Straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel

"I'm talking about Winning Post. I'm talking about the mysterious world of ad-selling. A world where masses of words are used to conceal the fact that we're doing nothing but straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. Where we go to bed every night and pray that the next day we'll be able to turn water into wine".

Regular readers of this blog might be familiar with the peculiar linguistic style of our Australian friend Richard Sims; and if there is any doubt, references to Winning Post usually give the game away. Anyway, I was reminded of one or Richard's more lucid (or less unlucid) offerings (see above) this week when I attended the Inside Information Seminar at the Rowley Mile on Tuesday. You'll have a read quite a lot about it in Wednesday's Racng Post. Well, that's not totally true: the one you read about was the 11.30 seminar, but I opted for the second sitting (1pm) which drew a smaller crowd (five people from Newmarket, namely three trainers - James Eustace, Lucy Wadham and myself - plus Justin Wadham and Colin Nutter, and four permit-holders from farther afield), which surprised me as I found that 1pm fitted into the gap between stable hours much more satisfactorily than 11.30am. Anyway, it seemed that a lot of people got hot under the collar at the 11.30 session, but ours was very uneventful. Apparently many of the delegates (is that the correct word?) felt that Paul Scotney should have been there, but personally I didn't feel that our session was in any way impoverished by his absence. We had three people explaining the very obvious and the more-or-less obvious to us, and, in a BHA masterstroke, one of them was Robin Gow, who is a man of such patent integrity and common sense - not to mention with so solid a racing background - that it would be hard to find fault in any presentation of which he was one of the co-presenters. So that was all fairly straightforward. For sure it took 45 minutes to tell us what could have been told in 5 seconds with the words "Just use your common sense", but if one couldn't spare 45 painless minutes once a lifetime it would be a poor show. Anyway, getting back to the wit and wisdom of Richard Sims, among the quotations which I read in yesterday's Racing Post was Jeff Pearce's observation that "they're taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut", which is probably a fair description of what is happening. But, that said, I still think that our Dickie would have put it better, and I prefer "straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel", whatever that means. And, anyway, the walnut clearly does exist, or has existed: whereas to you are me it would be common sense that you can't run out to the carpark between races to phone your punter to tell him to lay your horse in the next because you could make sure it won't win - so that you can either collect a fat envelope if the horse does indeed get beaten, or do some grovelling if you're proved you wrong - Panorama proved that it apparently hasn't always been common sense to everyone.

So that has been one notable event of the week, and another was (well, again that's not true, because this took place in the evening of the last day of last week) the victory of Strike Force at Wolverhampton on Saturday night. He was the horse who had shuffled round the show-ring umpteen times the previous Sunday, looking like a horse for whom athletic excellence wasn't an option, so it was great to see that he had saluted the judge a mere six days later, providing a great tribute to his own ability and courage, as well as to the skill of his connections. And what was also nice was that he was ridden by Jack Mitchell, who should have been Exhibit A in my recent round-up of good apprentices in Newmarket who are enjoying well-deserved success, but whose name didn't even appear in the review for no reason other than my sieve-headedness. Jack arrived in Chris Wall's stable at the start of the year, his father having packed up training in Epsom the previous autumn, and he's created a very good impression indeed since his arrival in the town, not only because of his continued good race-riding, but also because he is quite plainly a very industrious, courteous and decent lad. He seems sure to make a big success of his life and, while it seems in one way hard to imagine, purely on the matter of size, Philip Mitchell siring a Flat jockey, Jack is so far staying small enough to make a long-term career of Flat race-riding look feasible; and if size does become an issue in the future, I'd say that he'd possess the required self-discipline to give himself the maximum chance of staying light enough. Furthermore, if Maurice Kirby can sire a Flat jockey then anyone can: he's a very big man, and his son Adam, tall though he is, remains the correct weight. One forgets how young Adam is - I noticed his 20th birthday in the Racing Post three or four weeks ago - so it is possible that the struggle will become too hard for him at some point in the future, but he too is doing very well, and deserves a mention in dispatches; and I think that we can squeeze him in on the basis that he's a former Newmarket apprentice, even if nowadays he's neither Newmarket-based nor an apprentice.

As we approach the end of the chapter, I'll move the subject away from talented horsemen and back to the man with whom we began. I'm often accused of bagging Richard Sims, so in the interests of fairness I'll pass on this very complimentary report which was given to me by someone who had attended a recent ceremony in which Richard was invested with the Freedom of the Suburb of Keysborough, and in which a number of local dignitaries took it in turns to sing his praises: "It was a summary of Sims' empire and of the man himself, his various honorary doctorates, all his good deeds: Sims the patron of the arts, Sims the humanist, Sims the young people's friend, Sims the sports fan, Sims the sponsor of our cultural heritage, the enthusiastic restorer of old Aboriginal fishing spears, Sims the honorary doctor of archaeology who provides generous funding for digs at what might be Iron Age dwellings on Wilson's Promontary, Sims the patron of music who sponsors two violinists and a bassoonist in the Ballarat Symphony Orchestra. Founder of the Sims Prize for the most gifted young opera singer in the country. Generous donor to peace research in Australasia. And all the other things I can't remember. It was as if he were being portrayed as a one-man Australian Academy. Without a drop of blood on his hands.".