over the years ...

​I will be 71 come the middle of April. How this has happened is beyond me as I was always confident that I would be dead long before I got old. But there it is. It is what it is. No going back now. The seventies were nice, though. Remember 1973?
I cannot say I regret nothing; I would do it all again. Because I regret nearly everything and wish I could do it all again, though better, obviously.
Horse racing has kept me sane and the only reason I am now still breathing is because of my fascination with the sport. I have had a few successes in my time, though not one of them has led to monetary gain or even a pat on the back. But you do not miss what you have never had. Except you do. I miss not being a millionaire, for instance.
Through letters published in first the Sporting Life, then the Racing Post and latterly through this website, I have advocated ideas that might improve the sport in one way or another. Most of my proposals have been ignored, with few to encourage replies from those who disagree with me or who support the brilliance of my mindset. Yet I plough on, relentless in my need to be heard.
Before Christmas I proposed in a letter in the letters column of the Racing Post that breeders should be liable in part for the aftercare of racehorses. Breeders breed to make money and yet once their foals, yearlings or store horses go through the ring and into the care of others, they play no further part in the future of the horses they, and they alone, bring into the world. I suggested a levy on the sale of all horses sold at auction and a month or so later three of our top auction houses brought in a scheme where both sellers and buyers give £6 towards the aftercare of racehorses. That is £12 per horse sold in a calendar year. When this was announced, unsurprisingly, I was not mentioned as the progenitor of the idea, yet I am proud to have made this small contribution to the care of horses.
When summer jumping came in, a stipulation was that no meeting should take place on ground worse than good-to-firm. I applauded the stipulation yet pointed out that for the rest of the year jump racing could take place on ground as hard as a road. Within a few weeks hard ground was banned, with good-to-firm the firmest ground allowed.
I am not always successful with my ideas. Some are too radical, I realise, if well-intended. I still advocate that the flat should start with a bang and not the whimper that has become tradition. Back in the heyday of the sport, the Lincoln Handicap was as big an event as the Grand National, with the Spring Double a bet to dream and scheme about throughout the winter. The Lincoln these days is just a handicap and I thought to dress it up into something akin to the Aintree National. My proposal was a 40-runner race, started from a barrier, as in the good old days. As with the National, the Lincoln would then reflect the way racing used to be, with the jeopardy of the start becoming the equivalent of Bechers Brook and the Canal Turn, the large number of runners reflecting the Chair or the first big open ditch.
I would like to see all-weather racing separated from the flat, with all-weather races not included in the flat jockeys’ championships, with the all-weather titles based on January through to December. I hate the present system of determining the champion flat jockey and would beg on bended knee to go back to the days when the championship started with the first flat race of the season and ended with the last race of the season, so that dogged determination would be considered equal to the privilege of having the best horses to choose from, trained by the top trainers.
For a time before even the divine Hayley Turner, I advocated races confined to females in an attempt at sexual equality. Organically this is now coming to pass, though I still advocate the British racing calendar should include the richest race in the world confined to professional female jockeys as this would catch the eye of the non-sporting media and sections of the public.
I also put the case for restricted rider races as I believe everyone involved in the sport deserves to be given a sporting chance of making a living at the sport. It was also an integrity matter as a jockey with a healthy lifestyle and healthy living standard is less likely to be corrupted than a jockey with outstanding debts. We now have weeks of restricted rider meetings, though it has taken a long time to get to this point.
My present radical idea, though I have yet to put into a letter to the Racing Post, is to embrace point-to-pointing as a sort of ‘conference league of jumping’, with every owner/trainer considered a permit-holder and allowed to go from one side of the sport to the other, with licenced trainers allowed to run horses in point-to-points. Both sides of the sport are languishing at the moment and if one can help the other, surely that can only be good for the sport.
To my mind, every idea, whether whacky or financially unachievable, should be debated as perhaps a grain of the original idea that might lead to revelation. To achieve healthy debate within the industry, though, first we must rid the sport of the B.H.A. and its chairs and C.E.O.’s with only a limited knowledge of the sport and replace it with an organisation led by someone with decades of hands-on experience within the sport and administered by people from within the sport.