goodwood, berry, stamina, ludlow & PREMIER.

​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.