MR. NICHOLSON'S CRITICISM SHOULD BE HEEDED, BLINDS & A VIEW FROM THE PAST.

In today's Racing Post, in the Letters section, Mr. Nicholson of West Bolden, makes the point that as a retired man with time on his hands, someone who can go racing whenever it pleases him, he cannot see where the sense is in having three racecourses, all of which he would have attended if they were on three different days, staging meetings on the same day, namely, Sedgefield, which has acquired a fixture that due to ground conditions Uttoxeter could not hold, Redcar and Carlisle. There is no sense, of course, in swamping one area of the country with three-meetings on the same day. There is, though, explanation, and that is the financial fact that racecourses achieve more revenue from media rights payments than they do from public attendance. Not that this inconvenient truth is an excuse for the B.H.A. to allowg these three meetings to take place on the same day, even if they were acting in good faith in saving the Uttoxeter fixture from being lost to National Hunt trainers, jockeys and owners. You sometimes have to wonder if some racecourse owners want horse racing to continue as a spectator sport, what with the financial cost of having to accommodate the public. As Mr. Nicholson said in his letter, he would have attended all three of these fixtures if they were spread over three-days. I wonder many other racing fans have had to make the same choice.

Something that is annoying me at the moment is the extent in which some people within this sport want punters to be protected from losing their money. If I go into a betting shop to place a bet (and this is how I would place a bet -when betting shops are gone, my meagre betting habit would be finished altogether) I know there is a hundred ways I could lose my money, including including the crappiness of my racing knowledge.

The whole debate on whether a horse's chance becomes minimal when the jockey is slow to remove the blind, as with Callum Shepherd at York recently and whether the horse should be declared a non-runner by the stewards, could easily become void if the starter was given the task of saying 'blinds off', making sure all blinds are indeed off, before releasing the gates. Shepherd may well have made a howler, as Jason Watson delighted in saying, but what is the difference between what happened at York and a horse stumbling as it comes out of the starting stalls, a horse refusing to come out of the stalls, the horse that is just slow getting into stride. There are so many ways where a punter's hope of winning is decreased  due to jockey error or even the circumstances of how a race is run. Are we to protect the punter from any incident that gave him or her no chance of winning? Does anyone remember Ryan Moore on the King's horse Reaching High in the Ascot Stakes two Royal Ascots ago, on the bridle yet locked-up with nowhere to go? Anyone who backed Reaching High that day had no chance of winning from the moment that pocket closed around Ryan Moore.

When the Epsom stewards declared Benvenuto Cellini a non-runner in the Derby due to the horse putting a hind leg on the structure of the stalls, racing opened-up a can of worms that is slowly infecting the whole sport. Jockeys are human, they make mistakes. Get over it! Punters win, punters lose. Bookmakers usually win and sometimes they lose big to a punter. It is all apart of the daily merry-go-round. The ghost of Big Mac haunts us, it seems.

A few quotes from Jack Leach's book 'Sods I Have Cut On The Turf' on ungenuine horses. Horses that put their heads in the air in a finish. 'I believe a horse does this because it is trying to get air into his lungs the quickest way.' The majority of so-called 'dogs' are not really ungenuine. They may have some weakness in their make-up that cannot be diagnosed by a veterinary surgeon until the horse dies, and perhaps only then if there is a post-mortem. Take, for instance, the case of Humorist, who won the Derby in 1921. His story is stranger than fiction.'

To paraphrase Leach. Humorist was a top two-year-old, winning the Middle Park. The following season the horse became inconsistent, both on the gallops and the racecourse, working brilliant one day, awful the next. The horse threw away the 2,000-Guineas by 'curling-up' in the final furlong. Next time out he won the Derby. Two-weeks later he was sent to Ascot. But during a light canter on the morning of the race, he broke a blood vessel and did not run. A few-days later Humorist was found dead in his stable in a pool of his own blood. The post-mortem revealed that the horse died of a haemorrhage resulting from 'an advanced and long-standing case of tuberculosis'.

As Jack Leach concluded: there is usually a reason for a 'quitter'.