horse racing: bits and Bobs.

​Last Monday evening, at Wolverhampton, Hollie Doyle, 6-times Group 1 winning jockey, suffered what was described as a ‘freak fall’, resulting in, as was later diagnosed, a fracture of her elbow and ruptured ligaments in her arm. I may be wrong, though husband Tom was riding elsewhere that night, it seems she drove herself home, stopping off at Swindon Hospital to have her arm x-rayed. The x-rays were sent to be assessed by B.H.A.-appointed chief medical officer Jerry Hill. The following day (Tuesday) she was assessed by a B.H.A. appointed specialist and on the Wednesday, she was at Oaksey House in Lambourn for physiotherapy. 
Within 2-days Hollie was able to access a hospital, a chief medical officer, a specialist and a rehabilitation centre. In what other sport would this be possible? Horse racing may be in a bad place at the moment but there are elements within it that are a shining example of care and professionalism the rest of sport, and the general public, should be made aware of.

There is some disquiet amongst trainers that from last Saturday’s abandonments only a 3-horse race, as it would have been, is to be saved, to be run this weekend at an already jam-packed Cheltenham. Personally, and I may be alone in my view, but if a race only attracts 3-runners it does not deserve to be rescheduled. Yes, because it is re-opened to original entries, it will likely have 4, 5 or 6-runners, two of which will be no-hopers, at Cheltenham. Yet the Fleur-de-Lys Chase, due to have been run at Lingfield on Sunday, and worth the same amount of money as the Clarence House, is not be saved, even though it had attracted twice the number of runners.
Now, I don’t approve of Lingfield’s Winter Millions meeting as it can only have the effect of watering down competition between now and the Spring Festival meetings, but it was approved by the authorities and in his first manifestation served up plenty of competitive racing. But Lingfield is Lingfield and in winter it is the most relied upon racecourse to produce heavy ground and the freezing weather that scuppered the second instalment of the Winter Millions was evidence that this meeting will always be susceptible to abandonment even when the ground is raceable. That said, I believe the Fleur-de-Lys was a better candidate to be rescheduled than a race that most trainers totally ignored from first entry to last.
In my humble opinion, given its importance to West Country racing, the meeting that should have been salvaged from last weekend was Taunton. Insurance may come into play here, hence Taunton’s reluctance to ask the B.H.A. for a new date for the meeting, but of all the big races last weekend the Portman Cup was by far the most original. It is the only conditions chase outside of the National Hunt Chase at the Cheltenham Festival run over a distance in excess of 3¼ -miles. And it was a competitive race, even if Frodon was by miles the best horse entered, though there was no certainty he would stay the distance. In Ireland, where, yes, they have spaces available in the race programme to accommodate the rescheduling of entire meetings, the Taunton fixture would have been postponed not abandoned.
Also, while I am having another dig at the B.H.A.. Why does the sport always have to shoot itself in the foot? As Paul Nicholls quite rightly said, if the Clarence House was re-opened, given the race was to be run at Cheltenham, a completely different configuration than Ascot, he would have entered Greanateen, with other trainers, as Gary Moore has proved by allowing Editeur du Gite to run on Saturday, also having a rethink about the race. Of course, this could not happen because the rules do not allow it. The rule should be changed, shouldn’t it, for the benefit of the sport. It is the same with later entry dates for the major races, especially the Cheltenham Festival. If it will improve competitiveness, help reduce costs for owners and make life easier for trainers, races closing months before the day of racing should be eliminated. Simple measures that would cost the sport nothing and can only provide benefits to everyone involved.
Oh, on the subject of affordability checks, the death-knell of racing, no doubt, and ways around the dire consequence it heralds, as trainer Stuart Williams is quoted in today’s (January 24th) Racing Post, ‘ ….We need a turnover model for a start and, eventually, we need to move to a system like in Australia, where a lot of funding is coming from the Tote.’
Yet, as everyone keeps saying, the Tote boat has sailed. (Must keep the atmosphere of the racecourse jungle, mustn’t we?) The same people who doubtless would prefer to either come up with a complications of ideas that will require the favourable wind of good fortune to succeed in saving the sport or to simply allow the sport to slip away, rather than embrace a system that in various Tote forms has made racing in those countries a roar-away success.