BLUE RIBAND SIRE, BOW ECHO & THE BALLYDOYLE DOMINANCE IS BAD FOR BUSINESS.

Recently I purchased a book from a Book Relief charity shop for £3. It was great value. It would be of greater value if bought by someone whose interest of horse racings lies in not what happened on the racecourse but in the breeding sheds. Do not get me wrong, Lesley I Sampson's book 'Nijinsky. Blue Riband Sire' is a mighty tome and a good specilist topic for anyone wishing to take part in Mastermind but for someone who only knew Nijinsky as a racehorse, even if as a teenager I had a print of him on the wall of the living room of the family home, this is a book that disappointed. Rarely do I skip whole chapters in a racing book but with this book, I admit, I flipped more than I read. But if you want to know all that there is to know about Nijinsky the stallion, the mares that visited him, the colts he fathered that went on to be stallions, all his stakes horse from 1974 to 1984, his progeny from 1972 to 1982 and so on, this is a book you should hunt for.

As a young man and for a long period of my adult life, I considered Nijinsky, even though he suffered painful defeats at the end of his racing career, the greatest flat horse of my lifetime. That is no longer the case, even though his contemptuoous victory in the King George and Queen Elisabeth, with Lester hardly moving a muscle, is perhaps my clearest memory of any flat race. I came to my senses on this topic when I realised that greatness has to be bolstered by longevity, by being the best in more than one generation. It was always planned that Nijinsky would stay in training as a four-year-old but his owner, Charles Englehard, was dying of cancer and he wanted to live to see Nijinsky's foals on the ground. It is why, I dismiss single generational superstars such as Dancing Brave and Sea The Stars when they are sited in the pantheon of 'greatest of all time.' Unlike Brigadier Gerard and Frankel who proved themselves as sound in wind and limb and as brilliant on the racecourse at 4 as they were at 3.

In the Racing Post today, the question was posed 'Is Bow Echo the next Frankel?' No, is the obvious answer. Though it looks unlikely based on his 2,000 Guineas success, it is perfectly possible that he may never win another race. He might win the St.James' Palace Stakes and never win again. No one knows. What I do know is that the question is as stupid as when Derek Thompson asked Ruby Walsh after the 2008 Cheltenham Gold Cup 'Do you regret not choosing to ride Denman?'

Look back to see who was champion trainer in Ireland and Britain, flat or jumps, down the decades and though you will discover there was short periods of domination by one stable at times, the overall look of such championship tables shows  a far greater spread of different trainers winning the acolade than during the present decade. We now have a situation that sees Willie Mullins dominating to saturation point Irish jumps racing and Aidan O'Brien achieving the same on the flat, and though the flat title in Britain is generally a closer run thing, with Andrew Balding the leader at present, the jumps scene in Britain seems like it will be dominated by Dan Skelton for the foreseeable future. This is not good for the sport and presents a sound argument for altering the way our champion trainers are determined. Instead of being decided on prize-money, it should be decided on winners trained. This might not stop O.Brien dominating in Ireland, or perhaps Skelton in Britain, but it would allow more trainers to have a chance of lifting the champion trainers' trophy. As things stand, owners, potential and longstanding, congregate towards trainers who bear the title of champion, as happens in football, with the best footballers wanting to play for the teams at the top of the table. We need the top owners, those with the greatest spending power, to spread their options and if the title was determined on winners trained not prize-money won, it would increase the opportunities for more trainers to acquire the big hitters and give the big hitters a greater number of trainers to choose from to train their horses.