hORSERACINGMATTERS.COM - WHAT IS THE POINT?

​When a young man is madly in love with a girl who shows no sign of even knowing of his existence, or even if the unrequited passion is as ephemeral as a passing crush ignited by a pretty face on a 99 bus, the heart demands strategy, to give hope a chance to flower into something of substance. To sit still and to do nothing is vetoed by the pang of heart’s desire. The ‘unrequited suitor’ must buy bouquets out-of-keeping as a gift from a stranger, write love poems, secretly scroll the name of his ‘beloved’ on desk tops, in the margin of library books, on the palm of his hand.
This is the point of horseracingmatters; why I write thousand-word articles that drift unread, seemingly, amongst the flotsam and jetsam of the virtual reality. I write because to not write is to risk my sanity. This is my strategy, my love tokens to a sport that has held me in its thrall since I was too young to know any better.
My feelings for this sport are as sensitive as any young man’s love for a girl who is only real to him in his dreams and fantasies. Without the fillip to my soul of writing about horse racing, of my concerns and admiration for the sport and the brave and wonderful people who mastermind its day-to-day carousel of mystery and wonder, I would suffer even greater mental debilitation than my apparent uselessness as a human being affords me on a regular basis.
Horse racing is, and always has been, the great love of my life.
As much as the Grand National is my favourite ten or so minutes of the whole year, as I in anticipation wait for the tapes to go up, I will be as nervous as any parent watching their first-born take part in its first play, it’s first rugby match, it’s first solo car journey on a motorway. I am, I confess, a confirmed atheist yet at the moment of the ‘off’ I will pray to a deity I do not believe in to allow every jockey and especially every horse to come to no harm during the race, making the pledge as I do every year that I would prefer the safe return of every horse and jockey to backing the winner. It is a pledge that is true and honestly made. I would forego backing a 50/1 winner if it meant every horse returned to its home stable and every jockey to his or her own bed.
Of course where I only witness sporting and equine majesty, especially over the first line of six fences, others, people of ignorance who cannot and will not understand that the thoroughbred has no purpose in the world if it’s ability cannot be tested in the sporting arena and that injury and death, though either may be only statistics to those who oppose our sport, are in reality cutting tragedies that any one of us would sell our souls to prevent from every happening.
The Grand National, to me, is the pinnacle of the sporting year, every renewal of the race representing the only anniversary worth celebrating and I fear for the longevity of the sport if the ignorant minority should in any way emasculate and kill the spirit of the race, for in doing so the very foundations of our sport will be irreversibly undermined.
I desire wholeheartedly for my sport to thrive, for its inherent goodness to be appreciated by one and all. I want to have it respected and understood, to have it returned to the vitality of the days when the Derby was so relevant to society Parliament recessed so that Members could travel to Epsom to watch the race, when the Grand National stopped a country as it is claimed the Melbourne Cup still achieves. If I seem to criticise too often then it must be understood that the unease on the page is a mirror-image of the unease at my heart. Decisions by the B.H.A. of late, to give an example, have trampled across my heart, leaving furrows of concern and doubt on their adequacy to govern and lead our sport. If I had no outlet for my concerns, I would die deaths of despair at regular intervals. I am neither a journalist nor a writer. I write because I must. I write to be heard, and as with any writer, amateur or amateurish, I have a need to be read. Even taken to task. How else can any writer know he or she is being read if the reader is not roused to respond in indignation or praise?
Even if the B.H.A. is banging the gong on horse welfare too loudly for our own good and without any indication of exactly knowing what they are doing, the sport is finally waking up to the stark reality of the change in society, where animals are recognised as having thoughts, feelings and most importantly, rights. Finally, the horse is being placed at the vanguard of importance. One day someone will tally-up what we all owe the horse for its sacrifice and servitude down the centuries and the debt will out-score the national debt. We owe the horse everything. We owe our sport to its existence.
It doesn’t really matter what horse, jockey and trainer wins the Grand National on Saturday as long as the race itself is not tarnished.
This is why horseracingmatters.com exists. Without it my love of the sport would be still, as unhealthy as ditch water, kept unspoken and undeclared at the darker depths where despair for a love unreturned can fester. I may be a lone, quiet voice speaking from the dark of beyond but at least the chance remains that one day one of my ideas will come to fruition, perhaps even my fantastical idea of a 40-runner Lincoln started from a barrier, as in the good old days, to give the flat a race of jeopardy, will at least be debated.