the buck should stop somewhere.

​I think it was President of the United States Dwight Eisenhower who had a sign on his presidential desk that told everyone who visited him that the buck stopped with him. I very much doubt if anyone who works at British Horse Racing’s high table can make a similar claim.
In today’s Racing Post, Lee Mottershead makes a valiant attempt to explain how British horse racing is run. I am sure some of his readers, those of a higher I.Q. thanI possess, will now be better informed on the complexity of the working structure of the B.H.A.. Not so me, I’m afraid. In fact, that the editor of the Racing Post should think there was a need to commission one of his lead writers to write such an article tells you all you need to know about the B.H.A. and why it can appear so out-of-touch and without a working understanding of the sport it is supposed to govern.
The evidence Lee Mottershead provides illustrates, at least to my way of thinking, that the buck does not stop with one person or department but is passed around until someone is deemed to be ‘it’ and has to deal with whatever situation or crisis the buck represents.
I freely admit that I am an ignoramus when it comes to anything that comes remotely close to ‘big business’ and I accept that horse racing will not thrive in the commercial world in which it must compete without a strong shell of financial competence. But when you have an organisation where no one, seemingly, is the ‘top man’ (or woman), no one with the authority to take a decision without it ‘going upstairs to be voted on by the board’, it is a recipe for delay, indecision and a horse that looks like a camel because it was designed by a committee of the blind since birth.
I would suggest anyone wishing to get a grip on how the B.H.A. operates should go look up Lee Mottershead’s article as I am incapable of giving the matter the clarity it deserves. But when you read such statements as ‘The racecourses and horseman fell out almost immediately and have continued to do so every since’. And: ‘Under the tripartite system the B.H.A. does not, and indeed cannot, run racing overall’, you get a real sense that the B.H.A. is not truly fit for purpose. In fact, at times, as with the equine flu outbreak last season, it seems rather shambolic, taking ideas from anywhere it can find them and then taking an entrenched position even when the ideas they pursue are clearly inadequate or plainly wrong.
When someone as esteemed as Willie Mullins praises the new B.H.A. chair, Annamarie Phelps, she must be showing great potential. I have no view otherwise. My problem with the B.H.A. is that people get parachuted into well-paid executive positions where they have authority over an industry unlike any other without having worked a day within that industry in their working lives. Outside opinions should be sought by those with in-depth knowledge of an industry that has been their life’s work. Yet at the B.H.A. the shoe, in the majority, is on the other foot.
I fully accept that a former champion jockey or trainer or even owner might have little idea on how to secure funding for the sport and be worse than useless at glad-handing people of influence who might fight on the sport’s side in parliamentary debates and in the wider world. But what they possess that no outsider can ever learn is a detailed intimacy with all practical aspects of the sport. In my vision of a governing body for horse racing, people of the calibre of Annamarie Phelps would be employed by a board consisting of genuine racing people; she would not be the head honcho but the expert hired hand, using her expertise to supplement the equine and sporting knowledge of the board.
The B.H.A. have dropped so many clangers over the past few years that I shall no doubt find sleep impossible tonight worrying what Annamarie’s Phelp’s 5-year strategic welfare plan will contain. Though in general the vetting of all runners at Cheltenham and Aintree last season received virtually no criticism as everyone in the sport seemed to determined to ‘toe the line’, I thought it an insult to the training profession, as if Mullins, Henderson, Elliott and so on would knowingly bring a lame or ailing horse to the races. I just hope and prayer the exercise is not repeated this year.
So in conclusion: Lee Mottershead has confirmed my doubtless blinkered opinion that the structure of the B.H.A. is unwieldy, laced-together with far too many people with little or no direct working knowledge of the many hands-on elements that comprise our sport, especially very little awareness of the flesh and blood of the horse, and with no one who with the in a presidential-type capacity to remind everyone that the buck stops with him or her.
On occasion, particularly when that idiot B.H.A. spokesman suggested ‘horses should run of their own free-will’, and you should never wave your arms behind a horse in case it is deemed cruelty by a member of the ignorant public, I dream of staging a coup d’état, rather like what happened in Moscow all those years ago. Except that in my ideology no blood will be spilt and no Royal personage would be harmed.