Musings on two veterans

I don't know if I did the right thing in the last chapter by letting the cat out of the bag that Richard Sims was one of the Ten Tenors who 'entertained' the crowd at Flemington on Cup Day. Richard has always liked to keep his vocal skills to himself and he had been trying to prevent his many friends from knowing about his big gig, even going so far as to dye his hair again so that he wouldn't be recognised. However, in mitigation I can only quote from a passage from the latest edition of the Victorian Advertising Review, written by a visitor - who shall be nameless - to Winning Post to whom Richard regularly sells ads:

"I haven't described Mr Sims' appearance beyond remarking on his similarity to Father Joe. Like Joe, he is a man complete, at once tall and bearish, the features as permanent as lava stone, every movement an event. Like Joe, he is a father to his men. He is somewhere in his late fifties, you assume, yet you have no sense that he was yesterday a dashing lad, or tomorrow will be on the shelf. He is rectitude personified, he is constabular, he is the eucalypt of Australia. Just crossing a room he takes the moral justification for his actions with him. You can wait an eternity for his smile, but when it comes you're closer to God.

"Yet for me the real man, as ever, is the voice: the singer's considered tempo, the timed pauses always for effect, the fireside Gippsland cadences. In Keysborough, he has told me more than once, he is the leading baritone. In his younger days he sang tenor-contralto and had been tempted to go professional, but loved his Winning Post more. And it was Mr Sims' voice again that dominated all other impressions at the instant of my venturing through the doorway. I was aware, dimly, of other sounds and other bodies on the premises. I saw an open sash window and billowing net curtains, so evidently there was a breeze blowing up here which hadn't been the case at street level. But the focus of my interest was the upright silhouette of Mr Sims against the window and his homely Gippsland tones as he went on speaking into his cellphone ...

So that's good. Dickie's singing is a matter of public record, so I haven't made a boo-boo in announcing it to a wider readership. I probably should have pointed him out to the At The Races viewers during the telecast of the Cup, but I was too pre-occupied in passing on the wisdom of some of his compatriots. As in so many things, the key to presenting is preparation, and I had duly supplemented my own Cup Day notes with the considered opinions of some of the locals, and went to the studio armed with print-outs of the views of, among others, Clive Baldwin, Dan Happell and Peter Temple. The last named had been kind enough to provide the background to the omen tip for the Corey Brown-ridden Bauer (on the basis that Bauer and Brown had had a previous productive assocation, when the Austrian artist Ferdinand Bauer and the Scottish botanist Robert Brown had sailed together in 1801 on the 'Investigator' with Matthew Flinders to undertake a botanical survey of the new continent). However, aphorism of the night had to go to Joff Dumas, whose form summaries for selected runners included this opinion of a runner in the second race: "Rendzina has the ability but has been spectacularly badly placed by the man who made last year's awful, never-ending Melb Cup speech". I, probably wisely, kept those views to myself on the night, even though I'm sure that they would have struck a chord with anyone who either fell asleep or was sick during the presentations after Efficient's victory.

To move closer to home, we had day one of the Open Meeting today, which was really interesting. I'll try not to mention the word 'cheating', because that was more than over-used during the Racing UK telecast, and I'll restrict my views on the opportunist whip-borrowing incident to saying that I would describe a rider who has lost his whip taking a loan of one mid-race from a rider who is pulling up as a man negating a disadvantage, rather than as one taking an unfair advantage (it would only be that if his rivals were riding without whips, which clearly wasn't the case); and to say that I can't see how the rules can disallow such a thing when it is not permissable under the rules to ride in a race without a whip (strange but true), even if one is on a horse who goes more sweetly when the rider isn't carrying one. But that incident, which prompted Racing UK's sensationalist hyperbole, was merely one of many unusual incidents during the afternoon, the highlight of which was the winning display of tactical acumen by the excellent Irish jockey Davy Russell in the Cross-Country chase.

I'll naturally be watching the remaining two afternoons of Cheltenham, but I'll have half a mind on worrying over our forthcoming runners. To Be Or Not To Be will head up to Wolverhampton tomorrow evening, and then on Monday Kadouchski will head to Leicester. As we don't have many jumping runners (we don't have many Flat runners either, but they do at least outnumber our jumping runners), a day at a jumps meeting is always a pleasure, particularly when the horse ought to have a chance, which should be the case on Monday. Take Me There, too, should have a chance at Market Rasen on Thursday as long as we get some (more - we had four hours of nice weather today) decent weather in the next five days, because he looks to be entered in a very suitable race. And Filemot ought to run adequately at Kempton on Wednesday evening, if she gets a run of course. One would have thought that getting a run with a 52-rated filly in a 46-55 handicap would not be difficult, particularly as the race will be divided, but amazingly it is not guaranteed - so you can understand why I've accepted the inevitable by retiring the 42-rated Run From Nun (who dropped another pound to 42 for David Probert losing his stirrup, naturally).

Mention of Filemot brings me on to the thorny subject of Dean McKeown. I was pleased to have a chat with Dean at Southwell on the day that Filemot ran, because he is a man whom I like and respect, and a man whom I feel has been very badly treated. I do not claim that Dean is innocent, but I think that he has been grossly over-punished. I do not condone horses not being ridden on their merits - see my Melbourne Cup views if you are in any doubt about that - whatever the circumstances, and I think that British stewards take this crime far too lightly. However, the fact is that the stewards do take this crime lightly, and it has been established time and time again that the penalty for not riding a horse to achieve the best possible placing is a suspension of a small amount of weeks. This still seems to be the case - witness a jumps jockey receiving a two-week suspension yesterday for exactly that - and yet Dean has been given a four-year disqualification for this. That makes no sense at all. If a jockey can be seen to have been a party to the laying of the horse, or if he takes orders to stop a horse from people other than the horse's connections (watch Panorama if you doubt that these things could happen), then he should rightly have the book thrown at him; but if his mount's connections instruct him to give the horse "a quiet run" and he rides to orders, I don't see what difference to his punishment it should make whether or not the connections have laid the horse. It should, of course, make a huge difference to THEIR punishments, but the jockey has done nothing different whether they ask him to save the horse for another day and don't lay the horse or do lay him. So Dean appears to have done something for which common convention suggests that he should have received a short suspension (as I say, I actually think suspensions for this should be much higher, but the BHA seems to disagree) and has been given a four-year disqualification. To me mind, that makes no sense. So that is why I was so pleased to see him at Southwell, shake his hand and wish him well.

Of course, the funny thing was that when I had my benedictory chat with Dean, I didn't realise that he'd just come out of the stewards' room for supposedly stopping another horse! Dean must have thought it slightly odd that I made no reference to that day's events, but, as we were only in the penultimate race, all this had happened before I arrived, leaving me blissfully unaware of the furore. Anyway, once I subsequently discovered what had happened, it bothered me that Dean might have been so stupid as to stop the horse while the spotlight was on him and while the decision of whether or not to appeal his disqualification was looming. Stopping that horse would have been very, very stupid, and one thing Dean isn't is stupid. I was, therefore, very relieved to hear Liam Casey, a close friend and very experience racing man whose opinion I very much respect, tell me this evening that he had seen the race and that, in his view, Dean had done nothing wrong, and that, if the horse had been his, he would have been delighted with the ride. As we know, the one sure way of making a horse run below form is by asking him (or allowing him, if he is naturally free-running) to do too much too soon. Aidan O'Brien's jockeys proved this truism in the Melbourne Cup, and we proved it at Southwell with Filemot: on the basis that the horses who win over the straight five furlongs at Southwell on the sand are those who race up with the pace all the way, we had asked our jockey to have her up there all the way, with the result that she dropped right out in the final stages, running well below the form of her five-furlong race at Nottingham two weeks previously when the jockey had given her time to find her feet in the race and she had finished strongly from the rear to pass the post two lengths off the winner. Liam's opinion is that Dean was guilty that day of nothing more than getting his mount to run as well as possible: he was drawn low on a debutante on the sand so, when she unsurprisingly missed the start, he didn't ask her to do the impossible as the sand was being kicked in her face, instead nursing her along until he could find some clear space, from which point he pushed her all the way to the line. This seemed very similar to a previous occasion which demonstrated to me that it would be wrong to take it for granted that the stewards' verdicts at Southwell are good ones. A filly with minimal ability whose name I can't remember, trained by Chris Dwyer, ran the best race of her life there one day a few years ago - ie she finished not too far behind the place-getters - because her rider Alan Rutter had the sense not to ask her to go at a pace which she would not be able to maintain, which meant that she got very far back in the early stages but then was able to run on so well that she was able to beat superior, but worse ridden, rivals. The funny thing was that, watching the race at home, I was so pleased that the filly had at last run a half-decent race, and had been so well ridden, that I rang her owner after the race to offer my congratulations and to say how pleased I was that they had at last had a reasonably good run from the filly and how impressed I was by how intelligently Alan had ridden her. You can imagine my surprise when I was given the information that Chris was at that moment in the stewards' room being grilled over the running and riding of the filly, for which he and Alan were subsequently disciplined. Anyway, that incident taught me to be very wary of stewarding decisions at Southwell, and by the sound of it Dean's ride is another example of this.

Where this leaves us - or Dean - I don't know, but I suppose that the one thing which we should take out of it is that perhaps the stewards are right to be so lenient as regards punishment to supposed non-triers, because there is a very real danger that innocent men could be being punished. Certainly Alan Rutter that day was guilty of nothing worse than judging the pace better than the other jockeys in the race, and if he had been given a lengthy ban an even worse injustice would have been done than was done.

And don't expect to see Filemot making the running on Wednesday!