Sir Gino, another Irish farce & from 'Another View'.

Golden Ace, if you take as fact what you read in the form book, has all the luck, while Sir Gino, a far more talented horse, one for whom there was no foreseeable limit, has no luck. Having twelve-months ago fought-off an internal infection that almost took his life, now, as Nicky Henderson put it, Sir Gino fights on another battleground. The pelvic injury he suffered on Trails Day at Cheltenham is not now the primary cause of concern for the veterinary team treating him but a new internal infection.
I am not versed in these matters but perhaps the new infection is the old one rebooted by the trauma of the pelvic injury, having hid away unnoticed in a secluded area of his body, at rest, in wait of another opportunity to engage in a battle to take the life of this wonderful horse.
Life is not fair, not on any of us at times. Yesterday at Doncaster, a horse of far less ability than Sir Gino, Officer of State, suffered a fatal injury, falling at a fence the cameras could not capture due to the poor visibility caused by a wintry mixture of mist and rain. As always, we were not told the exact nature of his injury, though the adrenaline still present in his bodily system will have negated a good amount of the pain from his broken bone.
We owe these horses such a great debt; I hope the few that visit this site realise the sacrifices both horses and people make on our behalf. Praying for Sir Gino’s recovery will bear no fruit, I fear. There is no proof that any deity cares for the people He or She created; I very doubt those same deities care for the suffering of animals.

I recommend people read the Racing Post today, especially Richard Forristal’s report on the referrals committee of the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board’s decision that Philip Bryne had no case to answer over his unshipping at the last hurdle at Wexford eight-months ago, where it looked for all the world like he had deliberately ‘jumped off’. When you have read the itemised journey from Wexford, where the stewards did not even bother to ask Brynes for his account of what happened at the final hurdle, to his exoneration yesterday, I do not think anyone could disagree with Forristal’ summing-up of an incident that will be memorialised in miscellanies of horse racing’s curious cases as the ‘jockey who jumped-off or did he?’
Also, although Philip Brynes was found innocent of any wrong-doing at Wexford, to have the regulatory body of Irish racing declare in an official report that his ‘poor horsemanship’ was to blame for the incident, must be far more shaming for Brynes than any suspension of his licence that might have been imposed. For a professional jump jockey to be belittled in such a way can only have a detrimental effect on not only his confidence as a rider but on his professional career.

In the ‘Another View’ column of the Racing Post today, Catherine Macrae suggests the best publicity the sport can have is generated by celebrities, as when The Hawkstonian won at Ffos Las recently. One of the syndicate that owns the Ben Pauling trained horse is Jeremy Clarkson and his tweet on social media celebrating the win garnered nearly 400,000 views.
Macrae is right in saying that celebrity endorsement is good publicity for the sport, and it comes free, of course, yet I would contend it needs to be the right sort of celebrity. An ex-politician, for example, embroiled in scandal, looking for a fresh start in life, would not be a good fit for the sport, whereas, at this moment in time, Nigel Farage saying good things about the sport, as he has in the past, would be positive. Kier Starmer looking to soften his image by attending a race-meeting could only do the sport harm.
And the flipside to celebrity endorsement is it will attract the views of celebrities who are opposed to horse racing, whereby the sport becomes caught in the cross-fire between two opposing forces, both keen for the publicity for themselves and not the sport.
Someone recently wrote that he thought National Hunt racing only has a future life-span of ten-years. If Reform win the next general election, which I hope they do (Only political party I have ever become a member of) I would hope that ten-years becomes twenty, thirty or fifty-years.