​I look kindly upon Kia Joorabchian and wish luck upon his enterprise. I dislike those who buy success and find it difficult to be happy for Wathnam, even I am for their retained jockey James Doyle, when they win race after race at Royal Ascot. It is never truly their success when they have bought a horse at an inflated cost weeks before the event. It is the previous owner who has borne the cost till then and now with a six-figure cheque in his or her bank account they can bask in the shade, knowing that in the future Wathnam might return and pay even more for one of their horses.
I know little of personal success yet I witness the success of others from afar and what they have in common is consistency of team. When the captain of the ship is forever changing personnel, the captain is making mistakes. Already on his third stable jockey, Kia is now about to have his third main trainer in Kevin Philippart de Foy. The previous incumbent Raphael Freire claims he was always only in acting charge at Freemason Lodge and is happy to be relieved of his duties as the licence holder. I doubt if that is 100% true but one must respect his take on the latest Kia merry-go-round.
Everyone makes mistakes in life; I dare say even Aidan O’Brien made an arse of himself in the early days of his training career. Some people continue to make mistakes, some the same mistakes over and over again; they are the people who do not make good in life. Kia must learn to go with the flow, to roll with the blows and to trust the people he has personally put in charge to carry out the one division of his operation he is incapable of doing – the running of a stable and the training of winners. He should bite the bullet now and allow his new trainer time to put down the foundations that will build, cross-fingers, success. And I would advise he stops spending the millions upon millions simply to acquire a foothold in the most blue-blooded pedigrees and buy horses for a reasonable price to win more than a reasonable number quality of winners. 

The hopefully immortal David Ashforth is the provider of the Wednesday Column in the Racing Post today and his unusually downbeat piece centred on the young jockeys to have made their way in the racing life through the pony racing circuit. He starts with Elisabeth Gale and his hoped-for headline of ‘Gale blows away the opposition’ and progresses though all of those apprentices who have made their name recently and can be referred to now as a ‘professional jockey’.
Anyone who has not read any of Ashforth’s books should rectify the omission in due course. I recommend ‘Ashforth’s Curiosities of Horseracing’, ‘Fifty Shades of Hay’ and ‘Ringers & Rascals’. 

As anyone who has strayed onto this site in the past might be aware that I am an advocate of triple crowns and would like to see triple crown races for sprinters, milers, middle-distance and stayers, with a large bonus for the owner of a horse to win all three races in their triple crown series. As it is very unlikely we shall ever see, certainly not in the rest of my lifetime, a classic triple crown winner, the establishment of four new triple crown series would add spice to a developing season.
Also, I would like to see more champion jockeys throughout the year. In a heartbeat I would kill-off the present method of establishing our champion jockey and revert to how things used to be, which was to start with the first turf race of the season and finish with the last turf race of the season. It should be as God intended, not as a marketing consultant thought best.
I would not include all-weather races when it comes to the turf champion jockey but have a separate summer all-weather title, with the final meeting of the ‘season proper’ similar to all-weather finals which pinpoints the end of the winter season. The winter all-weather championship should continue as of now. So, there are three title championships for jockeys to contend for, a triple crown, if you may.
I would divide up the apprentice championship into three categories. Overall turf champion and summer and winter all-weather champion. Again, a triple crown for apprentices. I would also award prize-money and a trophy for the leading apprentice who began the season without a winner, a novice prize, if you will. I should also like to establish a champion female apprentice as I still believe females require an identity boost within the sport.
If we are to have amateur flat races – they irk me slightly as they seem just an excuse for racecourses to stage a cheap race – I would like three prestige amateur races, with what used to be the Moet and Chandon at Epsom staged at the revamped Derby meeting, plus two others to make another triple crown series.
Apart from marketing, the establishment of this series of triple crown championships and races would cost very little in monetary terms yet provide the on-going narrative of the season with stories and hopefully excitement, denouements and plot-twists.

​In the Tuesday column of the Racing Post today, Lewis Porteous makes a salient point around the issue of whip offences. Whereas running and riding offences are judged on the day, after the race, whip offences are deferred to the following Tuesday to be decided upon by the Whip Review Committee. Porteous was referring in his piece to the Queens Cup at York won, on the day, by Megan Jordan, the race that is, in effect, the female amateur riders Derby. It was as clear as day that the result would be altered come the following Tuesday, yet the procedure of weighing the winning rider with boxes of champagne was carried out nonetheless. Everyone must have known it was a charade, yet no one thought that in the interests of common-sense it should be held over until the next York meeting.
Porteous is right in his opinion. One of the stewards must have counted the number of times Jordan had used her whip in order to refer the matter and all of the footage that was available to the Whip Review Committee was also available to the York stewards. I cannot think what there is to prevent stewards on the day imposing a disqualification, even if the W.R.C. then review the stewards decision or arbitrate on an appeal from the connections of the disqualified horse.
As Porteous reminded his readers, Betty Smith, now the winning rider of the Queens Cup, is 38 and her ambition was to win the race, and the laurels were taken from her on the day by a procedure that is in place to ensure the right result is succeeded upon, yet in reality is not fit for purpose. I believe, demonstrating that some people know what the right thing to do is, Smith has split the champagne with Megan Jordan, and she will postpone her retirement to try once again next year to finish first past the post in the Queens Cup.

When the dictatorial rule of British horse racing was removed from the Jockey Club everything in the future was supposed to be glorious and democratic. At least that is how I remember the hand-over of power. Yet it has all become a mess, with the sport stuck at base camp, while so many other jurisdictions are either at the summit or comfortably insight of the sunny uplands. Baron Allen has recognised, perhaps finally, the hodge-podge of governance that is the B.H.A. is fundamentally a war of attrition and will only take his seat of office if those who have created the mess are prepared to act for the greater good and not dig in their heels for want of mercenary objectives. And as a sport that is acting without a permanent C.E.O., why has Brant Dunshea not been offered the job on a full-time basis, if only to bring the impasse to an end? No one else, it seems, wants the job, so why not give it to the man keeping the seat warm.
Also, and there is no hope of this, of course, why can’t the B.H.A. be on a lookout for a candidate to take up its chairmanship if Baron Allen walks away, perhaps some one with hands-on experience of the sport? Now that would be a novelty.

There is a lovely piece in the Racing Post today by Chris Cook in the series on the ‘Story of British Horse Racing.’ It focuses on Emily Wilding Davison and why she did what she did. From our perspective in the dystopian years of the 21st Century, her cause was more than worthy, it ultimately could only result in a suffragette victory. But the past is a different country, as someone once said. What I had not realised was that something similar occurred a few weeks later at Royal Ascot when a man, Harold Hewitt, stepped in front of a horse in the Ascot Gold Cup. Unlike Miss Davison, Hewitt survived his injuries as did both horses and jockeys involved in the two incidents. The horse brought down in the Ascot Gold Cup, Tracery, went on to win the Eclipse a few weeks later, proving once again that the past is indeed a different country. When was the last time a horse went from the Ascot Gold Cup to the Eclipse? I cannot get away from the idea that the  trainers’ of today are a bit weak-kneed when compared to those of the past.

Gallant Jack Kennedy rides again, starting-off on the next chapter of his storied career at Tipperary with three rides, two in beginners chases and the other a novice chase. No easy way back for Jack on a reliable old chaser. I do not know if it is a long way to Tipperary for Jack to travel today, I just hope the return journey sees him with a smile on his face and a few winners closer to catching up with Darragh O’Keeffe and Paul Townend, the main opposition to him reclaiming his champion jockey trophy. Kennedy is old-style, a man both of this age and the age of sacrificial and arsonist suffragettes.