firstly, the beach; secondly, justice.

​The clerk of the course at Fakenham, David Hunter, has proposed that the B.H.A. should consider (yet another good idea for marketing our sport to a new audience that has not come from the sport’s regulatory body) following the example of Ireland, and other countries across Europe, and stage a meeting on a British beach. A day at Laytown races is, apparently, common to a good number of racing enthusiast’s bucket lists.
Now, I am not one to blow my own trumpet, though if I don’t do so myself no one will do it on my behalf, but in one of many criticisms of the absolutely stupid proposal for City Street Racing I put forward the more sensible idea of racing on a beach, citing Laytown as an classic example. Whereas City Street Racing involves taking a fit and highly sentient racehorse into a toxic environment overloaded with a cocktail of scents and smells that could easily fry a horse’s brain, beach racing would involve taking racehorses into an environment loaded with fresh, salty air, and racing on what is far closer to a natural surface than that proposed by C.S.R..
Whereas with C.S.R. a huge area will have to be secured to prevent a loose horse running amok amongst spectators, or disappearing down a city side street, a beach venue has the advantage of the wide open sea for security, with perhaps the addition of a few boats positioned close to the shore to head off any horse in want of a cool-down.
North Norfolk seems a good starting point for such an experiment, with a host of holiday venues in close proximity to David Hunter’s suggestion of Holkham. With Yarmouth (or is it Great Yarmouth? Never quite sure) holding regular summer meetings, promoting a beach race meeting nearby should be easily achieved. Novelty always attracts interest.
I could envisage, not only in North Norfolk but elsewhere on the coastline of Britain, beach meetings becoming traditional draws, as is Laytown in Ireland.
 
It came as a surprise, I have to admit, but the Sandown Park 7 have had their appeals upheld by the B.H.A. disciplinary committee. Common-sense, for once, has prevailed. But it begs the question that if the jockeys were not at fault for the embarrassing debacle, who should carry the can?
Obviously, the fault lies with the ground-staff, (the disciplinary committee as good as said so) as the rules on stopping a race are presently written. Will Sandown and its Clerk of the Course be sanctioned? Obviously not. I do, though, have sympathy for the racecourse, its clerk and those involved in the incident. The heart attack that brought about Houblon Des Obeaux’s sad demise could not have occurred at a more inconvenient spot on the racecourse. Sandown has a quite unique lay-out, with the siting of the Pond Fence and then the track narrowing on the turn into the straight. But that would not have been a contributing factor in the fiasco if the procedure for stopping a race were more 21st century rather than 19th century.
We can determine the winner of a close three-way finish down to fractions of an inch; we can detect a miniscule amount of a banned substance in a blood or urine sample; yet we wave flags in an attempt to stop a race. In France they use klaxons, in Britain we use a whistle. In some countries they have microphones attached to furlong poles. We have a dozen cars following each race, yet not one of them is equipped with any sort of device for attracting the attention of the jockey to instruct them to pull-up. It speaks for itself, doesn’t it? The B.H.A. do not have enough true horse people in its ranks, or indeed anyone who is proactive in this or any other matter, to see a problem and to invent solutions to prevent embarrassing incidents as the debacle or fiasco of the London National.
The B.H.A., of course, will not find against itself. It will not make the judgement that its own procedures were not robust enough to prevent such incidents. What it will do, I have no doubt, is put in place a study group that in six months, or longer, will come up with the radical idea of using a different colour flag to the one used for starting a race. When what is required is investment, with every racecourse given the same audio equipment, if that is the solution, microphones on every furlong pole, klaxons or whatever, with Sandown treated the same as Fakenham, Ascot treated the same as Redcar.
Mind you, I would solve the problem thusly: I would ask the jockeys to come up with the answer. They are the ones in the firing line on a daily basis; they are the ones who get punished when the sport’s regulatory body mess-up. Mind you, what I am suggesting might be called the common-sense approach.