Queen a Derby winner he might be Sir Ian Balding by now, though personally, even though by his own admission he was a bit of a bounder in his youth, he deserves the honour anyway, if only for his undying commitment and enthusiasm for both the sport and the horse.
Oh, and perhaps his greatest achievement in a life of achievement – he gave us Clare, a great ambassador for the sport and the best racing presenter to grace our televisions.