as with all-weather racing, this piece is all-over the place.

​I believe, with one notable exception, that the problems presently besetting horse racing in Britain at present can be traced back to the day a High Court judge came to the conclusion that the owners of racecourses were disadvantaged by not being able to race when it suited them and from that moment the B.H.A. lost control of the sport. In the past, the sport’s governing body, ruled the roost, telling racecourses when they could race and which type of races they should provide.
Sensible racing people advocate for less racing, whereas the owners of racecourses want to saturate the racing calendar with more and more fixtures. At least that was the case; they have been reined in over the last few years, although Chelmsford is proposing litigation against the B.H.A. if they are not given more race-meetings. In the next year or so the new turf course at Chelmsford comes into action and quite rightly they want additional fixtures rather than having to use fixtures presently allocated to them for all-weather racing.
If we didn’t have all-weather racing or summer jumping, of course, the problem of too many fixtures for too few racehorses would not be the stranglehold that it is. All-weather racing, to my mind, is an evil necessity and I would like to separate all-weather racing, and summer jumping, from turf fixtures.
To first deal with summer jumping as that is far less of an obstacle to be overcome than all-weather racing. I have come to the conclusion that summer jumping should have a designated start and stop date, with a gap of a few weeks either side of the end of the ‘proper’ season and the beginning of the next, with winners in the designated period not included in title races for champion jockey, trainer, owner, etc,. Instead, we should have a summer champion jockey, trainer, owner, etc. I would also like to see fixtures given an environmental slant, with race-meetings in the north and Scotland one week, with two and three-day fixtures to create ‘festivals’ as is done so successfully in Ireland, with the same happening in the south, midlands and the west of the country. Wouldn’t it save on travelling expenses if jockeys and trainers did not have to drive to three or four different racecourses a week but located themselves in one part of the country for the duration of the race-meetings in that part of the country?
I suggest summer all-weather racing should also be excluded from the title race for champion jockey, trainer, etc. The greatest gain from such a radical change would be less incentive for the top jockeys to ride every day of the week, allowing those jockeys further down the food chain to have greater opportunities. Again, once the flat turf season is under way, all-weather racing would have its own summer championships; spreading the glory, as it were.
All-weather flat racing is less of an evil necessity to my mind as it regularly saves the day when winter weather claims National Hunt fixtures. Already it has its own title races, though the victors rarely receive the same acclaim for their hard endeavours throughout the worst of the British weather as, for example, the champion jockey on the turf.
Sidenote: Rossa Ryan rode over 200-winners in 2023, more than any other jockey, including William Buick, yet received no award, no acclaim. 
There is, at this moment in our history when the number of racehorses in training is in sharp decline, too many fixtures. It is unarguable, even when an increase in prize-money is linked to racecourse payments for media rights. It is a no-brainer, as proved when the weather takes it toll on the fixture-list, that too many race-meetings equates to small field sizes and less betting turnover.
‘Premierizing’ the sport may achieve champagne fountains of success. Yet it flies in the face of common-sense when the B.H.A. allow other race-meetings on the major days of the sport – the Derby, Grand National, Royal Ascot, Cheltenham Gold Cup, to name but a few – when their aim is to emphasise and herald to the sporting public the jewels of racing’s crown.
Separate the flat and National Hunt turf seasons from the lesser all-weather and summer jumping divisions and grow the sport from the bottom up, not from the exclusivity of the elite down. Sadly, I doubt if the sport has the luxury of time to get its house in order. In two-years, I fear, the length of the ‘premierisation trial’, we might all come to realise the fate of horse racing in this country.