ANOTHER LEADING DIES, AS I HAVE SAID MANY TIMES BEFORE, ARKLE/FRANKEL & LAZY GRIFF.

The death of Sheikh Ahmed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, brother of Sheikh Mohammed, is the loss of another important owner from the sport. He was an owner of longstanding. He won the 1987 Eclipse with Mtoto, horse of the year the following season and recently owned the world-traveller Addeybb. The Maktoun family may be one of the richest in the world and there may be sons and daughters to inherit the turf interests of their fathers, but their interest in the sport may be simply inheritary, keeping going a family concern, and it may become convenient to them to drift towards the racing jurisdictions in their own part of the world. At a time when there is more rocks in the road for our sport than a subcontinent mountain pass we need all the support we can muster and people like Sheikh Ahmed are hard to find and perhaps even harder to keep when it is realised there are greater riches to be found in other racing countries. May his soul rest in peace.

As I have said many times, there are too many Group 1 races these days. Julian Muscut, surprisingly agrees with me, as the Pattern and the erosian of its inaugural aims is the topic of his piece in today's Racing Post. Apparently there are 38 Group 1 races in Britain alone. Talk about overkill, about a lack of competitiveness. Muscat is miffed at the number of Group races where the penalty for winning a previous Group race, a condition that was intended to drive horses through the grades and not to stick in one grade winning multiple times, is increasingly being taken away in order to attract the sort of horses, if the spirit of the Pattern is not adhered to, that should be progressing up the Group ladder. I can see an argument for both sides of the debate. My beef, though, is that there are just far too many Group 1's and 2's in Britain and the whole of Europe. Group 1's, for instance, should be about the best of the best in opposition to one another. But that rarely happens as owners/trainers can cherry pick throughout the season, with travel to the farthest corners of the Earth now considered no more arduous than a lorry journey to Ayr or Hamilton. There needs to be a cull and the sooner the better, with no upgrades allowed. Upgrading the City of York was totally unneccessary. 

Mr. Evzona of Greenford, in a letter published in today's Racing Post, asks why there is no film of the life of Arkle, claiming correctly, that he remains the greatest racehorse to walk this Earth, and far more worthy of such an accolade than Frankel, soon to be a recipient of such an honour. Loathed as I am to say a single word in opposition to Arkle receiving any sort of posthumous award but he died 50+ plus years ago and virtually all the footage of him is in black and white. With the possible exception of John Lumley, Arkle's groom, everyone closely associated with the great horse must now be dead and Himself's story can only be told third-hand. Frankel remains alive, one of the great sires of the world, with the majority of the people associated with him alive to tell his story first-hand, except, of course, the great man, Sir Henry Cecil.

If anyone wishes to know all there is to know about Arkle, I recommend Pat Taaffe's autobiography 'My Life and Arkle' and Ivor Herbert's book 'Arkle'.

What is for certain is that we will never witness a horse like him in our lifetimes. Simply the greatest racehorse to set foot on a racecourse, with no horse since his death worthy to be mentioned alongside his name.

Really sad to read of the death of Lazy Griff. Obviously badly injured in a race at Chester recently, although everything was done to save him - there are two qualified vets in Charlie and Mark at Kingsley Park - his condition worsened to the point there was only one humane decision to be made. The only aspect of the passing of Lazy Griff that rankles with me, as it does when any horse suffers an injury that is made public, is that we are not told the specifics of the injury. The people who read The Racing Post are racing professionals in the main and to leave out the cause of death is to treat the racing public as if they are not sufficiently informed to understand such explanations. Silence on the cause of death could easily lead to false suspicions.