​I have recently read, back to back, the autobiographies of Jenny and Richard Pitman. Jenny will be pleased to know that I thought her book ‘The Autobiography’ the more entertaining of the two. It would be interesting to know which of the two ‘legends of the sport’, both of whom went on to seek financial benefit in writing racing-based novels, outsold the other.
I think it is truthful to claim that they were both far more successful after they went their separate ways than when they were married. Jenny Pitman trained some of the best staying chasers of her era and Richard rode the great horses trained by Fred Winter. And, of course, together they produced a Cheltenham Gold Cup winning jockey.
Jockeys and trainers, when writing accounts of their lives, have a weakness for wasting chapters describing how idyllic, not withstanding the poverty of their surroundings, was their childhood. Richard, to his credit, did not indulge himself, allowing his reader only a summary of his pre-adult life. Jenny, alas, devotes the opening three chapters to her childhood and her family. Do we need to know the names of all their ponies from Shetland to junior show-jumping? I always think one short setting-up chapter is more than enough for the successful trainer or jockey in any autobiography, unless, of course, there is a real dramatic incident to recall. With a biography, I can forgive two or three chapters given over to ‘the early years’, after-all, a writer must undertake research to understand and make himself more knowledgeable of his subject matter and this material cannot be simply crumpled-up and tossed in the waste-bin.
Although I always admired Jenny Pitman’s obvious love and concern for her horses, my feelings toward her are stained by the ‘Golden Freeze affair’, which resulted in Carvill’s Hill not only not winning the Cheltenham Gold Cup but rendering him unfit to ever run again. Jenny may claim that Golden Freeze was running on his merits and was not a stalking horse but any review of the 1992 Gold Cup suggests otherwise. I believe her judgement of events was clouded by her ‘dislike’ or ‘envy’ of Martin Pipe and in Peter Scudamore’s autobiography he claimed that Michael Bowlby, the rider of Golden Freeze and Jenny’s brother-in-law, apologised several weeks later, saying he was only ‘riding to orders’.
But there is no doubt she was a brilliant trainer, even if her reputation always preceded her. Although neither mentions the incident, though I believe when Richard’s book was published he was still married to Jenny, I recall him telling the tale of when he was late home one night – I believe a jockey he had gone racing with had been injured and he had accompanied him to hospital – and having sifted the evidence and found him guilty as charged of ‘seeing another woman’, as he opened the front door he was sent reeling by a right hook to the jaw! I hope I have at least nine-tenths of the facts in the correct order. But why let the facts get in the way of a good story!
Richard’s book, ‘Good Horses Make Good Jockeys’, is less enlightening. He rode some of the great horses of all-time, Pendil, Bula, Lanzarote, Killiney and of course Crisp. Through television I gained the view of Richard as a man of modest character, keener to talk himself down rather than up and this is perhaps the obvious explanation why he condensed his association with those great horses into a single chapter. I think Jenny appreciates that the public care more for the horses than the people of the sport and she was more open to writing about them as individuals, as characters, while Richard was restricted by what was still prevalent in his day, the macho strong upper jaw. 1976, the year ‘Good Horses Make Good Jockeys’ was published, was very much a different age to today, when men were men and women were grateful for it.
Of course, Richard’s book has the best, and most honest, title. When Fred Winter took him on, he said, ‘You’ll never be a champion but you’ll do’, two predictions that hit the nail squarely on the head. He never was to become champion jockey, as his successor John Francome was to achieve, but rarely let ‘the governor’ down. And he experienced the greatest ride any jockey could ever hope for when Crisp came within a whisker of achieving the impossible fete of giving 26lbs to the greatest Aintree horse of all-time.
The most interesting part of Richard’s book, and something that will embarrass him to recall, is his defence of jockeys trying to cheat at the scales, arguing that weighing out light was a lesser evil than wasting so hard to draw the correct weight that a jockey was too weak to do the horse, and its connection, justice. If any jockey pulled that stunt on one of Jenny’s horses, I don’t think anyone would disagree that her trusty right hook was not the appropriate punishment.
In later life, when in his sixties, I believe, Richard donated a kidney, inspiring me to attempt to do likewise. Unfortunately, I was advised that my kidneys were not a perfectly matched pair and was turned down. Given that I am teetotal and that Richard must have supped gallons of champagne and other libations in his time I thought that a rather harsh lesson in life to learn.

​Just a thought: why couldn’t the big two-year-old race due to be run at Doncaster on Saturday, the last Group I of the season in this country, a race that incidentally has no name but only lives and breathes as a marketing tool for sponsors, be kept over a few weeks (November 9th to be precise) so that it could be run at Doncaster, its true home, as an addition to the November Handicap? They were prepared to run the race on Saturday on very heavy ground and one can only expect the ground to be no worse if not a good deal better come the last day of the season.
Also, when six fences are omitted from a 2-mile 4-furlong steeplechase, completely altering the very nature of the contest, is there not grounds for abandoning the race altogether? Health and Safety matters should never be underestimated, yet, as Paul Nicholls inferred, fences were not regularly omitted in his day and at present by-passing fences is becoming something of a fashion. Is the sun hanging lower in the sky in our modern time than in days gone by? It seems so. I dare say the B.H.A. have already sat around a table and discussed the predicament, though I think some kind of blue-sky thinking needs to be brought to bare on the subject as it is bordering on the farcical to cut six fences from a twelve-fence race. On Saturday, I would suspect, the crowd at Aintree was swelled by the exciting prospect of witnessing one of the great jumpers of a steeplechase fence perform, only to be denied on Health and Safety grounds. If you book to be entertained by Basil Brush and find on arrival a limp and inert fox on the stage you would be in your rights to have your money returned. Frodon will be debating the issue with his equine colleagues for days to come, I suggest.
On Sunday Mrs. Skelton rode three winners at Wincanton, while Mr. Skelton drew a blank up at Aintree. Bridget Andrews, as she is better known, has always been what could be described as ‘a good little rider’, a fact she underscored with her hat-trick of winners, yet it was not fully heralded by, in my opinion, by the Racing Post. Female jockeys do not ordinarily ride three winners at a single meeting, especially in National Hunt. Not even Rachael Blackmore has achieved the hat-trick on many occasions and Bryony Frost, I believe, not at all. Of course, and as it should be, Bridget Andrews is just a jockey, the same as any other jockey and no doubt wishes to be treated no-better and no-worse than her make counterparts. I just thought the achievement worthy of greater recognition, though as the Post these days tries to squeeze an entire day’s worth of racecourse reports on to one page, she was lucky to have the coverage she did.
To finish: in today’s Racing Post, writing as a guest columnist, the trainer Richard Phillips puts forward the idea of a National Racehorse Day. This is a brilliant suggestion and one the B.H.A. (if they were doing their job, which they are not) should have come up with years ago. I put forward a similar idea a couple months ago, though I was more concerned with raising funds for equine charities, especially the rehabilitation charities. Richard Phillips suggests a day without racing (that won’t go down well with both bookmakers and racecourses) when yards up and down the country open their doors to the public.
We need to demonstrate to the public how well racehorses are cared-for, to open up the behind-the-scenes racing world, where the racehorse is king. And rather than keeping the media at bay, they should be invited to be part of the day, to make it clear to them that our sport is not solely a plaything for the rich but that it is very much a working-class sport that employs directly and indirectly many thousands of people. It is to be seen whether the B.H.A. will support and finance this idea. I do not hold my breath. But with the welfare issues in Australian racing, we need to be on the front foot so we are not tarnished with the same brush.
 

​A week or so ago I wrote a piece moaning – I thought of it as positive criticism – about the B.H.A. (in general I moan rather too much about the ‘powers-that-be, an expression I use to hide my ignorance of who exactly is in control of our sport) and the people it employs. I was not critical of anyone in particular, just the seemingly random way it appoints its top people. No one at the B.H.A. rises through the ranks to become head-honcho and certainly no one with a vast number of years working within the racehorse industry is ever invited to its top table. At the moment, as excellent as her c.v. maybe, we have an ex-rower in charge of our sport, this equine, 7-day-a-week sport that espouses many tenticles.
The Racing Post led today with the common-sense opinion of Ruby Walsh that it shouldn’t be beyond the wit and wisdom of Irish and British racing to schedule each horse race throughout the racing day to start at eight-minute intervals to prevent two races starting at the same time. As he quite rightly pointed out, and it is obvious when you think about it, why should races only start on the hour, the quarter or the half-hour? As he said, the racing industry in Ireland and Britain should think of themselves as one product.
If Ruby and his father ran racing here and in Ireland the problems we face would be solved in a few months, if not a few weeks.
Ruby is right, isn’t he, in his observation? As a jockey he would not have given the matter a moment of his time, yet after only a short while as a pundit and full-time racing columnist he has hit the nail right on the head. Here we have a small movement costing zilch which will have nothing other than gains if implemented.
So why has the B.H.A. or the racecourse association not thought along similar lines? Isn’t the whole point of the B.H.A. to guide the sport in a positive forward direction? This observation of Ruby’s should not have even been in the B.H.A.’s in-tray, yet I doubt if anyone within the organisation has even given it a consideration. Why? Because in the main the people on the Board of the B.H.A. are not true dyed-in-the-wool racing people. High finance they may be good at, good old-fashioned, bang-in-your-face, common-sense, not so much.
If you gave John Francome, for instance, the dilemma of sorting out the whip issue he would have it sorted in a day. The B.H.A. have struggled with the problem for what seems like a hundred years but might only be decades. If they were in charge a century or more ago, we would still be arguing over nudge and jostle races and the use of spurs.
Ruby has already sorted out the ticklish t.v. problem of start-times, though I dare say now aware of the issue the B.H.A. will form a committee, talk to all its stakeholders and some time in 2021 will come to some sort of conclusion.
I have no doubt the B.H.A. and all its stakeholders (I think therein lies racing’s major stumbling block to getting things done) are fine, honourable people. But how many of them are steeped in racing lore? How many of them have mucked a stable out pre-dawn or fallen from a horse on the gallops or stayed-up all through a cold winter’s night to ensure the safe delivery of a foal? Some, yes, but they would be in the minority, I suggest.
There should not be space in our sport for someone to put forward such an innovative and really quite simple solution to what is a fundamental yet unseen issue. If the B.H.A. functioned more proficiently they would have seen the problem years ago and dealt with it in the manner Ruby Walsh has suggested. And why are people of the calibre of Ruby Walsh allowed to retire from active participation in our sport without being first sounded out as to whether they would be interested in a position of at least advising the B.H.A., if not actually becoming a salaried member of staff? Of course, their predecessors, the not-so-shabby-looking-now Jockey Club, didn’t think Fred Winter a suitable person to become a starter. Enough said, perhaps.
The Dame who presently holds the top chair at the B.H.A. has been in office since June and I doubt if even now if she is properly up-to-speed. By the time her tenure is over she will still not be as knowledgeable about the sport as the head man or travelling head-girl of any of the top yards in the country. She will know the right hands to squeeze in Westminster and that may well be useful to the sport but it is not as impressive as knowing the nuts and tiny bolts of the sport she represents. If she fails to attain protection of our sport from the politicians or does nothing to find new sources of future funding, she will simply move on to the next C.E.O. position that comes her way. She may fall in love with the sport on her journey – why wouldn’t she? – but failure to improve the sport she is paid a sizeable wedge of money for not too many hours a week would not cut her to the bone as it would Ruby Walsh, Francome or someone whose whole life has revolved around horses and racing.
 

​The definition of the word ‘finale’ is thus: the last part, piece or scene in any performance or exhibition; the last piece in a performance; the last movement, the close, end, the final catastrophe.
In this electronic age of #hashtags#, emojis, and a general slide toward the days before Johnson’s first dictionary when any word could be spelt any old how, I suppose complaining about the misuse of the word ‘finale’ is going to come across as an old guy having a moan about nothing. I disagree.
‘Champions Day’ on Saturday was actually the day of the Champion Stakes. The only champion competing on Saturday was Stradivarius as Oisin Murphy and Cieran Fallon were actually not champions until after the final race of the day, even if they received their trophies during racing. It was also not, as it was claimed time without number by the I.T.V. presenters, the finale of the flat season, as today we have three flat meetings, with further meetings to take place up to November 9th.
Now, I will admit that it was the finale of the Qipco series but did anyone see or hear any reference to the winners of these awards? I am sure the original concept of Qipco Champions Day would be that the top sprinter, miler, filly or mare, stayer, etc, would honour the day by competing in the appropriate race on the day. Of course, with one exception, this did not happen. It is actually a rare event when one of the Qipco champions does race on Qipco Champions Day.
I am not cribbing the actual racing. As usual Saturday’s fare was action-packed and provided a good number of talking points, one of which was that Ascot got away with the weather once again. As I may have said before, if you are going to have a ‘season’s finale’, a Champions Day to close the season with a bang, it should be on  the final day of the turf season at Doncaster where the ground would no doubt be just as soft as it usually is at Ascot, though where it dries out a good bit quicker, and as the Qipco series requires a sixth race to ensure a full programme the November Handicap would be available to add heritage to the day’s racing.
Although both the Qipco series and Champions Day are considered a success by seemingly everyone but me, I doubt if it will succeed long into the future. It exists by virtue of its sponsor. If Qipco were to pull the plug, and sponsors always pull the plug sooner or later, there would be a very limited number of potential benefactors queuing to take over.
I personally believe, given the lack of money swilling around in racing’s vaults at the moment, that the money required to stage Champions Day would be better spent at the other end of racing’s hierarchy, where prize money is in dire need of a boost. Flat racing does not need a one-day high-profile blow-out that may appeal to spectators but in effect only swells the coffers of the big battalions of the sport.
Oisin Murphy is a deserving champion jockey and I dare say if the title were to be decided on every race between Doncaster in March and Doncaster in November, he would still have won the title. It is just bizarre to choose two arbitrary dates in the racing calendar to decide the title and completely ignore the rest of the season. You try explaining to someone with little knowledge of the sport that the champion jockey is not necessarily the jockey who has ridden the most winners during the turf season, which will happen, if it hasn’t already, in the near future. If I live to be a hundred, I will never accept the present method of attributing the jockeys’ title to be anything other than flawed.
One final moan (for now) though maybe it is a thought worth developing: if a race over 2-miles is described as ‘long-distance’, what is a race over 2-miles- 4 or further called? Is the Ascot Gold Cup run over a marathon trip? 2-miles is not in anyone’s book a ‘long-distance’. It is a very reasonable distance of ground. Some horses stay 2-miles, yet find 2-miles- 4-furlongs a trip too far. Perhaps 2-mile races should be differentiated from races run over what we might describe as the marathon distance. The same as mile-horses are differentiated from the mile-and-a-half horses.
Anyway, in summary: I dislike ‘Champions Day’ described as the ‘finale’ of the flat season because it is not the finale of the flat season; I dislike Champion Stakes Day (I also would prefer the Champion Stakes returned to its spiritual home of Newmarket) marketed as ‘Champions Day’ due to the wholesale lack of equine champions. I dislike how the champion jockey is determined; especially as champion trainer is determined in a whole calendar year. No harmony, no joined-up logic.
I remain out-of-love with the whole darn concept.
 
 

​I don’t know if there is a collective noun for a group of jockeys but a ‘weight’, given how crucial the weigh scales is to them, might be appropriate. A gaggle of geese; a pride of lions; a bevy of ladies: a weight of jockeys.
It was his weight as much as the wasting medicine and the bullet that killed Fred Archer. It was weight that prematurely retired Joseph O’Brien from the saddle. Weight, on occasion, has literally driven some jockeys over the edge into alcoholism, drug addiction and into an early grave. Dissatisfaction with weight can be a killer of mind, body and spirit. Ambition easily perishes, I suppose, when in order to ride a no-hoper at 8st 4lbs a slice of dry toast and a few sips of water is all you can afford to put into your body before you set-out on a return journey of six-hours.
As the young, year on year, in our affluent society, not in countries riven by real poverty, not the relative poverty of the West, get weightier, stronger and in many cases, and let’s not be p.c. about it, fatter, it is becoming increasingly difficult for trainers to recruit people who can both ride and ride at a weight commensurate to galloping racehorses. It is a problem that will perhaps never go away.
From time to time it is proposed that bottom weights in horse races should be raised to make life and living easier for jockeys. When I began my love affair with the sport bottom weight was 7st 7lbs, with apprentices able, and expected, to claim their allowance. Back in the history of the sport apprentices might ride at 5 or 6st. If you think I exaggerate read the autobiographies of jockeys like the Charlies Elliott and Smirke who rode in the years between the two World Wars.
It would make life so much easier, and extend their careers by many years, for the top flat jockeys like James Doyle, Ryan Moore and others, allowing them the opportunity to ride in every race at every meeting, if the bottom weight was raised beyond or close to 9st. But what of those lower in the pecking order? The lightweight jockey is all but a forgotten species as it is, if bottom weight became 9st these people would need a stone or more of lead in their saddles to do the weight, disadvantaging them further.
It may be, overall, a leap forward in the general health of jockeys if they were not seduced into wasting to ride a well-handicapped horse in one of the big handicaps. But what about the jockey who can ride at 8st or 8st 3 or 4 without resorting to wasting, flipping or salt baths and long runs in a rubber suit? Should we deny a means to a living to these people just so the top jockeys, who make a really good living riding and winning Group 1’s, can also plunder the 3.30 at Brighton, Redcar or Chelmsford?
As I argue that the journeyman jockey should be catered for with a scattering of races a week restricted to those who have ridden a limited number of winners in a time period of say 6 or 12 months, then a similar number of handicaps a week should exist that goes below whatever new threshold is agreed upon.
This sport caters for apprentices, female riders, amateurs, celebrities and on too few occasions stable staff, why is it a leap too far to help jockeys whose names do not appear in the top half of the jockeys table to earn an honest living? If we owe it to jockeys that wasting is not imposed upon them on too regular a basis as a condition of their employment, is there not a social contract with every strand of jockey to give them opportunity to make enough money to pay their expenses?
When jockeys retire through an inability to provide for their families, it is not unusual for them to be lost to the sport altogether, adding to the staffing crisis that is the day-to-day bug-bear of most trainers in Britain and Ireland. Horse racing exists all around the world, with the countries of the Middle East seemingly in competition with each other to grow the sport’s appeal. Saudi Arabia is the latest to open its arms to the racing world. Perhaps in future the staff presently employed in yards in Britain and Ireland who originate from Pakistan and countries closer to the Middle East might chose to take their skills there. These countries will also need resident jockeys, where the weights carried will be lower than in Europe and we will lose not only our stable staff but a percentage of our jockeys too.
 
 
 

​I am discounting books about American racehorses in the title to this piece. I am sure the books on Secretariat and Sea Biscuit were worth the effort, though as I have read neither of them, I do not have the authority to say either way. On my bookshelf I have books on Brown Jack, Eclipse, Persian Punch, Brigadier Gerard and Frankel, and one that has as its main character Running Rein, though that book is more about the scandal that surrounds his ‘Derby Triumph’. I have seventeen books on National Hunt horses.
I suspect someone is presently in the process of writing a book about Enable, and like the rest of us living on tenterhooks in hope she will be kept in training to give the writer a few more races to her life that might ultimately lead to a preface and final chapter that is the story of her third Arc success.
The reason so few flat horses are honoured by a book about their lives is that so few are truly deserving of one. Think about it, rather than boo and hiss at my prejudice, and compare the longevity of Kauto Star and Cue Card with the here today and gone tomorrow careers of the majority of top-class flat horses. There is a book about Nijinsky, one of the great three-year-olds of my lifetime, but like so many others his stay in the public eye can be measured in months, not years. Sea The Stars and Dancing Brave were the same. Golden Horn and El Gran Senor, too. Best of their generation by a long chalk but little more. Not in the same league as Enable, that’s for sure as they were not around long enough to become the ‘apple of the eye’ of the public, for people to become sentimentally attached to them.
Over the long years of my invisible love affair with this great sport, I have seen on the flat a large number of ‘second-comings’, two-year-olds that as three-year-olds were predicted by experts to become the ‘horse of a generation’, the sort of horse that Frankel became. Virtually every one fell by the wayside, many of them coming out of Ballydoyle, trained by the first O’Brien genius or his predecessor. I have witnessed various t.v. pundits eulogising over a young horse, telling viewers that we have been privileged to see first-hand the creation of a bright new star only for reality to spoil the pretty vision of the future come April, May or June.
So, romantics, brave-hearts and ante-post backers, temper your adoration of Pinatubo as the odds are stacked against you.
In a piece based on the Racing Post’s Sunday Q & A with famous racing folk, I answered the final question ‘Give us a horse to follow for the rest of the season’, Pinatubo, as I was really impressed by the manner of his win in the Woodcote at Epsom. Obviously, I could not have predicted he would finish the season with a (silly) rating of 128 but I had recognised his potential. So, I am in no way dissing him. It’s just that history suggests that the really great flat horses are barely noticed until they begin their three-year-old careers.
What happens year on year is that the best two-year-olds have arrived at their peak precociously early, while others take longer to strengthen and mature, bursting into bloom and vigour as three-year-olds. It is fact. Thoroughbreds are not fully mature until they are five, which is why it is imprudent and detrimental to the breed to retire colts to the stallion yards after their three or even their four-year-old careers.
Go through the historical record, which I haven’t done, relying on memory and my unreliable sense of instinct, and I am pretty sure that most Derby winners rarely feature anywhere near the top of the previous seasons two-year-old ratings. Pinatubo is a lovely horse and no one deserves a true superstar more than Sheikh Mohammed but we must not be surprised if his present rating is as high as he achieves before he is packed off to stud at the end of next season. Like me, you must hope I am wrong in my prediction.
We will not know if 128 is a true representation of his ability until the horses he beat in the National Stakes at the Curragh prove their own true ability as any one of them might improve leaps and bounds next season. Or each and every one of the horses who finished in his wake that day might fail to win another race. That is, I suppose, the fascination of this sport, that form interpretation is an inexact science and that every race and every horse is subject to individual opinion, opinion that might, and often will, change from race-to-race.
Is Pinatubo a great horse. No, at least not yet. Will he become a great horse. Perhaps, though history and the odds are against him. Will he run in the Epsom Derby? That will depend on whether it might knock a swathe off his stud value if he should suffer humiliating defeat. Would I advise anyone to back him ante-post for the 2,000 Guineas? No. Back Military March at long odds for both Newmarket and Epsom.
 

​The other day I was in our local supermarket and I was stopped short by the amount of booze on sell on the shop-floor, plus what there must be in the store-room, which, multiplied by the amount of booze sold in the entire town, multiplied again by the amount in the county, in the country … (Well, you get my drift.) suggested that a vast amount of the world’s resources must be given over to the production of a commodity with the potential to harm and to kill. It was a sobering thought, and I am teetotal. It makes the brouhaha and controversy about sweeties at the till seem rather petty, as if obesity has little to with greed and that liver failure had no connection to the over-consumption of alcohol.
You may think I have gone off topic. Well, it’s here I haul the prose back on track.
Alcohol has been the downfall of too many jockeys. Think Bobby Beasley, a jockey many considered as good a rider ever to come from Ireland. Booze beat the crap out of him and it was one of the comebacks of all comebacks when he won the Cheltenham Gold Cup on Captain Christy. Jockeys also succumb to drink when retired and here I’ll reference Pat Eddery.
Now, I’ll admit I’m rather addicted to Assam tea and if forced by circumstance to give-up the golden nectar I dare say I would experience the same withdrawal symptoms as someone signing the pledge and foregoing whatever delights are to be had from an excess of alcohol. But when you are a gifted and successful sportsman why would you try to make sense of the stresses involved in your labour by resorting to getting blind drunk and suffering the hangovers that just prolong the agony? Why.
I have just finished reading ‘Riding The Storm’, the autobiography of Timmy Murphy, a book that was far better read than I imagined it would be. It is an honest assessment of the pitfalls of being Timmy Murphy. A man, who by his own admission, spurned opportunity after opportunity mainly due to going out on weekends looking for the ‘craic’. A jockey who fails to take advantage of becoming first jockey to Kim Bailey, when he was top of his profession, and to Paul Nicholls as he rose to the top, really is his own worst enemy.
Yet that was not the height of his follies. He actually ended up in prison after making an ass of himself on a flight back from Japan, adding to his own humiliation by sexually assaulting a stewardess. It was a mild sexual assault, though he was wrongly put on the sex offenders register, as if a six-month prison sentence was enough of a punishment for being under the influence of alcohol.
At the time, only knowing of his fall from grace through the media, I thought that was the end of his career, another brilliant Irish horseman undone by his inability to address his addiction to alcohol. Just another name to add to the long list of jockeys who failed to take full advantage of their skill in the saddle.
But Murphy got lucky, though he perhaps earned his good fortune by having the balls to start from scratch, to make his way back from the bottom of the heap to, well this book was published way to early in his career, something close to respectability, his reputation almost restored. With A.P. taking up a retainer to ride for J.P., David Johnson wanted his own jockey and Murphy was the best unattached jockey around. David Johnson saved his bacon. And how.
And that’s the mad and sad thing about ‘Riding The Storm’ as two-years after publication Timmy Murphy won the Grand National for David Johnson on Comply or Die. (Incidentally if you watch the 2008 Grand National keep an eye on the ride Paul Carberry gave King John’s Castle, a horse who rarely gave more than he had to and who never won beyond 2-mile 4. As good a ride as you’ll ever see at Aintree) Has a jockey who has won the Grand National written an autobiography that omits his greatest triumph? The rock bottom of a prison cell to the heights of winning the Grand National. That should have been the story of Murphy’s autobiography but then he was not to know what life had in store for him, did he?
And of course, post Aintree his career took a different turn when he chose to ride solely on the flat and as someone who has not heard the reason for him making such a radical career move, I felt short-changed at the end of the book.
No doubt due to the assistance of Donn McClean, and due in no small way to Murphy’s black and white honesty, ‘Riding The Storm’ is a very good read. I was always a fan of Murphy as a jockey, which was why he plummeted in my esteem so much after his arrest and trial (I despise anyone who brings the sport into disrepute) and accounts of his early life, plus the mistakes and misdemeanours of his early career, gave me the impression that it would long odds on him changing my opinion of him through the writing of this book. But at the end I was truly pleased he had hauled himself off the floor and achieved the heights he would go on to achieve.

​As with most people, for a moment, an annoyingly short moment, it looked for all the world that the fairy-tale would become reality. It was not to be. But that is sport and why we are willingly enslaved by its majesty. It didn’t happen, despite all our hopes and prayers that it would. The worst aspect of Sunday, though, was that, as good and deserving as he was, Waldgeist is not a super-horse. He is honest as the day is long. He turns up and does the job he was bred for without complaint, without making a great show of himself. As Arc winners goes, he is average and that is where the disappointment, for me, lies. If Sottsas had won or Japan there would be grounds for believing they are aspiring for true greatness as four-year-olds, if given the opportunity. But Enable was humbled by a five-year-old, a horse she had beaten on the three previous occasions they had met.
But as Ted Walsh once famously said, horse racing is neither Hollywood nor Disney. Horse Racing can be life at its rawest. That’s an element of the sport that makes the sport as addictive as it is.
This will not happen, I strongly suspect, but there remains on the planet one horse who could still win three Arcs. Enable. Yes, it was asking for the moon to expect Prince Khalid to keep her in training as a five-year-old and in asking for her to be kept in training as a six-year-old we are doubtless entering the fantasy world of Disney. But why not. As I said, she remains the most likely horse to win the holy grail of three arcs and only failed on this occasions due to the almost heavy ground.
John Gosden, as truthful and pragmatic a man as you will ever find, often will say that Enable loves her work, loves going out with the string on to the Heath and that on the day after the King George & Queen Elisabeth she made her annoyance known when she taken for a walk and pick of grass when Gosden’s  first lot went out for proper exercise on the gallops. She enjoys being a racehorse and insists on going out first lot and not kept hanging around. It would seen unfair on her to take her out-of-training when in mind and body she remains fit, healthy and still eager for the fray.
If I was a betting man, which I am not, I would put money on not seeing her on a racecourse again. They might be tempted to take her to the Breeders Cup but with the unacceptable large number of fatalities at Santa Anita in recent months I can’t see Prince Khalid taking the risk of Enable being added to the casualty list. If she were mine, I would keep her in training another year. Flat racing needs her, especially if one of Godolphin’s Shamardal superstar two-year-olds go on to be superstar three-year-olds. What a match-up that would be, Enable versus Pinatubo in the Eclipse, for example. But we should not get ahead of ourselves. Sporting dreams can be as easily crushed as a grape under the heel of the bogey-man.
Perhaps, like Charles Englehard, owner of Nijinsky, who, dying of cancer, retired his great horse as a three-year-old in hope of still being alive when his sons and daughters were on the ground, Prince Khalid is keener to see what offspring she produces than to have her add to her haul of Group 1’s. And at some point, as Aiden O’Brien regularly points out, the genes of the noble greats have to be passed on to the next generation, and as a fourth generation Juddmonte racehorse Enable is a very precious commodity to have on the roster. There will never be another like her. Though with Juddmonte, who can be sure. After Frankel, it was very long odds they would produce a horse to be spoken of in the same sentence as the wonder-horse.
Yet, and again I say this more in hope than expectation, even with having bred Frankel and other great racehorses, it would be a major feather in the cap of Juddmonte if it can be boasted that they and they alone bred the only three-time winner of the Arc. I ask again. Why not? It is arguable that Winx was a superior racehorse in her final year on the track than any year that preceded it. What was she, seven when she retired? Enable would only be six next season.
In trepidation I for one will be keeping my fingers crossed over the coming weeks for the announcement of Enable’s future. And remember, though Frankie is of the opinion he has ridden her for the last time, neither Lord Grimthorpe nor John Gosden has said one way or the other about retiring the great mare or keeping her in training. I just hope the outpouring of affection shown to the mare by the public and how much it would mean to them and the greater good it would do the sport might, just might, sway influence Prince Khalid’s difficult decision.

​The two questions we must ask regarding the sad closure of Towcester racecourses are: was every avenue pursued in an attempt to keep the course open? And is there an under-the-table policy to allow other small courses go to the wall?
I may be wrong and others may know better but I have not read of any fighting talk by anyone to save Towcester. It is all very well the great and the good coming out after the demise of the racecourse and describing the situation as ‘sad’, ‘a tragedy’, ‘a sense of great disappointment’. It is all of those sentiments and more, of course. But as maddening as it is that the B.H.A. and racing’s stakeholders have allowed this unique little racecourse to close, with the exe hovering over Kempton Park, one of the country’s major racecourses, it has to asked if any racecourse is safe? Is the closure of Towcester just the thin end of the wedge? Is it the case that any one of Britain and Ireland’s racecourses will be allowed to perish?
There are wealthy people involved in our sport who are prepared to ‘invest’ millions in bloodstock and yet no member of ‘the great and the good club’ of British racing was prepared to organise or even float the idea of a consortium of wealthy investors to buy Towcester to keep it within the racing fold. Is it too late for a rescue mission? It seems that without the sanctioning of race-meetings, days in the calendar which appear to be a racecourse’s greatest asset, a racecourse doesn’t have the right to exist. Yet if the proposition to hold point-to-points in the future is genuine, surely the hallowed racing surface is to remain in situ, which begs the question as to why it is being said the course has closed rather than merely mothballed.
As Hereford and Chelmsford have proved, with the right amount of will-power, ambition and good management, racecourses can rise from the ashes stronger and with greater viability. Why can this not be the same with Towcester? Why has its owners and the racing community just rolled over and allowed the death notice to be served? There was always a lobby to reopen Hereford. And Fred Done and others had the vision to buy Great Leighs and invest in its future to great effect.
Horse racing, especially National Hunt, is a country sport. Its birth was because of two sporting gentleman betting on which of them could ride fastest between the two steeples of two country churches. Hence, steeple-chasing. The chase between two steeples. Nowadays the main racecourses are situation with urban environments but not that comparatively long ago a day at the races was a trip into the countryside, a day out of the dirt and grime of the city. Today, racecourses offer a green lung to our cities and towns. Towcester is ideally situated to be that trip to the country for sporting fun.
Because there is scant hope the B.H.A. will ever offer positive and innovative leadership, horse racing is ever in need of movers and shakers, entrepreneurs who recognise the potential of challenging bookmakers monopoly on the betting side of the sport. The B.H.A. plod along, much like the Jockey Club before them, getting excited when someone comes up with a stupid idea like ‘formula 1 style team racing’ as if the concept of ‘fans’ getting behind a team ‘borrowed’ for a few weeks by a washing powder manufacturer or gambling company could ever be the financial ‘saviour’ of the sport.
I suspect the company that own Towcester have never had any interest in the place as a racecourse. What is happening is what they had always planned to happen. Soon pockets of Towcester will be opened up for development. A few houses here, a business park there and this unique racecourse will be as dead as Wye, Woore, Lanark, Buckfastleigh and Folkestone; country courses that ultimately no one in racing cared about. Racecourses that in the main catered for the small trainer and his workaday owner. Remember, the B.H.A.’s predecessors, the Jockey Club, sat back and allowed Aintree to be taken to the brink of closure. It took the passion of racing enthusiasts and the public to understand the true place Aintree held in both racing and the history of sport in this country.
Losing Towcester is profoundly regrettable, an annoying example of how little racing’s custodians and regulators care about the backbone and journeyman of the sport, but if the trend continues what this latest course closure assures us is it will not be the last. Take note, houses surround nearly all of our best racecourses from Ayr to Cheltenham, with hotels taking root by design in many others, encroaching like an epidemic on the green sward of the sporting field. In time we might think ourselves fortunate if we come across a Racecourse Road, Steeplechase Avenue, or Grandstand Street. Evidence of what used to be.