horse racing: innovation versus tradition.

​If I recall correctly, the sport of show jumping went down the ‘innovation’ route and look where it found itself – not on mainstream t.v. They built an indoor ‘Hickstead style bank’ in an attempt to duplicate the jeopardy of the real outdoor ‘uphill and down-dell’ obstacle synonymous with the Hickstead Derby. They also tried betting on show-jumping classes.
The rather elemental and beautiful sport of athletics is not to spared innovation, with razzle-dazzle lighting effects and mixed-sex relay races amongst innovations to tempt more people to the sport. All needless and gimmicky; the work of go-getting entrepreneurs with no appreciation of workaday gold-dust or history.
Has innovation improved any sport? Cricket now has so many formats it has become a circus of hit, run and pyjama-costumes. W.G. Grace, Don Bradman and the other founding fathers of the game must toss and turn in their graves as ‘the Hundred’, the rough-coated terrier of all-sports’, denigrates the history and tradition of a once leisurely pastime. 
A small annoyance at the proposed innovation of micing up jockeys so they can talk to interviewers or trainers as they mosey down to the start or indeed during a race is the word ‘micing’ itself. Sounds too much like mice-ing-up or even mincing-up. The last thing horse racing needs is to have the piss taken out of it.
Here's a scenario that will be repeated time and time again: a jockey will be cantering down to the start on a favourite and he or she will be asked if their mount feels as if it will cope with ground that might be firm or heavy. The jockey will truthfully return a negative response and the horse will ‘drift like a barge in the betting’, only for it to scoot in at twice the odds it was in the morning papers. ‘Foul’ many will scream. ‘The jockey was prompted to give a negative response by an owner wanting better odds and a bigger killing’. Jockeys will be put in ‘a damned if I do and damned if I don’t’ situation which will be unfair on them.
Jockeys also swear and curse. Racehorses behaving badly can make a vicar blaspheme, I assure you. As nice a bloke as Tom Marquand is, when that horse kicked him down at the start at Newmarket this season, lacerating his arm and putting him off-games for a week, I doubt he said ‘damn and blast’ as he slipped painfully out of the saddle. And what sweet oaths will fall from jockeys’ lips during a race when they get cut-up going for a run up the rails or when they their mount rears-up or goes down on their knees in the stalls.
What really sticks in my throat though is the constant comparison between horse and motor racing as if a Formula 1 car is a sentient being or jockeys have the safety protection as a driver. They use so much coded messages in Formula 1 that for the viewer it becomes more a game of ‘Only Connect’ than insightful involvement into a sport that is 90% high-tech and 10% perspiration. 
Our sport is both simple to understand and as complicated as you want it to be. Would it help the punter if it was known that a trainer had changed the feeding regime at his stables? Or that a jockey had gone without breakfast to do the weight on a horse whose form suggests it has no chance of winning? I would suggest the only innovation in horse racing that would wholescale benefit horse racing is around the science of finding-out cheats and the welfare of the horse. Micing-up (or mice-ing up or mincing-up) jockeys would bring little sunshiny benefit and a myriad of unnecessary grey undertones.
If we are so desperate to engage with a new audience, the young and affluent, we have to make the sport palatable for their dainty senses and that will require less whip and a higher degree of ‘My Little Pony’.
This sport has evolved from match races across open farm land and heath to the competitiveness of today; from when it was a sport for the aristocracy and the gentry to a sport for all classes; the domain of men only to a sport where both genders compete on equal terms. From starting flat race from barriers and delays lasting twenty-minutes to stalls and races starting bang on time. Horse racing continues to evolve; it has no need of youthful intervention that mimic other sports. The Racing League was innovation designed to engage with a ‘new audience’ and yet it fails on an annual basis because its concept is based on a fallacy; that the public can acquire an allegiance to a team that in reality does not exist.
The beauty of horse racing is its history, its diversity and the human interaction with the thoroughbred racehorse. The sport is called horse racing. We race horses, don’t we?