rust, the long gone & five days in march.

​I will not disparage the reputation of the current head honcho of the B.H.A., Nick Rust. Those in a better position to pass judgement on his tenure as head of British Racing (if he’s the top man what exactly is the role of Anne-Marie Phillips?) have passed favourable comments on him since he announced that he is stepping down from his post at the end of the year.
The people who speak most highly of him are the heads of racing’s varying quangos, horse racing’s stakeholders. On balance, from my point of view, he has manfully held together a crew who all think they should have possession of the charts and the sextants. It is good for all of us that the racing sphere is not flat, otherwise the sport would have tilted over the edge many moons past.
Those with qualifications about Nick Rust’s achievements are the horseman, those within the industry who must follow the B.H.A.’s rule of law, the people who perhaps know far more about the day-to-day workings of the sport, trainers, their staff and jockeys, than the whole of the B.H.A. board-members, and whose opinions are either the last to be sought or not sought altogether.
What I find disappointing with the leading candidates to replace Nick Rust, as drawn-up by the Racing Post, is that not one of them has actual hands-on experience of working with racehorses. In fact, not one member of the B.H.A. hierarchy has earned a living either as a professional rider, caring for racehorses or training them. I realise the B.H.A. is an administrative organisation, where emphasis is on the commercial side of the sport but that should not prevent someone from the horse side of the sport from being at the very least a candidate. Many of the problems the B.H.A. have brought upon themselves over the past decade would have been prevented if someone with first-hand knowledge of the workaday of the sport was at the head of the organisation. At times, frankly, some of the stuff that has come from the B.H.A. in the past few years has been nothing short of embarrassing.
On the whole I think the B.H.A. is pretty useless and I would very much like Nick Rust’s successor to radically change my opinion.
 
In today’s Racing Post there is a piece on the ‘galloping gardener’, Mick Jeffries, who returned to race-riding, aged 56, twenty or so years after his last race-ride. This brought about the idea that there must be hundreds, if not a thousand, ex jockeys and stable staff out in the wilderness, who might also be tempted back to the sport, if only in a small way, if there were the occasional race, perhaps held for charitable purposes, for such people. If say only twenty to thirty people put themselves forward for these races (who can foretell how many would be interested?) for whatever period of time it took for them to get fit, lose weight, etc, they would be invaluable extra hands for all those trainers short of staff. It is, as far as I see it, a win-win idea. I am not talking about ‘legends races’ but those like Mick Jeffries, jockeys who did not leave their mark on the sport.
 
The proposal, if that is what it is, to extend the Cheltenham Festival to five days is steadily growing in support, with both Alan King and Phillip Hobbs coming out in support. As many has said, financial considerations will almost certainly determine that it will happen sooner or later. As I have written only recently, I am in favour of the meeting becoming five days but would prefer the fifth day to be a non-Festival day, much in the way Royal Ascot used to finish with what was termed a ‘Heath Day, when Royal Ascot returned to being the less grand Ascot Heath.
This fifth day would allow Cheltenham to trial any proposed new race for the Festival’s four days and give a resting place for any race relegated from the main event. There are other benefits to my suggestion, though I’ll leave the reader to review the January archive to find out what I believe them to be.
My ‘Heath day’ suggestion is a compromise between those who want 4 and those who champion 5-days and it is also a compromise between those who champion new races and those who do not want to lose the historic old races. I live in hope of someone in the media coming on-side and at least floating the idea, if only to discover if I am not alone.