wrong horse, compromise & decline of Epsom Derby Meeting.

​As with most people, I like Charley Appleby and even though he represents the high table of horse racing, while I usually support the underdogs of the sport, I am pleased when he has a Group 1 winner. So, I was astonished to read in the Racing Post today that he was yesterday fined £750 for sending the wrong horse for a race at Southwell on March 14th. He joins a list of wrongdoers for this offence that not only includes Brien Ellison and Jessie Harrington but also, and more famously, Aidan O’Brien, though his error at Newmarket in the bad old days of government restrictions on our freedom was his representatives mixing-up two horses running in the same race and putting on them both the wrong racecard number but also the wrong jockeys.
Given the success of Charlie Appleby, you would think stable procedure would be watertight, yet somehow the wrong horse was loaded on to the horsebox. It begs the question where was the groom for that horse, the person must likely to have spotted the mistake? I realise the days when a groom would ‘do’ three-horses and would accompany those three-horses when they went to the racecourse. Perhaps these days it is more haphazard, perhaps horses no longer have dedicated grooms, with grooms randomly allotted different grooms on different days.
It does seem an offence of baffling negligence for a trainer to send the wrong horse to the races. Perhaps in March Charlie Appleby was in Dubai and in his absence, it was his staff who cocked-up and in all such manners whether he was at home or not is not an issue as the buck always stops with the trainer. If this was the case, I hope whoever ultimately was responsible for the error repaid Charlie the whole of the £750, though in general, as such mistakes can only be the result of sloppiness in the extreme, I would have thought the fine might have been double or treble the fine on this occasion. It does make you think if a trainer or his representatives can take the wrong horse to the races, what other mistakes are they capable of.
Having always considered Godolphin to be a well-run outfit, it sort of takes the gilt of the gingerbread to discover they are as human as the rest of us.

The road to hell is often paved with good intention, so it is said. Ascot have announced that the Windsor Castle will be run over 6-furlongs from next season, with the sires of runners having either won over 7-furlongs+ as a 2-year-old or over a mile+ as a 3-year-old. When this was announced I was broadly in agreement with the proposal as I believe everything that can be done to encourage the breeding for stamina, should be done. I now accept the argument of Eve Johnson Houghton (she is furious about the change) that the Windsor Castle represent one of the few opportunities at the Royal meeting for trainers like her to have the limelight of a winner. Richard Hughes has also chimed-in to accuse Royal Ascot of basically siding with the leviathans of the sport and allowing them the advantage in yet another Royal Ascot race.
My compromise in all of this would be keep the sire restrictions and 6-furlongs but add a stipulation that no runner should either have cost more than 50,000 guineas at auction or if home-bred must be sired by a stallion standing at no more than £2,500. Or something along those lines.

Scott Burton bemoans in the Tuesday Column of the Racing Post the decline of the Epsom Derby meeting. He makes several ideas that warrant consideration, though as with everyone else he gives no credence to going back to the traditional Derby date of the first Wednesday in June.
The first Wednesday in June was always my primary proposal, if only as an experiment, given the decline of the Derby meeting began with the switch to a Saturday. I am sure over the next few years we are going to see a different sort of Derby meeting and the sooner Jim Allen presents his image of Derby Meetings to come, the more dynamic the discussion on this topic will become.
I remain wedded to the proposal of a Triple Crown series involving the 2,000 Guineas, Derby and Eclipse (restricted to 3-year-olds) with a month between each race, April, May, June, with the race programme altered to accommodate such an arrangement, including moving Royal Ascot into the month of July, first week, perhaps.
How will this arrest declining attendance at Epsom? It probably would not. The solution to that dilemma will be determined by the inventions Jim Allen can put into place as the solution to the Jockey Club’s problem child lies outside of the racing surface. It must become an event worthy of the word ‘carnival’ being attached to the meeting, resembling Royal Ascot but clothed in smart casual.