NOT OFF. I HOPE NOT.

​In ‘Sods I Have Cut On The Turf’, Jack Leach’s cleverly titled memoir of his career as a jockey, there is chapter titled Crooked Racing. I approached this chapter with the same mindset as I do when reading anything that might bring the sport into disrepute. I was cautious, fearful of what I might learn. Leach rode in the time of Gordon Richards, a time when security and the integrity of the sport was in its formative years, when perhaps in certain sectors it didn’t exist at all.
In reality it is but a short chapter, with little or no mud spread across the reputation of racing. He told of a ringer at Stockton where a two-year-old once trained by his farmer and who was known to be moderate won a good class two-year-old race by three lengths that turned out to be a four-year-old good enough to have run third in a valuable handicap at Newmarket. The perpetrator was caught and jailed and who claimed later to be a serial ringer of horses. But other that story, and one must remember the book was published in 1961, when the Jockey Club ruled with a rod of iron and it paid as a licensed trainer, as he was at the time, to tow the line, his narrative was one of debunking stories of crooked racing.
He did, though, focus for a paragraph or two on Bend Or, winner of the 1880 Epsom Derby. This was not a case of skulduggery but one of possible misidentification as it was claimed afterwards that Bend Or and another horse bred by the Duke of Westminster, Tadcaster, were ‘mixed-up’ when they were transferred from the breeder’s stud to Newmarket. The owners of the runner-up in the Derby, Robert The Devil’, formally lodged an objection with the Jockey Club and after lengthy deliberations Bend Or was allowed to keep the race. A few years later, it is said, one of the stewards who looked into the matter, James Lowther, came across information that suggested Bend Or and Tadcaster were misidentified at Newmarket, though by then there was little appetite to reconvene the inquiry.
I am sure similar ‘mix-ups’ must have occurred many times when racehorses were regularly shipped between stud and stable when the only means of transport were goods trains arriving at their destination late at night. Human error, though, is not the same thing as corruption, as it is when a jockey mistimes his run and, as was the case with Fred Archer in 1883, his horse finishes third to a horse trained by his brother. To some it was suspicious, though as Leach wrote, some horses do not come down the hill at Epsom as well as others and the form can easily be reversed when it comes to races later in the season at places like Ascot or Newmarket.
More than wanting horse racing to be clean and straight, I need it for the sake of my conscience. I do not need every horse to be ridden as if lives would be lost if it were to be beaten and I must have horses ridden with compassion and a care for their well-being. I believe whips should never be drawn in two-year-old races and horses allowed to enjoy their first experience of the racecourse without jockeys being summoned to explain themselves. And I am appalled when jockeys are hauled over the coals by the media and stewards for making human errors and are berated by punters who believe themselves robbed when in truth they have only suffered misfortune.
I take it on trust that every jockey is as honest and reputable as A.P.McCoy and Ruby Walsh. I want our sport to be squeaky-clean and for everyone involved in the sport to take a pledge of responsibility and to report to the authorities anyone they believe to be intent on crooked behaviour, of bringing the sport into disrepute.
But I am inherently naïve. I also admit to being a bit of a hypocrite as I enjoy the stories of times past when a horse was pulled all season in order to land a massive coup in the Cambridgeshire or November Handicaps.
Is horse racing as straight and clean as I want it to be? Jack Leach’s message from racing’s historic past suggests, at least in this country, that it is.