two great men of the sport.

​In the Question & Answer column of last Sunday’s (October 11th) Racing Post, John Francome supplied the following answer to ‘How would you go about improving racing’s finances’. “The levy has turned out to be a curse. It’s the equivalent of an allowance for a rich child. It makes you lazy and unambitious. When you know the money is coming in at the end of the month it takes all your drive and ambition away. Racing needs to be out there with its own bookmaking platform earning its own money. I have said it a million times. Racing has the only licence to bake bread but doesn’t have a single baker’s shop. Lazy or what? The best thing this government could do is stop the levy altogether. That way racing would have to get off its fat ass and start making its own money.”
John Francome would be the last to acknowledge his worth, but it is my opinion he is the most listenable person in or around the fringes, as he sadly now appears to be, of the sport. If the Racing Post were to give it some thought they might ask Francome to write a weekly column. His honesty and wit would give the paper a pep it hasn’t had since Alastair Down took semi-retirement, and in saying that I am not one jot being critical of its present staff of columnists all of whom are excellent. But let’s be fair-minded about it; there is only one John Francome. As there is only one Alastair Down.
Go through that quote bit by bit. With more humour than rancour he goes to the very nub of racing’s direst problem. How to fund the sport so that it can compete with France, Hong Kong and virtually every other major racing country. I know, less eloquently I have put forward the same solution but to re-quote the great man “Racing has the only licence to bake bread but doesn’t have a single baker’s shop” he runs a cart and horses through every other solution to the financial dilemma that anyone else has ever suggested. It is ‘our sport’ yet we allow what is now, though in the past bookmakers were independent and in some cases family businesses, global gambling organisations to cream-off a huge slice of revenue from ‘our’ endeavours. It is utter madness.
To the question ‘Who would you love to be for a day?’ he said the prime minister. God, I wish he were in the seat of power. If only Joker Johnson was as incorruptible as John Francome would be, we would all be in a better place right now.
Before I get completely off this subject, I just want to commend the Racing Post for the Sunday editions of the paper. I just wish I had more time to devote to it. Chores, you know, chores. And ladies playing football to a skill level that improves year on year.

We take Paul Nicholls for granted. Eight-winners over the two-days of the Chepstow meeting is just like the good old days for the Master of Ditcheat, not that his halcyon days are too far in the past. Even his so-so seasons would be deemed highly acceptable by the majority of his competitors. I admit his only winner I witnessed was the fabulous looking McFabulous and anyone who wasn’t impressed needs to go a course of wow pills. In what is at present, and going on last season’s 3-mile hurdlers, a weak division, I would have no hesitation in nominating McFabulous as the most likely winner of the uncreatively titled Stayers Hurdle at Cheltenham. You would think the Champion 3-mile Hurdle would have been chosen above the Stayers, wouldn’t you?
But as someone recently said, it’s no big thing to train horses to win races – just feed ‘em well, get ‘em fit and chose the right races. If only the job were that easy. Take Present Man, for instance. I didn’t think we would see him on a racecourse again. His form had tailed-off to the point where he only finished his races infrequently. Pulled-up on his only appearance last season. Yet there he was last week, partnered by his old pal Bryony Frost, winning a competitive veterans race in a head-bob finished, winning by a nose and a nose after being headed between the last two fences. That is where the division is between the good trainer and the brilliant, when they are able to rekindle dying flames, to know instinctively there is a problem with a horse and to sort out the problem and then to get the horse 100% fit to win first time out.
What he achieved with Denman after his heart problems was the stuff of genius. He perhaps wasn’t the horse he was when he won the Gold Cup but he did win a second Hennessey after his heart problems, putting up one of the weight-carrying performances in the history of the race. It’s what Paul Nicholls does and very few could even dream of achieving.