In today's Friday column of The Racing Post, Vaughan Lewis, a strategic adviser in the gambling and gaming industry - some jobs look made-up, don't they - offers his views on the problem of goverance in the racing industry. He is not the first person, perhaps more like the thousandth, to suggest a need for a single pair of hands at the controls of the sport, one person who ultimately signs off on every decision that affects every member of the racing family. I would go as far to say his summation of the tanglements within the stakeholder system is the most easily read and understood that I have seen in The Racing Post to date. I would suggest that Simon Cox interviews Vaughan Lewis for a position on his independent board of unalike yet likeable racing enthusiasts. I will not quote any of his proposals as they are his, not mine, and I recommend that readers search out his article to read for themselves.
His proposals are aspirational, I should add, proposals, though, that in an industry of self, self, self, are unlikely to be supported by half of the present 'stakeholders', with Arc being no doubt the ringleader for the status quo.
There will be no racing at Ludlow this season due to the poor condition of the racing surface. This is a severe blow to the racecourse and the local suppliers that I should imagine rely on the racecourse for putting butter on their bread, so to speak. Hard times made harder through no one's fault but God or the subcontractor gods he uses to water the planet. It is all very well the clerk of the course citing mitigating factors like the course laying on top of gravel, making it almost impossible for the racing surface to hold moisture, yet I would contend they knew all of this back in the summer and instead of irrigating in order to preserve the grass, they trusted to luck, trusted to the prayer that it had to rain some time, even though the gospelists within the climate change industry were making noise that this is how it is going to be forever and forever. Perhaps Mr. Sherwood is a climate sceptic, as I am.
What I do not understand is why, when one of the cries is that there is too much racing, the cause of a lack of competition on a daily basis, why the B.H.A. have transferred Ludlow's fixtures to other courses.
Just to make clear, I am not stupid, well, not entirely, I am aware weather patterns are changing, though for what reason is open to debate (not that it is debated, which is suspicious in itself) and I am not suggesting that Ludlow should have sprinkled enough water on the course to provide good-to-firm ground. I am just making the point that they should have ensured the grass kept growing. I bet the putting greens on the golf course inside the racecourse remained green. Grass is the livelihood of all racecourses; it should be cared-for 12-months of the year, no matter what the weather.
Why does Cheltenham receive so much grief these days. Back in the day when Cheltenham was regularly waterlogged it remained the holy grail of the sport, and even if the ground was on the firm side of good for the Festival, it remained the only place anyone wanted to be. So, the ground did not suit every horse at the Festival last season, or to be precise, not every trainer or owner, and perhaps John Pullen could have put an extra few gallons of water on the course, but the ground conditions were raceable for most of the Mullins team and there was no talk of the ground after Lossiemouth won the Champion Hurdle or Gaelic Warrior after the Gold Cup. As I said last season, good ground has become the new good-to-firm. Go back to twenty-years or so and trainers would say good ground would not hurt any horse. Now trainers seem to want good ground for some of their horses and soft for others on the same day at the same meeting. As Paul Kiely said of Jonbon in his column today, we should appreciate him while we still have him. It is the same with Cheltenham, if we stop appreciating the place for the Mecca it is, then we lose not only the magic of Prestbury Park but, who knows, the magic of the sport in its entirety?
As a follow on from above, and I do not suggest I know anything about the extinct racecourse I am about to mention; they might have been fair or death-traps, hilly or flat, well-attended or ghost towns but once they did exist and now they do not. William Day listed in his book the courses on which one of his more modest horses won at ... Reading, Bibury, Winchester and Plymouth. The mare also won at Salisbury, though thankfully that charming racecourse has survived. Before Day got this mare to train she had also won a small race at Northampton.
I loath losing racecourses and I will figuratively keep my fingers crossed that we do not lose Ludlow or Kempton Park. With the ever lowering state of the sport's finances and with the net zero nonsense liable to place more and more restrictions on travel and freedom, I can see in the near future governments putting the squeeze on sports to reduce radically their carbon footprint, which might lead to less racecourses, less racing and less intermixing of northern and southern trained horses and the same with jockeys. By 2050 we could easily, or at least you young 'uns, will be living in a dystopian world of citizen control, fifteen-minute cities and all green fields either built upon of left to nature to do with as it pleases, and that includes racecourses and golf courses.