the starting machine.

​We take so much for granted in life, don’t we? Double glazing is a great necessity of our modern lives but do we appreciate the draft-free benefits those two panes of glass bring us? The toilet, too, we take for granted. It might seem a grand adventure to travel back in time, to visit King Henry the 8th or to be in the stands when Golden Miller won the Grand National, though I expect the lasting impression if the return journey were possible would be the sanitary (or unsanitary) arrangements of one’s do-do’s.
Taking stuff for granted was brought home to me by an extract I read over the weekend from the July 8th 1896 edition of the ‘Racing Illustrated’, a newspaper of sorts that I wish were still around today, if only to take away the Racing Post’s monopoly and to drive down its cover price. The previous year a new-fangled device was exhibited in the paddock at Sandown Park that its inventor suggested ensured an end to ragged starts. It was referred to as a ‘starting machine’.
We think today of a machine as something with an engine or motor, though back in 1896 a machine was any mechanical apparatus by which motive power was applied or any mechanism, simple or compound, for applying direct force. An elastic band could be considered the mechanical power behind the firing of a spit-ball, for instance. In the case of the ‘starting machine’ the force applied was for the flipping up and away of the spring-loaded single strand of wire that horses were required to stand behind at the commencement of a race.
The look of the starting machine at Sandown frightened owners and trainers alike. It was not of British origin, which obviously got their backs up from the get-go. It was also from, of all places, Australia! Experts thought it ungainly and too fearsome looking for the sensitive souls of two-year-olds. Most of the criticism was of the ‘shock of the new’ kind, though some quoted tales heard from on-the-spot observers in Australia that there were often long delays at the starting post and that the starting machine used at Flemington did not always give satisfaction.
Anyway, as the more enlightened commented, it would take a change to the rules of racing before the starting machine could replace the tried and tested method for starting races that was the starter and his flag, an invention of Admiral Rous no less.
Australia adopted Alexander Gray’s starting machine in 1894, with the first race at Canterbury Park, New South Wales, in February, of the same year. In the 1920’s the single strand was upgraded to a five-strand tape. Of course, in Natural Hunt racing the single strand is still in use, though with races starting so far back from the starter nowadays it can only be a matter of time before it will be replaced by a chalk line, which alongside the flag was part of Admiral Rous’s radical starting procedure back in 1896.
It was an American ex-jockey called Clay Puett who thought the starting gate could be improved upon and in 1939 at Exhibition Park, Vancouver, the first race was started by an electronic starting gate. It was so successful and so impressed the Jockey Club that in 1967 they decreed British racing should also adopt the electronic starting gate, with the first race of the bright new modern age at Newmarket, 8th July.
We take starting gates, and the excellent work of the loading crew, for granted as we have nothing to compare them to, apart from a race at Glorious Goodwood every year that is started behind a single strand tape. There was jeopardy to every race before the introduction of starting gates, with many races lost at the start and many races won by jockeys getting a flying start. Gordon Richards, in particular, was a great exponent of the flying start.
It is why, alone and without anyone coming out in agreement with the idea, I propose the Lincoln Handicap should revert to the old days and become a 40-runner (there were 57 runners one year) race started from a barrier. What the start of the flat lacks is oomph, a Lincoln as I propose it would give the flat a race of jeopardy, an equivalent, in some respects, to National Hunt’s Grand National. Certainly, anyone who loses their money at the start when their horse whips around as the tapes go up or whose jockey falls off in the general excitement of the cavalry charge will never again take the fairness and convenience of starting stalls in vain again.