There is so much that is good about British racing and some of its finest assets - variety, character and family appeal - were celebrated yesterday by the vast crowds that congregated at Goodwood, Redcar and Cartmel. Such sights could not be admired, though, without a flash of the anger and frustration this sport also provokes.
Nothing comes easier to racing folk than cynicism - unless it is conservatism. They were able to mix and match in the gleefully derisive response to the rebranding exercise unveiled recently. Scarcely out of the starting stalls, Harrison Fraser's work has already been condemned by most as a nonsensical waste of time and money.
This is both unfair and premature. The mistakes so far have been in timing and tone. Going public before a range of ideas have been properly defined, let alone activated, was asking for trouble from a reactionary parish just as surely as the patronising characterisation of racing as a boring old fart called Brian.
Harrison Fraser must eventually be judged on the merit of its conclusions - and racing itself on the speed of their execution. A couple of elementary points already made by the group, however, have been relevant over this holiday weekend.
The first concerns the freely peddled misconception that racegoing in this country is too expensive. Harrison Fraser disagrees, comparing racing favourably with other sports but adding that “it fails to get across its message about free parking and free entry to children.”
What other leisure pursuit lays on convenient car parking without charging a penny? And can you imagine football grounds letting in thousands of under-16s for nothing? Yet British racing does these things every day and makes nothing of it.
Goodwood, yesterday, took these reasons to be cheerful a stage further, promoting its first Bank Holiday meeting in recent memory with free entry up to the age of 18. And its car parks were full to bursting.
There were even more cars at Cartmel, squeezed into this Cumbrian village that is magic in miniature on a holiday raceday. Shaun Hodgson, the manager, reported: “I shooed the first arrivals away last night, and again at six this morning. Before 11am the main car parks were full and we were heading for a crowd around 18,000.”
Other venues cannot imitate Cartmel, so it is incumbent on the sport to encourage this unique course to race when it suits best. It would have drawn a similar crowd on Saturday, had the meeting been in the afternoon rather than the distinctly less popular evening slot to which it was banished by withdrawal of Levy Board funding.
This fate also befell Stratford's traditional two-day meeting, on which a Friday evening was always followed by a Saturday afternoon and thousands stayed over to attend both. It has lost such continuity with two successive evenings and this is a classic case of the cart, otherwise known as the bookmakers, pulling the horse.
Harrison Fraser decreed that a priority should be to “bring racing to people when they want it.” Hardy an Einstein theory but one that bears reiteration, for its importance has been overlooked too long, especially on the holiday weekends that provide such an opportunity to snare that elusive new audience.
This column has previously bemoaned the needless prevarication over staging fixtures on Good Friday and suggested they could be combined, in a big day out, with the two long-standing Open Days in Lambourn and Middleham. The good news is that the British Horseracing Authority has responded and is keen to make it “a unique day in the racing calendar”. The depressing news, so typical of the snail tendencies of racing, is that it is looking at distant 2011, rather than next year, for something already overdue.
Mick Channon will have cursed loudly yesterday when Halicarnassus failed by a diminishing neck to overhaul Tranquil Tiger in Goodwood's listed race. He reacted similarly at the Curragh on Sunday, when Lahaleeb was mugged by the same distance when a first classic seemed imminent. The limping warrior of an old striker keeps hitting the bar but, after the trauma of involvement in a fatal road accident, he is back at his colourful best. Youmzain, too, has been second in successive runnings of the Arc for Channon, so group one glory in the Coronation Cup at Epsom next Friday would be universally popular.
Racing folklore echoes with the tale of Fred Winter winning the Grand Steeplechase de Paris on Mandarin despite food poisoning and broken tack that denied him steering or brakes. Forty-seven years later, on a similarly hot Paris afternoon, the race produced more heroics from another riding great. Christophe Pieux, now 41 and 15 times French champion jockey, won Sunday's marathon on Remember Rose before being virtually carried off the track in agony. Yesterday, the injuries he sustained through a collision with the rail were diagnosed as a broken toe and severed tendons. Not for nothing is he known as the “Iron Man”.
(Source: Timesonline.co.uk)
