Tales from the Turf

by Robin Oakley

  It simply could not go on, the most eye-catching events in racing’s calendar constantly clouded by cruelty issues. Desperate for a greater share of the leisure dollar, the industry has accepted that.

  Old-school jockeys used to insist that they could make horses go faster with use of the whip and true horsemen like Peter Scudamore, sensitive enough to determine how horses were responding, did just that. Too often though we also saw tired horses flogged home unnecessarily by clumsy riders in a way which demeaned the sport.

  Talking to great riders like Dessie Hughes and Richard Dunwoody, as I did for my history of the Cheltenham Festival, I found they are now regretful about how the customs of the time allowed and even encouraged them to belt away at horses like Monksfield and Viking Spirit. Now with Dettori, jumps champion AP McCoy and champion trainer Paul Nicholls lining up in support of the new law’s clarity, we have the chance to turn a page.

  The key phrase Paul used was ‘the time has come’. Traditions have their attractions but if we never accepted the need to reflect the mood of a new age we would still have ponies down pits, children up chimneys and landowners helping themselves to rosy-cheeked peasant girls. The people we want to see thronging Britain’s racetracks don’t see the care and attention lavished on racehorses in stable yards by devoted staff: racing’s image is determined for them by what they observe at the business end of races on track.

  But if the BHA has done well in setting such clear new limits, it has done well too in refusing to be panicked into getting rid of the whip altogether. You can’t sit a horse on the naughty step or stop its pocket money: whips are needed to control wayward behaviour, to aid steering and balance and to prevent injury to the animal and others. Some wanted horses disqualified from their victories where riders have committed whip offences. For me that is a step too far, punishing owners, trainers and punters for a rider’s misdemeanour, although racing might note that if the new regulations don’t work it may be all we have left to try.

  Some riders are muttering. What, they ask, if you’ve used up your ‘hits allowance’ and a horse starts drifting dangerously across the course? Seamie Heffernan fears that owners will say ‘You gave him five smacks and he just got beat, why didn’t you give him the other two?’ Johnny Murtagh grumbles that owners of lazy horses will be penalised and wonders how pleased punters will be to see him put down his stick when a horse is responding well to vigorous urging but a limit has been reached. The answer is: we’ll learn to live with it. This is a threatened sport and it doesn’t any longer live in a world of its own.

  I had been abroad when the new rules were published and I returned to find massive controversy, with many jockeys pronouncing the scheme unworkable. Returning to the subject I wrote:

  From Canadian waters, noting that jockeys like Frankie Dettori and Tony McCoy had backed the reforms, I welcomed them too. I still back reform. Racing needs public approval and bigger crowds and the public response to whip use has to be heeded. But in the way they introduced the rules and the punishments they decreed for those found contravening the new rules, the British Horseracing Authority formed a circular firing squad.

  October 15, the first Champions Day at Ascot, was planned as Britain’s richest and most exciting day’s racing ever, featuring the wondrous Frankel. So it was, but because the BHA chose to introduce the rule changes that week, sporting headlines were dominated for a fortnight not by Champions Day but by endless stories about jockeys being found in breach of the new whip regulations.

  Ascot’s attempts to cement its position as a hub of international racing suffered a huge setback when the amazed Christophe Soumillon, the Belgian who is one of Europe’s leading riders, lost his £50,000 share of the Champion Stakes prize money for giving his horse one smack more than the newly permitted five in the final furlong.

  Dettori and McCoy, it turns out, had effectively been suckered into their public support. Richard Hughes, probably the best jockey in Britain, refused to ride again until the rules were changed and riders both on the Flat and over jumps were incensed both at the complexity of the new rules and the scale of the penalties. A jockeys’ strike was threatened.

  It was a public relations disaster. Jockeys involved in frantic finishes found it impossible in many cases to count whether they had used their stick the permitted five times or an extra one which brought automatic and condign punishment. What they had done in most cases was to infringe a technicality: what the public absorbed from the headlines was that large numbers of jockeys were daily being found guilty of cruelty to their mounts.

  In their eagerness to demonstrate the smack of firm government, the BHA have inflicted severe damage on the sport they are supposed to succour and protect. They are trying to change the behaviour of professionals who in many cases have been riding under one system for twenty years, and who are criticised and penalised if they don’t go all out to win.

  The sensible way of proceeding would have been to announce the new rules but run a trial period with no penalties for the first two months. Jockeys who transgressed could have been called in and cautioned each time, and warned of the penalties they would have suffered if the new laws had come into force while they adapted.

  There were other concerns. Taking away a jockey’s riding fee as well as his or her share of the prize after a whip transgression was unfair, especially for those at the bottom end whose fee may largely be swallowed up anyway by travel costs.

  Not surprisingly the BHA has been forced to backtrack, while huffing and puffing that it is for regulators not participants to regulate and that ‘regulation is not a negotiation’. Overall limits on the number of whip strokes remain, rightly. But the unworkable specific limits in the last furlong or after the last obstacle have now been removed and penalties scaled down. M. Soumillon keeps his cash.

  Slowly we are edging towards a workable reform. I haven’t met any jockey or trainer who opposes reform in principle. But plenty of problems remain to be addressed. What can you do with lazy horses? Will international jockeys like Soumillon continue to race in Britain given the risks of suspensions which apply at home too? What about riders like Ruby Walsh who ride regularly both in Britain and Ireland? After an Aintree race earned him a five-day ban from the saddle for exceeding the prescribed number of strikes he declared, ‘I don’t want to be coming over here and getting bans in small races and missing big rides for Willie Mullins back home.’ Is it realistic to restrict riders to virtually the same number of strokes in a five-furlong sprint and a three-mile steeplechase? What about the safety issue when a rider who has used his ‘strike allowance’ finds his mount veering across the track, endangering others?

  As I write, incensed riders are still threatening strike action until there are further revisions to the reforms. I hope they don’t push their luck. Racing has suffered enough damage already. All we need now to turn a disaster into a debacle is tabloid headlines declaring ‘Jockeys strike for the right to thrash their horses harder’, which is how it would be presented.

  Since then, mercifully, things have quietened down, thanks to a few more tweaks of the rules, the building in of a little more discretion and some personnel changes at the BHA. Some reform has been achieved.

  Women jockeys

  Most women seem to enjoy racing – the dressing up, the chance of a flutter. Mrs Oakley, fun to be with on any other occasion, just cannot get the racing bug, however hard I try. I have even found her in the racecourse car park devouring the latest well-reviewed novel rather than cheering on my fancy in the fifth. But racing simply cannot manage any longer without those of the female gender, and that is why I have long campaigned for a better deal for women riders. It has been a long, long time coming.

  At first, of course, by decree of the Jockey Club, women weren’t allowed to be trainers. Not until 1966 did Florence Nagle become the first woman licence-holder, although of course she had trained since 1938 with her head lad Bill Stic
kley nominally holding the licence, the subterfuge several redoubtable ladies had to adopt. The subsequent successes of the likes of Monica Dickinson, Mary Reveley, Jenny Pitman and Venetia Williams exposed that for the stuffed-shirt nonsense that it was.

  Tim Neligan, former managing director of United Racecourses, told me how Flo Nagle had once berated him for the lack of race-riding opportunities for girls. She wrote him a cheque on the spot to sponsor a race at Kempton and left funds in her will for its continuance. The race was first run in 1986 and John Lawrence wrote in the Daily Telegraph that Mrs Nagle was no doubt looking down from her celestial cloud with approval. She politely wrote in to tell him that she was still happily on this planet, but that when she moved on she was expecting to land up somewhere hotter than Heaven – and there to meet most of her racing friends!

  Mrs Nagle, as ever, was well ahead of her time and in 1999 I was complaining as loudly as I could that there had not been a single woman in the top 50 riders on the Flat or over jumps the previous season. Having observed before the Whitbread Gold Cup that spring that twelve of the seventeen contestants were led round the parade ring by lasses, I argued that most yards would grind to a halt without female staff. That is even more true today. In the age of McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken and pizza parlours, trainers have been delighted to have some lighter-weight girls to put up on the gallops. And yet a prejudice has persisted in many quarters about using women riders on the racecourse.

  Women have been riding winners in Britain since the 1970s but it is a sad comment on racing’s conservatism that when her husband David ‘Dandy’ Nicholls gave her a leg-up on Portuguese Lil in 1996, Alex Greaves was the first woman ever to ride in the Derby. Not until Hayley Turner was given a no-hoper to ride in the 2012 Derby was the phenomenon repeated. Gay Kelleway, first amateur and then professional ladies champion, was for many years the only woman to have been given a ride at Royal Ascot. Yet in 1996 when I watched an average day’s racing in Auckland, New Zealand, seven of the ten races were won by women jockeys. In the United States when Julie Krone proved herself as good as the men on the way to her 3,700 winners she was hired for plenty of rides in top races to reflect that. In 2011 Tammi Piermarini became the fifth female in US racing history to register 2,000 winners. But in Britain it has been a long, hard struggle for the women.

  When I spoke to Alex Greaves back in 1996 she was philosophical. The hierarchy had been stuffy in the past, she said, but people could not help the way they were brought up and the younger generation were more liberal-minded. ‘There will always be some prejudice. Some people won’t use lightweights and that’s it.’ But, she added, the stuffy ones would be the losers for it. ‘Take the strike rate of winners to rides and people like me and Emma [O’Gorman] and Kim [Tinkler] would be pretty high on the list. But most people say “Women jockeys haven’t got the experience” and if they don’t give us the rides we’re not going to get the experience.’

  Alex Greaves and Kim Tinkler, another female rider with more than 100 wins accumulated at that time, were both married to trainers. Emma O’Gorman, another prominent rider then, had a trainer father. But Diane Clay and Lorna Vincent, two capable riders in their time, were never given a fair chance over jumps. As Diane Clay said, ‘If you haven’t got connections it’s a waste of time. This is the only sport in which women compete with men on equal terms but you have to be better than a man to get the opportunity to prove it.’ Interestingly, women who made the breakthrough as trainers like Gold Cup winners Jenny Pitman and Henrietta Knight weren’t known for putting up women riders. Henrietta Knight actually said she hoped never to put up a woman because she didn’t believe the female form was made to take falls at racing pace. I hesitate ever to question my friend Hen, but were male bodies any better designed to do so?

  In recent years, thank Heaven, the penny has dropped with most trainers both on the Flat and over jumps. Hayley Turner is top class and Newmarket trainer Michael Bell has given her the chance to prove it. Knocking down the targets like ninepins, she shared the champion apprentice title in 2005 with Saleem Golam and in 2008 became the first woman to ride 100 winners in a season. In 2011 she became the first woman to ride a Group One winner in her own right (Alex Greaves once dead-heated in one), taking both the July Cup on Dream Ahead and the Nunthorpe on Margot Did. Perhaps just as importantly, the year Hayley rode her first 100, Kirsty Milczarek rode 70 winners, just to show Hayley was no freak. In the 2012 season Amy Scott was champion apprentice in her own right and Cathy Gannon too has grafted herself into popularity with English trainers after coming over from Ireland.

  The lovely thing about Hayley Turner is the girl-next-door naturalness she retains despite her achievements, but when you talk to her there is, too, a steady gaze which reflects the inner confidence she has needed to mix it with the boys. Although the no-nonsense Hayley, much happier riding horses than letting the media try to mould her into a PR personality and fashion icon, has had a couple of seasons disrupted by a head injury and a broken ankle, she is back at the top of her game and is now in contention with half a dozen good girl riders.

  Over jumps Lucy Alexander became the first woman to win the conditional riders championship in 2012/13. But that does not mean we should be complacent. Like some of those who paved the way before her, Lucy Alexander has a trainer father and the Irish duo Katie Walsh and Nina Carberry come from families steeped in racing. And while a few top names have come through, the talented South African Lisa Jones, who was hailed as a breakthrough model herself when riding 47 winners back in 2004, was forced to go abroad to Macau and India because of the lack of opportunities and bookings in Britain once she lost her claim.

  Progress has been made, but we will only really know that we have arrived at a sensible position when we in the media have stopped greeting every female-ridden Group winner as a newsworthy item in itself. We need to abandon the fenced-off category of ‘woman rider’ altogether. Just like their male equivalents they are jockeys – bad, indifferent, or in the cases of riders like Hayley Turner and Cathy Gannon, top-class, tactically intelligent and instinctively resourceful.

  I guess though that we will never completely get away from the sex factor. I haven’t forgotten one bookie’s reaction to the finish of the gruelling four-mile National Hunt Chase for amateurs at the Cheltenham Festival in 2010. In a desperate, flailing finish Katie Walsh and Nina Carberry both earned bans for over-use of ‘the persuader’. ‘Birds first and second,’ he rasped. ‘And what about the way they used those whips?’ ‘Oh yes, oh yes,’ said a gent in a camel-hair coat standing next to me, dreamily turning an excited shade of pink. It takes all sorts, even in a racing crowd.

  It has to be said, incidentally, that some women trainers do add to our pleasures by the way they turn themselves out, as well as their horses. One day at Kempton in March 2005 I noted:

  One of the pleasures of seeing Venetia Williams’s horses triumph is anticipating what racing’s best-turned-out trainer will be wearing in the winners’ enclosure. After Clear Thinking’s triumph at Newbury the other day it was a brown suede creation with black tassels. Elegant tassels, I hasten to add, not tassels of the twirling kind. When Limerick Boy came smoothly home at Kempton to capture the Favourites Racing Pendil Novices Chase, the trainer arrived to greet him in a coat that was not so much something to keep the cold out as a piece of modern art with buttons. Mrs Oakley, and my credit-card company, would no doubt have been able to name the designer. I can only describe it as a snowstorm in a coalmine or a soot-blast in an ice-cream factory. White on black or black on white, it was quite literally dazzling. So much so that, biro poised and jaw dropping, I only narrowly escaped a kick from Limerick Boy which would have removed my right kneecap. Perhaps he preferred the brown suede.

  While we are on the subject of the disadvantaged, I do have another sympathy in racing: what happens to those top-class young riders when they lose the right to claim those few pounds off which make them good
value in a shrewd trainer’s eyes. The Mauritius-born Saleem Golam, who shared that apprentice title with Hayley Turner, has not found life easy since. At unfashionable Folkestone in September 2008 he was riding a couple for Stuart Williams, who agreed, ‘It’s very hard when young riders lose their allowance and it depends very much on whether those who have helped to make them a success while they had it stick with them like Michael Bell has done with Hayley Turner.’

  Too much racing?

  It was the master of Warren Place who began it all in August 1996. Henry Cecil, from a stable where you suspected most of the horses, given half a chance, would wear Gucci racing plates and Hermes head collars, complained that there was too much racing in Britain and that it was breeding mediocrity, weakening and bringing down the racing industry. Rod Fabricius, clerk of the course at Goodwood, intensified the argument by objecting that the fixture list had swollen excessively in the past decade and that racing was spreading its product too thin. He pointed out that during Goodwood’s five-day festival meeting ten years before, there had been 22 other meetings, with just two in the same catchment area. That year there were 29 other meetings, six of them in places competing for customers.

  Nudged along by the Sporting Life with rather more than hands and heels, the ‘too much racing’ debate has proceeded in stable yards, parade rings and racecourse bars up and down the land. For the most part, the responses have depended on whether you are in a yard where the owners drink Bellinis and holiday in Mustique or whether your stable familiars bury their heads in a Guinness glass and take their leisure on the Costa Brava.