No becher, jonbon, gambling decline & DAVY RUSSELL.

​Storm Darragh battered Aintree into submission yesterday, resulting in the abandonment of the Becher Chase meeting. In years past, having the Becher Chase taken from me would put a dark marker over the day, but on this occasion ‘was I bothered’? No. Before the Grand Sefton was moved forward in the season, the Becher used to be our first look at the Aintree fences since the previous season’s Grand National and it was the race I most looked forward to before Christmas. It was a race to spot a potential ‘National horse’; one to follow through the season and to back for the big race. Not anymore, sadly. Chianti Classico would have been of interest yesterday, though I was concerned a slog through heavy ground might take the edge off him for the rest of the season. Kim Bailey deserves another big race success before he had hands the reins to his loyal second-in-command Mat Nicholls, and in Chianti Classico he has such an opportunity. But with the neutering of the fences on the National course and the want of the Aintree executive to have ‘Gold Cup’ type horses running in their ‘Little National’, rather than true ‘National types’, the Becher Chase has been rendered irrelevant, and with small double-digit numbers each renewal, it has also lost its competitiveness. So, no, I was not bothered it was abandoned and hope it is not shoe-horned into its next meeting.

Jonbon is good. How anyone can knock a horse that has won 16 out of 19 is beyond me, with one of those defeats coming over hurdles to his lauded stable-mate Constitution Hill and the other when the excellent James Bowen could not get the hang of him at Cheltenham last year when Nico was injured. Though whether Jonbon can be mentioned in the same sentence as Sprinter Sacre and Altior, at least as how things stand at present, I am not so sure. The aforementioned pair both won Champion Chases and Jonbon must do the same this season to work his way up to the heights of Sprinter Sacre, Altior and I would suggest Remittance Man, who also won Champion Chases. And, of course, there were two Sprinter Sacres; the one Barry Geraghty had the pleasure of riding, the one who I believe was the best chaser since Arkle, and the one Nico had the pleasure of riding, the one who illness laid low for two-years and yet rose from the near-dead to win a very competitive second Champion Chase, my favourite race from any Cheltenham Festival. In Jonbon’s favour for legendary status is that if he were to add the Champion Chase to his already impressive c.v., he will most likely have to beat a better cluster of horses than either of Nicky Henderson’s more illustrious former champions needed to defeat. Personally, I believe this is going to be Jonbon’s year.

With Aintree’s abandonment, I.T.V. had a discussion with Nevin Truesdale about the Gambling Commission and all the vital nonsense it is involved in. This subject is out of the scope of my natural orbit but I will tell you something, the elephant in the room, if you like, that goes unmentioned by any of the great minds who talk and write about the Gambling Commission and the pressure on punters to provide financially sensitive and private documents in order to bet small or large.
In the same way farmers, especially the smaller farmers who produce meat, are being kettled into a position of unviability, the mandate of the W.E.F.’s ‘Great Reset’ involves removing all activities from the countryside as its long-term plan is to return farmland to the wild. Hence, long-term there will be no place for racecourses and what is behind, not so much the dictates of the Gambling Commission as they are simply conduits for plans that come from way above its pay-grade, the government’s prompting, is to undermine betting and gambling so that people move away from it organically so that horse racing becomes financially unviable and what it is seen as a natural extinction.

Davy Russell has a book out, just in time for Christmas. It is an autobiography, though as it is ghost-written by Donn Maclean, it is to my eyes half autobiography and half biography. Also, in today’s Racing Post, Davy does not sell it very well as he admits to not wanting ‘to annoy anyone’ and has left out what insiders of the publishing game would call ‘mud on the page’, the stuff that sticks in the minds of readers. A man who never shied away from controversy and doing things his way, now shy of telling his adoring fans the tit-bits they might long to know about.
Anyway, if that was Davy’s decision and not Maclean’s we will have to live with it as Donn Maclean will have to if he fought to get Davy Russell to spill beans and muddy some of the pages.
Will I buy the book. Obviously. It will be this year’s Christmas present to myself. I have Francome’s book, and Ruby’s, and A.P.’s, and Dunwoody and Scudamore’s book, and Geraghty’s – Francome’s and Ruby’s are treasures, by the way, and not to have Davy’s would be as stupid as owning five volumes of a medical encyclopaedia A through to T and refusing to buy the volume through to Z.