'CHANGE FROM WITHIN' & NOSTALGIA VERSES REALITY.

What I admire about Richard Forristal is that he disguises his moaning behind the skill of a good wordsmith, and he has still achieved the professional status of Irish editor of the Racing Post. Unlike my contribution to life, Forristal combines his moaningness with great wisdom and expertise. He is not one, though, for the joke or absurd witticism, unlike his colleague and underling, David Jennings. It is to all our benefits that we are not all alike. The Racing Post, after all, is a serious newspaper and it would not do to have wannabe comedians on every page.

Forristal's headline today is 'Change From Within The Only Way To Make Derby Great Again.' Below his columb this morning there is a letter penned by me putting forward my belief that any changes and great ideas that Epsom may come up with to make the Derby great again will be scuppered if breeders do not step up to the plate and reverse a trend that has become normalised for breeding for speed and milers, with 10-furlongs the golden distance, with 12-furlongs seen as the death-knell for stallions.

Since I started writing these blogs back in 2018, I long asked journalists and jockeys, and Frankie in particular, from claiming the Epsom Derby to be the 'greatest race in the world', as clearly it has lost a furlong or more of ground to races such as the Arc and the Melbourne Cup. When I was young, even less callow and naive than I am today, the Epsom Derby held as much fascination for me as the Grand National. Indeed my party piece was to recite the previous fifty-winners of the race, something I could not do today. I sometimes struggle to remember the winner of the previous year's Derby. (Lambourn) Of course in the 1960's and 70's the sport was just about hanging on to the owner/breeders with strong and sometimes unbreakable links to the days of Lord Derby, Gordon Richards and John Porter, people who revered the Epsom Derby, who lived and breathed to be associated with a Derby winner.

Those glorious years are long gone; the studs of heritage and prestige now replaced by new money, by wealthy people who view the buying and breeding of young stock as an investment, their sole ambition to make a killing on that investment, with Royal Ascot and all its speed races dominant in their strategy. In the same way as Aintree racecourse ruined the nation's real greatest race, the new vogue of breeders are ruining flat racing's great jem. I hope that was the thrust of Forristal's 'Change From Within' theme of his piece today. My fear reading him this morning was that he wanted Epsom to tread the path of France and reduce the distance of the Derby. Such a move would be a death-knell for the thoroughbred breed, a step along the road to making British racing as boring and one-dimensional as the sport in the U.S.

The weakness of my thinking, a condition, perhaps, which people of my age are prone to suffer from is nostalgia, wishful or sentimental longing for situations that are past and irrevocable. In the book I am presently reading there is brief mention of a 3-year-old having its debut in a 27-runner maiden at Newmarket and my instant reaction was to wish for those days to return. Can you imagine the difficulty facing a starter in the days before starting stalls, trying to get 27 fractious or excited thoroughbreds to stand in a line behind a multi-stranded barrier?

In 1953, the year Sir Gordon finally won the Derby, there were 27 starters. In 1954, the year of my birth, 22 ran, with Lester achieving his first Derby Victory on Never Say Die. In 1955 23 ran.. In 1956 27-ran. When Mill Reef won in 1971 there were 21 starters. In 1973 there were only 13-runners. In 2000, 15. 2001 12-runners. Nostalgia verses reality, isn't it? Rose-coloured glasses or a dose of actuality? Is there anything wrong about wanting the sport to return to what it once was? To have a return to the days when the Grand National could be both a dream and an ambition for everyone connected to the jumping game? To have a Derby attended by a quarter of a million people, with enough runners for there to be office sweepstakes?

The reality is we, the sport, has been let-down by those that control the sport. Both the Epsom Derby and the Aintree National have been framed to make them the sole territory of the elite, the top tier ring-fenced while those at the bottom of the food-chain left to starve or to connive to stay afloat, to dream to have a fast two-year-old to sell to Wathnam or Amo. We need to kick into the long grass many of the health and safety measures of the past decade, especially the lowering of maximum field sizes. In the past 27 horses have contested the Epsom Derby with very few incidents, yet one fall and the field size the following year is reduced by four or five, yet it took fifty-years or more to get concrete posts replaced by plastic. Ask John Francome, he campaigned most of his career for their removal. There is genuine health and safety matters, then there is health and safety propelled by wokism and the fear of public perception.

I, and others of my age, have what the young do not possess, and that is experience of now and experience, if viewed from a fogged-up lens, of the past, and from what I remember, the past was superior. There was a time, you know, when Mill Reef, Brigadier Gerard and Nijinsky were in training at the same time. If only I realised back then that those days would never return, that three of the greatest thoroughbreds to grace the flat were owned, trained and ridden by three different people! Mellon/Balding/Lewis. Hislop/Hern/Mercer. Englehard/O'Brien/Piggott.