the journeyman jockey.

​This Covid-19 interlude, which I remain convinced is 9/11 on a global scale, is doing no one any good, the country, especially. The Horse Racing community is but a small minority amongst the 67-million who live in Great Britain. (As of today, just over 30,000 people are officially registered as contracting the Covid-19 flu virus out of a population 67-million – the percentage is miniscule, with the death rate a country mile away from the highest ever number of flu-related deaths in England which stands at just short of 29,000. The long-standing average for England is 17,000. And for this we have curtailed liberty and limited free-speech!) And it would be wrong to highlight the discomforts and financial crisis that is being played out amongst those jockeys whose everyday lives is one of a hand-to-mouth existence.
Jockeys are people, too. They may be sportsman who perform and display their skill and courage in front of huge crowds, the elite amongst them hailed as heroes, the highest of the elite wealthy and able to ride out this political and health storm. But they, too, have mortgages to pay, children to feed, etc. The backbone of this sport are not the heroes of Cheltenham but the men and women who have become to be known as ‘journeyman jockeys’, the jockey who is up before the crack of dawn to ride out for a trainer who may or may not be able to give him or her the odd ride and who then drives, perhaps hundreds of miles, to a far-flung racecourse for one ride in a seller or 100/1 outsider before travelling the long road home with virtually no profit for their 12-to-18 hour day’s toil.
These men and woman barely scrape a living and any compensation they receive from the government’s scheme for the self-employed will reflect their paltry annual income. And, though, yes, if the current band of journeyman fail to survive the Covid-19 interlude, there will be others waiting in the wings to follow their path, everyone in hope luck will shine on them and they will have a career where they become the next Barry Geraghty or Nico de Boinville. But to hold that view is to miss the point. These men and women give their lives, willingly and voluntarily, I agree, to the sport. They are racing’s equivalent, in some ways, to the bit-part actors and extras that allow films and t.v. soaps to seem real to life. If you removed the actors whose names you do not know from feature films and the likes of Midsummer Murder you will have great holes in scenes, the already scarcely believable plots rendered laughable and devoid of reality.
We, and by ‘we’ I am referring to the B.H.A., have a duty of care to these people. In times of hardship ‘we’ need to give something back. Not charity or handouts. But opportunity. I suspect the B.H.A. have no plans to offer succour to the journeyman, keen just to get racing back on, to return to the status que, to move heaven and earth to stage the Derby and Royal Ascot somehow, at any convenient date in the calendar. You can be sure the B.H.A. will look after those at the top long before they give consideration to those lower down the pecking order.
I have always ‘given out’ my views on the appalling way the racing calendar treats the less fortunate amongst our jockeys. There are races aplenty for apprentices and conditional jockeys, amateur rides (flat and jumps), lady riders, point-to-point riders, celebrity riders and charity races but absolutely zilch restricted to the journeyman, the rider who, for example, rides less than 20-winners in a season. I have made the case many times in the past, on this site and before that in letters to the Racing Post and Sporting Life, to no effect. One reader of the Racing Post (it might even have been the Sporting Life, now I think about it) commented that to support the lesser riders is to support the unskilful, the substandard. I have always argued that it would cost the sport not one bean if there were to be a race a day or a handful of races per week restricted to the journeyman jockey. I am not talking about a series of races with a valuable final but just ordinary workaday races, lower banded handicaps and sellers.
When racing resumes, when a kind of normality returns to our lives, the sport must give consideration to those worst effected by this intolerable embezzlement of our freedom to go about our lives as we please. To help the journeyman jockey retrieve some of his or her lost income, there should be one race a day for the rest of the season, both flat and N.H., restricted to the journeyman jockey.
Sadly, I have no faith in the B.H.A. to take a compassionate view on this matter, and even more sadly, I doubt if the Jockeys Association will lobby the B.H.A. to have the matter at least debated.