more criticism of the british horse-racing authority.

​You quite often learn of someone who has risen to become chairman of a big, sometimes global, company after starting out on the bottom rung of the ladder, on the shop-floor or as the office gopher. Someone who has experienced a company at every level before becoming the head man or woman can bring a different perspective to decision making than the person head-hunted from a rival company, someone whose life and work experience is limited to university and boardroom. It is not the same within racing, of course, with the B.H.A. an exclusive club with little or no member with hands-on experience of the industry the authority governs.
A teenager starting on the ground-floor of the racing industry, as a stable-hand or groom as they are now referred to, can expect with hard-work and good fortune to rise in rank to travelling head-groom or even head-groom. A few will become assistant trainers, while an even more fortunate few might become trainers in their own right. The really talented, of course, if it is their aim in life, will become successful or unsuccessful jockeys. That, though, is as far as the jobs-ladder in the racing industry will take them.
I lie, of course, to a degree. If their face fits and they have achieved a certain level of achievement as jockeys’, positions at racecourses can be open to people, Clerks of the Courses, stipendiary stewards, starters, that sort of thing.
The path to the higher echelons of the industry are, though, firmly closed. To reach the heady heights of head honcho of racing what is required is not hands-on experience of the horse and the sport but knowing the people who can lever you into the position of ultimate power. Rather like the qualifications for being an Archbishop does not on paper require a belief in God, to become head of the British Racing Authority all that is required is a passing interest in the sport. Soon, though, I suspect, a firm requirement will be an Australian passport.
Until John Francome kicked up a fuss about it, stewards used to refer to jockeys by their surname, as if in their minds they were addressing servants. In turn Francome referred to stewards as ‘Cabbage-Patch Dolls’. Mr.Francome won the argument. Unfortunately, we seem to be regressing to those long-ago days of The Jockey Club when that exclusive institution were racing’s overlords. Reading what Ruby Walsh thought of the tone used by the stewards and the starter at The Festival at the jockeys’ briefings, ‘as if they were talking to children’, very soon Ruby can expect to be summoned by his surname when the stewards want a word with him.
There is, it seems, a culture of ‘them and us’ developing between authority and the working-class majority which is symptomatic of a governing body that has lost the plot and have adopted the defensive attitude of ‘it’s my ball and I can do what I like’.
I always regret when someone in racing with vast experience of the sport is allowed to retire without anyone in authority thinking it might benefit the sport if his or her experience was put to good use as an advisor or even in some sort of executive board member capacity. Henrietta Knight, for instance. A woman of great experience of horses, racing, other equine activities, jockeys, trainers, owners, and connected to an influential racing family, yet when she retired no one seemed to think she might remain as asset to the sport, if only in an advisory role.
Of course, the sport must be financially administered by people with the experience in such matters but there should be avenues for real racing people that might lead to their experience being relied upon at board level. The cock-ups that have come from B.H.A. board members over the past twelve months, even if driven by a sincere desire to protect the sport from the ignorant minority at Westminster and beyond, would not have happened if people with hands-on racing experience were in position to make the right calls at the right time. I cannot imagine Henrietta Knight suggesting that arm-waving represents cruel coercion or that ‘horses should race of their own free-will’, or horses should only race with four shoes or that Declan Lavery was guilty of inappropriate riding.
It should be remembered that this is a flesh and blood industry. On a day-to-day basis, good, honest, dedicated professionals, work alongside and strive to do all they can to work in harmony with what is probably the most handsome animal on the planet. Neither Nick Rust nor anyone whose whole working life has involved wearing crisp suits and a collar and tie can make rules and regulation to improve the sport and its reputation without having a working knowledge of the day-to-lives of the horse and the people who dedicate their lives to its care and fitness. At the very least the B.H.A. should have people of the calibre of Henrietta Knight in advisory positions and there should be a procedure that before any procedure or rule change is adopted it should be discussed, perhaps debated, with the people it most concerns.