GOODBYE SWEET WILLIAM, DRAW BIAS & OUR FUTURE.

Late reporting for duty as being someone who wilts in the sun, I needed get the cycle out before it gets too hot. I remain determined to die healthy!

Occasionally, and not often enough for my peace of mind, a horse comes along that becomes like the furniture in your home and when they are gone you not only miss them but you appreciate them more in their absence than when they were present season after season. One such horse is Sweet William. Philippa Cooper has announced 'her favourite horse' is now retired and will join her other grand servants or 'thugs' as she described them in The Racing Post today, in what I am damn sure will be a life of reverential retirement at her Normandy Stud. (Hope I have named the stud correctly)

For all the reverence thrown at sprinters and milers by breeders and sales agents, not one great horse over the shorter distances have become the darling of the public. Yes, Frankel was hugely popular when he was racing but a whole lot of that endearment was allied to the love the public had for his trainer, a man in the last days of his life. The horses that live long in the hearts of the racing public tend to be the long distance horses on the flat. And this is not a modern thing. Brown Jack, the winner of 7 consecutive races at Royal Ascot, winning the Queen Alexandra Stakes 6-times, had a railway locomotive named in his honour and a public house. Incidentally, the race was over a longer distance back then, 2-miles 6-furlongs and 85-yards.

Sweet William is no Brown Jack. Nor is he in the same league as Persian Punch, Trueshan, Trelawney, Stradivarious,  Kyprios or Yeats but come next June he will be missed, his name not included in the racecard for the Gold Cup and then again when Goodwood comes around. He was a staple of the Cup races, as was his owner facing up to Matt Chapman in the parade ring. If anyone in our sport deserves a truly great champion it is Philippa Cooper, an example of how an owner/breeder should deport themselves on a racecourse and, I dare say, in their relationship with the people blessed to train for her. Yes, she is my favourite owner on the flat.

Trainers and jockeys complain about track bias without ever coming-up with a solution to what is, after all, just one part of the puzzle of trying to find a winner. I am pretty certain that if you were to walk the length and breadth of any field the ground beneath your feet would alter from one hedgerow to the other. I suspect, even out in the wilderness of the Cesarewitch course, miles away from the grandstands, the going will differ from right to left. If we reverted to the times when racecourses were not watered, when rattling hard was just accepted as a token of the season, I imagine it would have been harder on one side of the course than the other.

I have suggested at Chester, where draw bias can have nothing to do with watering or the weather, that those drawn 'wrong' should receive a weight allowance in an attempt to even things up. Not huge amounts, just 3Ibs for those drawn the highest down to a single pound for those drawn middling. Could this not apply to Royal Ascot, once a draw bias has been established? 3Ib to those drawn 30 down to 24, perhaps, then 2Ibs for those drawn down to 20, and a single pound for those down to stall 12. If there is a known drawn bias, the horses drawn with the bias in their favour have a distinct and perhaps unfair advantage. Why not then try to remove that advantage by giving those with apparently 'no chance' of winning a weight allowance?

The future of our sport concerns me. It will last for what remains of my life time, I have no doubt. But I want it to survive beyond my time on this Earth. Those who are opponents of our sport, the Green wokish people who will not be content until we are stopped from sharing our lives with cats, dogs and parrots, will not refrain from their evil rhetoric at the banning of National Hunt, show jumping and eventing. Horses can fall in flat races, too. Horses can lose their lives in pursuit of our enjoyment at any racecourse dedicated to flat racing. How real is the possibility of jumps racing going the way of greyhound racing in Wales is anyone's guess. But we should not be burying our heads in the sand. Ask yourself why our present government is allowing the Gambling Commission to kettle punters to a black market that is basically stealing revenue from them? Why would they stand aside and allow commonsense and facts be trampled on by people with no understanding of our sport or the people who find enjoyment in betting on our sport, yet allow those same people to buy as many Lotto tickets as their wallets will allow? Death by natural extinction is the answer to that question.

The one move open to us to grow appeal for our sport amongst the general population, and I have lived the majority of my life amongst people with no interest in horse racing and have heard their silly and ignorant doctrine over and over again, would be to limit the use of the whip to an absolute minimum. You will never convince an ignorant public that a whip, call it what you like, does not hurt or intimidate a horse. For our sport to defeat the aims of a government that reads from a book written by the unelected elite, we need the public to be on our side. To that end I remain convinced we must explore the possibility of not exactly whipless races but as close as we can get to such a claim. One hit and that's it. A whip drawn but not used in earnest. What is the point of hands and heels race for apprentices if that model is then rejected as soon as the apprentice becomes a professionl jockey? We need to experiment with hands and heel races for professional jockeys. Forget the hue and cry that will come from jockeys and the racing media, the horses that lose because the jockey was limited to a single stroke. Because a similar number of horses will thrive through not being struck six or seven-time during a race. The time for change in this matter was yesterday, though tomorrow will do if it is not a tomorrow the other side of my funeral.