by Robin Oakley
The victories of Dancing Sherpa, Dempsta and Volcano Lover did little more than pay for a round of rum punches in my hotel but my raceday in Mauritius won’t easily be forgotten. It is fast, fun and friendly. As I passed Serge Henry’s stable yard on the way out, the sun was gleaming on the flanks of a contestant being hosed down after his race. Mynah birds called above. But in my mind was the soulful gaze of a young Mauritian, peering through the slats of the weighing-room blinds at an incoming winner and clearly wondering if he would ever have the chance of such a mount himself. How about a British Horseracing Board scholarship or two?
Racing issues
The all-weather
One of the biggest changes to racing in my lifetime has been the development of the all-weather tracks, first Lingfield, then Southwell and Wolverhampton, then, as part of an £18 million redevelopment, Kempton Park. Even Newbury has flirted with the idea. To many they are just there to provide low-grade betting-shop fodder, making sure that bookies have enough races to keep punters coming through their doors even when the elements have made racing on turf tracks impossible through frost, snow or flooding. Never mind the quality, feel the each-way opportunities. In early days of low attendances they used to joke that the natural order of things was reversed on the all-weather: instead of jockey changes being announced to the crowd they used to announce crowd changes to the jockeys huddled for warmth in the weighing room.
I wrote a pretty sour piece about a day at Lingfield in January 2001:
I don’t know how many others were like me at Lingfield for the all-weather racing on Saturday because the jumping meetings at Sandown and Huntingdon had failed to survive the weather. But I doubt if many of them will be rushing back. I like a bet when I go racing, but I don’t go just for the betting. I go racing too for sport, spectacle and excitement. I go for colour, character and camaraderie. But although four of the six races ended with the leaders separated by three-quarters of a length or less, there was about as much excitement about the proceedings as you would find in an undertaker’s car park. This was racing for those who bet on numbers or colours as much as they do on measuring the respective qualities of horses, riders and trainers.
Where was the nobility of the equine athlete, the glamour of sporting excellence? Hot Pants, winner of the five-furlong sprint, did the business but looked like something from an attic where the moths had taken over. No self-respecting tramp would have worn her coat.
Of course even low-grade racing can be fun with the right presentation but it doesn’t do much to enrich the entertainment or inform the punter when the scratchy racecard doesn’t even include a colour illustration of the jockeys’ silks. There is no excuse for that: we are in the 21st century. The trainers didn’t do a lot to help either. Six stables had winners; in five cases the winning trainers – Mick Channon, Richard Hannon, Stan Moore, David Chapman and Ken Ivory (who admittedly was on holiday in Malaga) – did not show their faces at Lingfield.
OK, so the horses they race on the all-weather aren’t usually their stars. Trainers running mega-horsepower yards can’t be at every meeting. But none of those winning Lingfield trainers had runners over the jumps at Uttoxeter or Haydock, and they too are part of an entertainment business. People want to be able to nudge each other and spot the racing personalities, even to exchange a brief word with them. The one winning trainer who was there, Hugh Collingridge, took the richest race of the day with the consistent Admiral’s Place and promptly re-stirred a controversy from a fortnight before.
On that day, racing at Lingfield was abandoned. But it was not abandoned after a morning inspection, saving people a fruitless journey, it was abandoned just before the first race because the stalls handlers pointed out to jockeys arriving at the start that there was just a thin veneer of sand over the frozen surface. The stewards called off the meeting. Owners, trainers and racegoers let Lingfield’s owners Arena Leisure know exactly what they thought of such cack-handed management.
Trainer Nick Littmoden said ‘a blind man with his stick would have known it was rock-solid frozen’ and Collingridge and others quite naturally demanded compensation for their costs. That Saturday Collingridge called for the track, which had clearly deteriorated over the eleven years since it was laid, to be dug up and have new drainage installed. Having been training since 1974, he pointed out, he was in on the ground floor of all-weather racing. ‘I love coming here. Lingfield is a super track, but the only course is to take it up and employ some modern technology.’
That, of course, raised the question of who was to pay for works that would cost at least £1.5 million: Arena Leisure or the soon-to-expire Levy Board? Somehow between them the Levy Board and Arena had to make sure that the tracks which had become crucial to bookmaking revenue, and through that to the continued existence of the sport, once more became what their name implied, true all-weather tracks.
Nine years later, Lingfield having installed a new Polytrack surface, I was singing a slightly different tune. In January 2010 I wrote:
Where would we be without ‘all-weather’ racing on artificial surfaces? With Sandown’s jumping card frosted off last Saturday I wasn’t the only one who scuttled across Surrey to Lingfield’s Polytrack, where Betdaq had sponsored an extra day to keep the cash tills rolling and the internet wires humming with the bets that help to sustain our sport.
All-weather racing began here only twenty years ago, just before the Berlin Wall fell. But with an ear-nipping chill and snow still visible on the grandstand roof, we still enjoyed a seven-race card. Gone are the days when you went to Lingfield just to watch the little guys of the sport kicking sand in each other’s faces in front of crowds no bigger than a bus queue. These days top trainers too send their horses to the artificial tracks: Ghanaati won last year’s 1,000 Guineas on her turf debut after two prep runs on Kempton’s all-weather.
Top jockeys have found they can boost their careers by staying put at Wolverhampton, Southwell, Lingfield and Kempton rather than heading off to the sun in India or Dubai. Punters relish the greater predictability of results on the all-weather. Trainers too had been converted. Noel Chance tended to put any invalid jumpers on the all-weather before going back over fences. Andy Turnell told me at Lingfield that he was quite a fan: ‘None of them comes back with “a leg” after racing on this surface’, and George Margarson cut to the quick: ‘There are so many all-weather races now you’ve got no choice but to come.’
In between, in January 2003 I had noted how the all-weather was improving life too for busy lightweights like Jimmy Quinn:
If Jimmy Quinn rode horses as fast as he talks, the rest of them would never catch up with him. He is a 7st 10lb ginger-haired bundle of energy who never stops. Last year he rode more than 1,100 horses in races in Britain and scored 101 victories. On top of that he had more than 100 rides in Germany. He rode in Ireland, in Italy, even in Istanbul and was second in the Swiss Derby. He reckons he had just three Sundays off in the calendar year.
I could only catch him for a quick word on Saturday at Lingfield as he took a quick drag on a cigarette after the fourth race: the fifth was the only contest on the eight-race card in which he didn’t have a mount. For lightweights like Jimmy Quinn the steady build-up of the all-weather tracks at Lingfield, Southwell and Wolverhampton has been a boon, increasing both the size and the steadiness of their incomes.
You won’t see Kieren Fallon, Richard Hughes, Kevin Darley or Frankie Dettori blowing on their mittened fingers in February before a seven-furlong seller at Southwell, although Pat Eddery, eager to clock his normal century of British winners, did take all-weather rides in December (he finished on a frustrating 99). But for the next rank of jockeys the all-weather tracks have become a godsend, as they have for smaller trainers who won’t be getting much of a look-in when the big yards are in full swing. Epsom yards could hardly exist without their regular victories at conveniently close-by Lingfield and Kempton. Trainer Jim Boyle told
me that the all-weather tracks make planning a campaign for a horse much easier: ‘So often you have a horse lined up for a turf race and then the ground goes.’ The all-weather tracks too are kinder to problem horses: ‘They don’t always come back so well off the turf.’
Jimmy Quinn has become one of the stars of the all-weather tracks, along with Ian Mongan and Eddie Ahern, who scored a treble on Saturday’s Lingfield card.
In the bad old days at Lingfield, say the jockeys, there wasn’t much finesse about it. There was so much kick-back from the sand that your only realistic hope was to dash into the lead and stay there as long as you could. But since the excellent new Polytrack surface was laid it has been much more like turf racing, with a variety of tactics applied.
Jimmy Quinn says, ‘It’s a nice track to ride now, but you have to use your head. It’s hard to ride here now from in front. You need a horse which can travel, there can be a lot of traffic coming into the straight.’ The key to many races, he says, is coming down the hill between the three- and two-furlong markers, and there his fellow Irishman Eddie Ahern has perfected what has become known as the ‘slingshot technique’, a long, smooth acceleration through that furlong, building momentum for the swing around the turn into the straight.
All-weather racing still lacks something in atmosphere but spice is sensibly being added in the Bet Direct All-Weather Jockeys Championship, running from November to March. At least at Kempton, I noted one day, the runners make a good silhouette as they turn into the back straight and you see them silhouetted against the in-course lake. ‘That’s fine,’ said former jockey John Lowe, ‘providing you’re not on a horse that’s hanging left round the bend and, like me, you can’t swim.’
Winter Flat racing has improved steadily in quality with yards like those of Barry Hills and Brian Meehan spotting the improved prize money and up-and-coming trainers like Andrew Balding taking the chance to get his name on the winners’ lists after taking over from his father Ian. At least they hadn’t had to waste too much on the horses’ rugs in the changeover, merely unpicking the ‘I’ from the previous I.A.B.
Emerging jockey talent too was there to be spotted on the all-weather. That winter I picked out in my Spectator column a certain Tom Queally, later to be Frankel’s partner through his glorious career. I wrote:
A claimer who showed that you don’t have to be an old sweat to master the Lingfield tactics was young Tom Queally, a former Irish champion apprentice who is attached to the Aidan O’Brien yard and who was on a working holiday with David Elsworth. He timed his run coolly on old Indian Blaze in the seller. We all have to start somewhere …
The whip controversy
Trainer Sir Mark Prescott once noted that the greyhound races for the anticipated pleasure of sinking its teeth into a fluffy white bunny tail ahead. The human athlete races for the hope of fame and riches. But what’s in it, he asked, for the horse?
One thing that has been in it for the racehorse has been the coercion of the whip, the fear that if it doesn’t do its utmost, a wallop or two will follow, the hope that if it does stick its head down and go all out, that little demon on top will stop belting away.
It wasn’t a reasoning that worked particularly well for me at boarding school. The masters and matrons who wielded cane or slipper, in some cases with obvious relish, only made me stroppier. But racing folk have clung to the old theories. What used to be euphemistically termed the ‘persuader’ or the ‘attitude adjuster’ was defended as an essential. Some even claim the whipping of horses in races as part of some mystical, noble ritual.
It is an issue no racing writer can really avoid and I became involved for the first time after the 2,000 Guineas of 1996. That year three horses drove to the line together with Mark of Esteem prevailing by a head from Even Top with Bijou d’Inde only another head away. All three jockeys, Frankie Dettori, Philip Robinson and Jason Weaver gave all they had. All three whipped their horses into giving all they had. And the stewards suspended the three for eight, four and two days respectively. The penalties were set to reflect the respective severity of the offences, the amount of times the jockeys used their whips, whether or not they had applied excessive force and whether or not they had hit the colts out of rhythm with their strides.
I wrote then that in most sports if you break the rules you are disqualified. Horses do generally respond to the whip. If you make excessive use of the whip and so break the rules to give your horse an advantage then the difference between that and feeding it some prohibited substance to make it go faster is only a qualitative one. But doping would have you disqualified and banned.
And yet if any of the three horses had been disqualified there would have been an outcry. Racing is all about winning. To have handed the race to the fourth horse home Alhaarth would have been absurd. The action of the stewards was realistic. And yet a niggle remained. If by whipping his horse another ten times and harder still, Jason Weaver could have improved his place from third to first, would that have been considered within the bounds as well? Where does trying to win end and cruelty begin?
In a thrilling St Leger that year, Dettori got up Shantou by a neck from Eddery on Dushyantor. But again both he and Eddery were given two-day suspensions for using the whip with unreasonable frequency. That time I wrote:
The two riders are ultimate professionals, one the champion jockey the other ten times the champion before him. Rules are rules and you cannot blame the stewards for implementing them. But as Eddery says it surely cannot go on like this. Not only does the intensity of the occasion make it likely that every time there is a close finish to a Classic all the jockeys involved are going to be collecting whip bans. It ensures too that on the occasions when the sport receives maximum attention from the media and non-regular racegoers, the question of potential cruelty becomes the major focus.
What adds intensity from the jockeys’ point of view is the ‘totting up’ procedure which nowadays applies. After you have received twelve days’ worth of bans for similar offences, any further transgression triggers a reference to the Jockey Club’s disciplinary committee with an automatic extra 14-day ban to follow. Frankie Dettori is now on the 12-day mark, Pat Eddery on ten and both will have to take extra care on future mounts, a fact which could be seen as a penalty on the trainers and owners who put them up from now on this season.
Frequent examples highlighted the dilemma. There have been few more thrilling racecourse duels than the battle to the line in Sandown’s Coral-Eclipse in the year 2000 between Giant’s Causeway and Kalanisi. But George Duffield had hit Giant’s Causeway more than fifteen times with the whip in the straight and Pat Eddery had given his mount a similar number of reminders. Both jockeys were referred to the Jockey Club for ‘excessive use’ and were stood down for ten days as a result, a blow to their earning capacity in high season and for Eddery a penalty that could have affected his chances of retaining the jockeys’ championship.
Admitting that he broke the rules and would have to pay the price, Duffield said, ‘It was a true championship race, the kind that people come to see.’ He would, he added, do it again if that was what was needed to win the race. An upset Eddery added, ‘Bans are ruining the game. We are doing our best for everyone. It was exciting for the public and we have to suffer for it.’
I had mixed feelings. Neither horse appeared damaged or distressed after the race. Both responded gamely to their jockeys’ urgings and continued to do so in races later that season. We did, after all, expect the authorities to come down hard on jockeys in other races who did not make enough effort to win.
But I noted at the time that Pat Eddery, Kieren Fallon and Frankie Dettori had all been penalised too for ‘excessive use’ after the 1998 Juddmonte International, one of the best races for years, with Pat punished for hitting One So Wonderful 23 times. There do have to be limits in the interests of horse welfare and it was interesting that the introduction of automatic ten-day bans for
excessive use of the whip in Group One races, where the financial rewards for victory involve the strongest temptation to overdo the use of the ‘persuader’, did result temporarily in a sharp decline in the number of such offences. George Duffield’s comments at the time suggested that there was in racing as well as football a concept of the ‘professional foul’.
As a townie for most of my life rather than a countryman, and with little riding experience I feel that my right to pronounce on the whip issue is limited. But there are genuine experts like Sir Peter O’Sullevan who have campaigned for more restrictions on whip use and I cannot condone anything which amounts to cruelty. In the autumn of 2011 therefore I welcomed a new set of rules on whip use from the racing authorities, particularly as they appeared to have the backing of some top racing professionals.
The new British Horseracing Authority rules, I wrote, marked a new era:
It is racing’s final acknowledgment that while the whip may be used for occasional correction, it is no longer appropriate beyond a very clearly defined point for coercion. Under new rules the number of times a jockey’s whip can be used during a race has been nearly halved to seven times on the Flat and eight times over jumps, with a maximum of five strikes in the last furlong or after the last obstacle. Jockeys breaking the rules will face automatic suspension. They will lose riding fees and prize money percentages, and it will be an offence for owners or trainers to encourage wrongdoing by recompensing riders for what they have lost.
Things came to a head after Ballabriggs’ victory in the Grand National. Jason Maguire, by no means a whip-happy jockey, was suspended for five days for hitting his mount seventeen times although, under the old rules, he didn’t lose his £40,000 share of the prize money. Frankie Dettori’s thrilling Ascot victory on Rewilding over So You Think also came under scrutiny because he hit his mount 24 times, earning him a nine-day compulsory holiday.