Just plain wrong

I won't use the headline 'Sad Mad Bad' for this post because that went out of fashion in the spring of 1995.  Celtic Swing was the best colt in Britain but he had bad knees.  He was a narrowly beaten favourite on firm ground in the 2,000 Guineas and came home with soreness in his knees.  His connections realised that the end was in sight so wished to minimise the risk of breaking him down, and thus elected to contest the Prix du Jockey-Club on a flat track at Chantilly than have him gallop up, down and around Epsom.  Tony Morris felt that it was wrong for the best colt in England not to be running in the Derby and wrote as such in the Racing Post, which ran the front-page headline 'Sad Mad Bad', borrowing words which Tony had used in his article.  As it was, Celtic Swing's connections made the right decision: even racing round Chantilly more or less finished him off, but at least he won the race.  Had he run at Epsom, he'd have finished even more damaged, and probably would have been beaten.

Anyway, I'll just say, 'Just plain wrong'.  "What is?", you might well ask.  Well, you might have read a handful of weeks ago of a £5,000 bonus being added to certain specified races on a Sunday, thanks to the negotiation of the Horsemen's Group, but which can only be claimed in full by owners who are ROA members.  Other owners will only receive something like 30% of the sum.  And this is just plain wrong.

It's wrong anyway (and possibly illegal) but I've recently stumbled upon a particular reason for this being wrong.

I can understand the ROA pushing for this because the brief of the ROA, of course, is to promote the interests not of owners per se, but of owners who are members of the ROA.  Fair enough.  But what is wrong is that the National Trainers' Federation has not opposed this: as trainers, our duty is to push for the interests of all our owners equally, whether or not they are ROA members.  I raised this point with the NTF top brass at one stage last year on a different matter, only to be told that I'm wrong - so I'll write it here instead, as nobody can tell me that I'm wrong on this.  (And if you post a comment below this piece telling me that I'm wrong, I have the power to delete it.  So there!).

Anyway, that should be the long and short of it, but it actually gets worse.  The problem is that it is not simply  a case of owners deciding whether or not they wish to join the ROA; a surprisingly high proportion of horses are not eligible to be made eligible for this bonus, if that makes any sense.  Baffled?  Right - I'll start at the beginning.

The beginning is the autumn of 1995.  Lawrence Wadey, Bill Benter and Gerry Grimstone formed a racing partnership called the 1997 Partnership.  I bought three horses at the sales that autumn for them (an unraced two-year-old filly by Old Vic called Old Roma, consigned by Luca Cumani's stable, a yearling filly by Salt Dome whom they named Seaside, and a yearling colt by Ela-Mana-Mou whom they named Il Principe and who is pictured at the top of this chapter in a photograph taken by Vernon Whitehouse returning under John Egan to the winner's enclosure in August 1997 at Musselburgh after the second of his 10 victories).  Anyway, Lawrence, Bill and Gerry have been the most wonderful patrons of this stable and have had a succession of horses here over the past 18 years, with Ethics Girl (pictured here under Darryll Holland after winning last year's Brighton Cup - and if you're wondering about the cap, Darryll's wearing the right one, whereas Egan and his valet had got in a muddle at Musselburgh - and then a bit farther down catching some now-long-lost rays of sunshine in the stable after exercise one day last October) being their current colour-bearer.

Anyway, when Lawrence, Bill and Gerry formed the 1997 Partnership, they did what they thought was the right thing by enrolling the partnership as an ROA member.  They've been paying their annual subscription ever since and their membership number is 19598.  Last year it became apparent that Ethics Girl's sponsorship by Tattersalls Ireland had expired, so they applied to the ROA to take up that organisation's sponsorship option. The response from the ROA was, staggeringly, that the partnership was not eligible as it was not an ROA member.  When we pointed out that they'd been paying membership fees for 18 years, we were told that this should not have been happening as partnerships are not eligible for membership.  (No offer to repay the past 18 years of fees which had seemingly only been accepted in error has so far, as far as I am aware, been made).  Anyway, apparently if a horse owned by a partnership is to be eligible for the benefits of ROA membership, then every member of the partnership has to be an ROA member.

Well, you might think that that is a bit stiff: one man can own 10 horses and, by paying one subscription, all 10 horses will be covered, whereas if 10 men form a partnership to own one horse, then 10 subscriptions have to be paid for that one horse to be covered.  But, it's actually worse than that.  Only people, apparently, who own at least 50% of a horse are eligible to be members of the ROA, so this means that a partnership such as the 1997 Partnership, which is composed of three long-standing and loyal owners who each currently own 33.3% of a horse, cannot be eligible.  So, if Ethics Girl were to win one of these races, her owners would not be able to be eligible to collect the full bonus whatever happened (unless they were to buy another horse so that they each then owned 66.7% of a horse, and then all three of them signed up individually as ROA members).  And that's far from an extreme case: there could easily be 10 of them in the partnership.  There must be a very large amount of horses who will be ineligible for this full bonus, irrespective of whether their owners wish to pay up for eligibility.  Highclere horses will be out; ditto Elite Racing Club horses ...

How, under the circumstances, can the current rules have been allowed to be drawn up?  And how on earth has the NTF allowed this to happen?  It has failed badly in its duties to its members in failing to oppose this vigorously.  There will be plenty of trainers who are NTF members who will have the majority of their stable ineligible to be signed up to this scheme; very possibly there will be NTF members who have their entire stable ineligible for this.  It is just plain wrong for these syndicate-owned horses to be discriminated against in this manner.

Nobody seems to mind.  I gave the NTF my views on the subject of the NTF supporting moves which discriminate against non-ROA members last year, and it wasn't interested.  The BHA doesn't seem interested as Jim McGrath (who seems to be the only person apart from me who thinks that this is wrong) has apparently raised the matter but not, as far as I know, received much in the way of a satisfactory response.  (And it is hard to see what response could be satisfactory).  The press isn't interested: the Racing Post carried a short article outlining Jim's view, but has done nothing to follow the matter up.  But I'm interested because I don't like injustice, so I thought that, on a bitterly cold evening at the end of another bitterly cold winter day (and this photograph of the view on TV at Southwell this arvo really conveys how unpleasant the conditions are at present) I'd waste half an hour on a chapter of waffle (and you can be the judge of whether it's more or less inconsequential than the usual waffle) on the subject.

It will be interesting when a non-eligible horse wins one of these races and the connections launch a legal challenge.  That might focus the BHA on how wrong the current situation is.  But I hope that it won't come to that - and, if someone in the BHA reads this, perhaps it won't.

Here endeth the lesson.