​On reflection, I believe Goodwood is the best flat racing festival. It has top-quality races, some with iconic names like the Sussex Stakes and the Goodwood Cup, mind-bursting tricky handicaps over varying distances and races that are nurseries for the immature and developing horse. But most of all it is the racecourse itself and the wonderful countryside in which it resides, enhancing rather than distracting from neither nature nor the farmed landscape. It is a racecourse that tests both the equine and human participants, where jeopardy can still exist in spades and where the weather can play a good or nasty turn. Goodwood is premier racing at its best and demonstrates that glorious racing does not necessarily need every race to be a Group race, where competitiveness can be organic, without any need for it to be plumped and fluffed-up. If only Galway and Goodwood could follow each other in the calendar rather be in opposition to one another.
Jack Berry is a force of nature and while he is still with, for all he has selflessly done for the sport, the B.H.A. and the sport in general should recognise his worth with something like a ‘Jack Berry Day’, a day when the sport goes all out to raise funds and awareness of the charities the great man supports almost on a daily basis. Just an idea that I hope someone will pick-up and carry forward.
It seems I am not the only one who believes stamina should be encouraged when it comes to both the breeding industry and the race programme, with little vocal support for the Irish Derby to be reduced in distance, I am glad to report. In today’s Racing Post, there is a letter suggesting races at 12-furlongs and above should be more generously rewarded with prize-money than races over shorter distances. I agree, especially when it comes to the historic races like the Ascot, Goodwood and Doncaster Cups, perhaps making them into Blue Riband events, a stayers’ triple crown. If more is not done to encourage British and Irish breeders to focus bringing to market yearlings and foals with stamina laced throughout their pedigree and not with more than one thought on the foreign market, in time the thoroughbred will have one purpose and one purpose only, speed, speed, speed, with the lesser horses without a second life outside of racing. Not only are the Group 3 and top handicappers now out of reach of National Hunt trainers when it comes to Horses In Training Sales, but a whole lot of the horses that make-up the catalogues are of no use to them as the majority are sprint-bred and have no future as hurdlers. And what good is a horse programmed from its first day in a racing stable to go flat out for 5-furlongs to someone looking for a hunter, eventer or show-jumper?
The survival of our sport is not dependent on the number of people who attend the flat-festivals through the summer but on those who support their local racecourses and it is there where we might attract new advocates and supporters. While the racecourses that stage the major meetings bemoan crowd sizes in comparison to what they used to be, smaller tracks like Ludlow, Perth and Cartmel are doing well, which begs the question, why? Personally I would rather have 10,000 people spending a pleasant day at the racecourses like the above-mention, that 30,000 going home from a festival critical of the amenities, prices and lack of space they had to endure.
The concept of premier racing does contain, I now believe, a germ of a good idea that at present is being drowned-out by its hostage-takers determining that the sport can be grown from the top down, whereas all good things grow organically from the bottom up.
At Goodwood, for instance, this Saturday, the Stewards’ Cup should have been ring-fenced within a golden hour in which it was the only race run in Britain so that all eyes were on one race. It should be the same for one race every Saturday, with something similar, though perhaps the protective window might be shorter, every day of the week. Yes, thereby shining a spotlight on the likes of Fontwell and Redcar, with one race per day worth at least £20,000. 
There is no need for Goodwood, for example, to be framed as a ‘premier day’ as it has been that for decades. Individual races are what is needed to be ‘premiered’ not whole meetings.

​Ryan Moore rode a treble at Goodwood yesterday. For him, it was just another day at the office. He might be forty now but as Aidan O’Brien said of him, he only gets better at his job. To me, not that Ryan would care a jot or a fig if someone told him, he is the best jockey of my life-time and my life-time took in everyone else’s G.O.A.T., Lester Piggott, as well as the likes of Pat Eddery, Steve Cauthen, the much under-rated Willie Carson and the incomparable Frankie Dettori. Yesterday he coaxed an immature Jan Brueghel to success in the Gordon Stakes, rode a sublime front-running race to win the Nassua Stakes on Opera Singer and then took a maiden on Dreamy, to give O’Brien a treble also. The best of the best, and that can as easily apply to the modest Aiden as to the taciturn but sometimes witty Ryan Moore. ‘No, I wasn’t pestered for the lead,’ he told journalists after winning the Nassau. ‘but I am being pestered now.’ Perhaps he had a plane to catch as he is riding at Saratoga the next few days.
Syd Hosie no longer has a training licence and Tony Charlton has been granted a temporary licence to train from Hosie’s stables in Dorset. That is all the B.H.A. is prepared to say on the matter. The public need to be told more as speculation will be rife on social media and if Hosie is guilty of any crime or breaking the terms of his licence, or whatever, he will be talked about as guilty even if he is proved innocent and his reputation will be sullied forever. We need to know, so, please B.H.A., release at least the outline of whatever enquiries you are engaged upon.
The Magnolia Cup is an invention worthy of its inclusion within the framework of Glorious Goodwood as it raises funds for various female charities as well as raising awareness of those charities. Yesterday one of the runners slipped on the way to the start, its rider having to be taken to hospital. These things happen with horses and not only on the racecourse; I just wonder if Goodwood is too idiosyncratic for this type of charity race.
As I expected, Ray Dawson and ex-trainer Henry Spiller came out with their reputations intact after the B.H.A.’s ‘Enough Already’ enquiry which found that owners, confusingly father and son, Royston Barney and Royston Cooper, had instructed Dawson to stop their horse Enough Already from winning at Yarmouth and when he won threatened both him and Henry Spiller with violent consequences. What I want to say is this: Barney and Cooper are obviously undesirable people and the sport is well rid of them. But, and this a very shaky ‘But’, they might be excluded from owning racehorses for life or twenty-years. The length of their ban is not important. My point is this: when jockeys do wrong, they are offered help, be it substance abuse, drugs or drink. When owners breach regulations is there any traction in the idea of warning them off temporarily, with remedial help offered by way of B.H.A. funded courses in an attempt to get them to see the error of their ways. Perhaps not the right approach with Cooper and Barney but in some instances, it might be worth a trial of some sort. The sport needs all the owners it can get, after all. Usually, warnings-off are as a consequence of betting breaches. It does not follow that because someone loves a punt they do not love the sport. That is my point in a nutshell.
Galway – what a mad Festival. 7-days of eclectic brilliance. I believe if Epsom want to return the Derby to its former glory, Galway is the blueprint. Though not 7-days. 4 at most. With some sort of Derby each day. Epsom is, after all, the home of the Derby.
The Irish regulators refused to allow Petrol Head, trained by Katy Brown, to take part in the Galway Hurdle yesterday as a hair sample taken after it won at Bellewstown had traces of clenbuterol, a banned substance found in products for respiratory conditions. Petrol Head was formally trained by Ronan McNally who is currently serving a 12-year ban for various misdemeanours. Again, no information from the regulators is forthcoming. As in Britain, as in Ireland. In shadows there can be menace.