syndicates, economics, college, miserliness & E.J.H.

​At a time when the sport should be collectively engaged in attracting more people to become involved in horse racing, one of the best and financially easiest ways for new people to come on board is being scuppered by the very organisation that should be leading the enterprise to recruit more owners. No doubt there is an underlying reason why the B.H.A. has brought in a regulation that requires members of a syndicate to disclose the source of their income but you would have thought someone would have noticed this would highly likely upset potential investors in the sport as the regulation looks like an in-bred brother to what punters are having to live with just to have a bet. I suggest the government is behind this latest kick-up-the-arse for the sport and the sooner the B.H.A. backtracks the better it will be for the sport.

Let us all be honest from the get-go – William Haggas was right and we should all bow-down and accept his greater wisdom and vow to never again challenge any of his decisions. Economics blitzed the opposition by all accounts in a Group 2 at Deauville yesterday and is now the latest superstar in waiting. I just hope after winning the Irish Champion Stakes and the equivalent at Newmarket the horse is not whisked off to stud.

For forty-years, the National Racing College at Doncaster has provided the sport with jockeys of the calibre of Hayley Turner and Holly Doyle, God bless them, as well hundreds and hundreds of stable-staff. Along with its sister venture at Newmarket it continues to prove itself an invaluable asset to the sport and as such it should never need for money. I have said this many times before and make no apologies for saying it again, instead of fancy race-days in support of national charities that are well-supported in all other areas of society, horse racing should have race-days dedicated to raising funds for in-house charities and irreplaceable institutions like the racing colleges. Charity begins at home.

Simon Munir has added his miserly four-pennies-worth to Ireland’s wholly laudable decision to restrict one race a week to trainers who had less than fifty-winners the season before. Sixty races a year will exclude the four top trainers in Ireland from entering a horse and boy are they moaning about it! It is easy for someone like Simon Munir to believe in the benefits of a meritocratic system when he dines off silver platters of the finest food. Yet in racing there has to be haves and have-nots, the problem being the haves would have nothing if the have-nots were not there as the sport’s very foundations. The wining of the Irish elite to the proposal of giving succour to the poor smacks similar to the French Queen suggesting the starving should eat cake if there were no bread for them to eat. Shame on everyone of them that wish to stand by and allow more and more hard-working men and women go to the wall by denying them a few crumbs of hope.

I cannot answer why as I have no association with her but I always rejoice when Eve Johnson-Houghton has a winner, especially the winner of a race that matters. I know I like her loyalty to her jockeys. Charles Bishop has risen from her 7Ib claimer to stable jockey and warrants the position, and Eve is always full of praise for Georgia Dobie and was as pleased as punch when she rode a listed winner for her on the home-bred Betty Clover this season and then kept her on the horse in a Group 2 at Ascot on King George day. I see her apprentice Mia Nichols gets her chance on the stable favourite Accidental Agent at Newbury this Saturday and though it is doubtful he can win off such a long lay-off, if he is in with a squeak at the furlong-pole I’ll be cheering him on.