this weekend's racing.

​Just a thought: why couldn’t the big two-year-old race due to be run at Doncaster on Saturday, the last Group I of the season in this country, a race that incidentally has no name but only lives and breathes as a marketing tool for sponsors, be kept over a few weeks (November 9th to be precise) so that it could be run at Doncaster, its true home, as an addition to the November Handicap? They were prepared to run the race on Saturday on very heavy ground and one can only expect the ground to be no worse if not a good deal better come the last day of the season.
Also, when six fences are omitted from a 2-mile 4-furlong steeplechase, completely altering the very nature of the contest, is there not grounds for abandoning the race altogether? Health and Safety matters should never be underestimated, yet, as Paul Nicholls inferred, fences were not regularly omitted in his day and at present by-passing fences is becoming something of a fashion. Is the sun hanging lower in the sky in our modern time than in days gone by? It seems so. I dare say the B.H.A. have already sat around a table and discussed the predicament, though I think some kind of blue-sky thinking needs to be brought to bare on the subject as it is bordering on the farcical to cut six fences from a twelve-fence race. On Saturday, I would suspect, the crowd at Aintree was swelled by the exciting prospect of witnessing one of the great jumpers of a steeplechase fence perform, only to be denied on Health and Safety grounds. If you book to be entertained by Basil Brush and find on arrival a limp and inert fox on the stage you would be in your rights to have your money returned. Frodon will be debating the issue with his equine colleagues for days to come, I suggest.
On Sunday Mrs. Skelton rode three winners at Wincanton, while Mr. Skelton drew a blank up at Aintree. Bridget Andrews, as she is better known, has always been what could be described as ‘a good little rider’, a fact she underscored with her hat-trick of winners, yet it was not fully heralded by, in my opinion, by the Racing Post. Female jockeys do not ordinarily ride three winners at a single meeting, especially in National Hunt. Not even Rachael Blackmore has achieved the hat-trick on many occasions and Bryony Frost, I believe, not at all. Of course, and as it should be, Bridget Andrews is just a jockey, the same as any other jockey and no doubt wishes to be treated no-better and no-worse than her make counterparts. I just thought the achievement worthy of greater recognition, though as the Post these days tries to squeeze an entire day’s worth of racecourse reports on to one page, she was lucky to have the coverage she did.
To finish: in today’s Racing Post, writing as a guest columnist, the trainer Richard Phillips puts forward the idea of a National Racehorse Day. This is a brilliant suggestion and one the B.H.A. (if they were doing their job, which they are not) should have come up with years ago. I put forward a similar idea a couple months ago, though I was more concerned with raising funds for equine charities, especially the rehabilitation charities. Richard Phillips suggests a day without racing (that won’t go down well with both bookmakers and racecourses) when yards up and down the country open their doors to the public.
We need to demonstrate to the public how well racehorses are cared-for, to open up the behind-the-scenes racing world, where the racehorse is king. And rather than keeping the media at bay, they should be invited to be part of the day, to make it clear to them that our sport is not solely a plaything for the rich but that it is very much a working-class sport that employs directly and indirectly many thousands of people. It is to be seen whether the B.H.A. will support and finance this idea. I do not hold my breath. But with the welfare issues in Australian racing, we need to be on the front foot so we are not tarnished with the same brush.