At Market Rasen on Saturday, Willie Twiston-Davies vented his spleen on the topic of summer jumping. His view did not exactly mirror my opposition to the current summer jumping programme yet I understood his disquiet. Of course, being a critic of summer jumping has not stopped him and his father having runners over the summer. Indeed, yesterday at Newton Abbot the father/son combo trained two-winners, one ridden by the next jockey sensation Lucas Murphy, son of Timmy.
My views on summer jumping tend to change with the wind. As W.T.D. himself hinted at, mentioning Killarney, I would like the summer jumping programme to focus on festival meetings consisting of 3 or 4-days fixtures, a formula that is a great success in Ireland. Where I chop'n'change is when the winter season should end and the summer season begin. I was content with the season ending with the old Whitbread meeting at Sandown until Dan Skelton came-up with the proposal of staging the Aintree National later in the year and making it the last meeting. I thought that was an excellent proposal, not that it gained a groundswell of support.
Where W.T.D. erred, in my opinion, was to use the phrase 'welfare issue' in his argument. He did not say anything about 'welfare issues' when Broadway Boy nearly lost his life when falling at Valentines in the Aintree National two-years ago, did he? As with all-weather flat racing, the summer jumping programme has spiralled out-of-control and a major rethink is required to rein it back in. Summer jumping has its values as it allows trainers with a smaller number of horses in training than the Twiston-Davies team, to earn prize-money that is far harder to achieve through the winter months. To my mind, the summer season should be a championship within itself and not be part of the jockeys or trainers championship. This would give the summer months more emphasis and perhaps more media coverage. Each month of the summer season should have a 'festival', one in the west country, one in the midlands, one in the north and one in Scotland, with a few one-day fixtures leading up to those festivals. Racecourses should be regulated to achieve good-ground for summer jumping, not good-to-firm, though obviously ground conditions will dry out on hot days.
It was good that W.T.D. brought this issue into the public light and I hope his intervention will move the B.H.A. to take summer jumping more seriously than it has in the recent past.
I have stopped watching I.T.V.'s 'Morning Show' as it is more likely to annoy me than entertain. A lot of my disquiet centres around Matt Chapman, a man of huge ability, huge ego and an insufferable want to be right, middle and left of every second of content, though mainly he just wants everyone to accept he is right about everything. But also, I could not care less what any of the presenters think will win later in the afternoon. Horse racing is so much more than tipping winners or in the case of the Morning Show presenters, losers. The programme only achieves my interest when they actually show the horses, the actual stars of our sport. More racing yard content would please me. More serious discussion about racing-related topics might enlighten me. Racing people suggesting proposals to make the sport more relevant or simply better might lead to change for the better. Anything other than week after week of tips that either do not win or who start at the sort of prohibitive odds that are of no use to the casual Saturday punter. I have no doubt the producer of the programme works under a tight budget but so do those who make racing podcasts. As things stand, I do no believe 'The Morning Show' does anything that would attract new followers of our sport.
In a fall at Worcester on August 23rd, Tom Bellamy broke eleven ribs, sternum and scapula, punctured a lung, while the other lung collapsed. He was in hospital for 6-days. A week later he suffered an infection which required 17-days in hospital, a chest drain and antibiotics. And yet keyboard warriers think they have a right to criticise and use threats of violence against these brave and skilful sportsman and women. What we all should be doing is sending Tom Bellamy a Get Well card along with a donation to the Injured Jockeys Fund.
I always wondered why a mare registered as bay was called A Snow White Park? Snow suggested she should be grey. White suggested she should be grey and white park cattle tend to be whiteish. She won yesterday at Roscommon and it turns out she is grey. So why is bay her colour in the paperwork? On the racecard? Does this mean if there were to be an all-greys race, as they have at Newmarket every season, she would not be qualified to run? A Snow White Park, a name I approve of, now I know she is as grey as her name.