(Non-)issues

Another week started.  It's been a quiet enough Sunday, but with three horses set to run in the middle of the week (Roy at Brighton on Tuesday, Hope Is High at Bath on Wednesday, Konigin at Leicester on Thursday) that meant that I had three horses to ride this morning, so didn't finish morning stables any earlier than I would do Monday to Saturday.  Still, I started an hour later so that was a bonus.  I'm looking forward to the week.  If you've read the previous chapter, you'll know that all three horses are fit and well, and all three are being aimed at what I believe should be suitable races.  So we can be full of hope, as ever!

I sometimes like to scan the wider racing world in this column, but I've been studiously avoiding most of the 'issues' recently as we've heard more than enough of them without my augmenting their over-coverage.  We have had the Magnolia Cup (in which our representative - human representative, not equine - Rachael Gowland, pictured here, did really well, failing by a few inches to win on a horse rated 49 who was meeting the 66-rated winner at level weights).  We have had the whip.  We have had the putative allowance for female jockeys.  We have had more than enough of all of them.

It's funny how things can become a 'issue'.  Charlie Fellowes wrote a column in the Racing Post and suddenly the whip, a subject of which we had reached saturation point years ago, was an issue again.  Kevin Blake presumably was short of a topic for his blog one week so decided to resuscitate the hypothetical female jockeys' allowance and hoped that nobody would remember that we'd done this one to death a couple of years ago and, one had hoped, already put it to bed.  Suddenly, once again this was an issue.

Female jockeys collectively are doing better all the time, gradually breaking down centuries-old prejudices, and at last seem to be winning the battle to be regarded as jockeys, rather than as a separate and inferior group or riders.  We shouldn't even have been discussing something so chauvinist as an idea to turn the clock back, to turn them once again into a separate group - to classify them as female jockeys rather than jockeys - and, worse still, to re-write the rules to enshrine the concept that they are inferior by virtue of their gender.  Barmy.

We had some very good discussion of issues on the Racing Debate on Sky Sports Racing this morning, though, as the panel was as good as you could get: Tanya Stevenson, Stuart Williams, Michael Channon, three of the highest-calibre people in the sport.  Unfortunately I only caught the latter stages because the programme was halfway through by the time that I finished morning stables and came back into the house, but what I did see was very good.  One thing with which I did struggle, though, was the idea of 'fitting the racing programme to the horse population'.  That's fine in theory, but in practice would inevitably lead to a phasing out of longer-distance races.  We'd end up like the USA, or Queensland.

We have a great rule to try to protect longer-distance racing - ie the one that each programme has to contain two races beyond a mile whose distances add up to two and a half miles or farther (and obviously can contain more longer-distances races than that if wished) - even if that rule, unfortunately, remains less well policed than it should be.  The 'commercial' market will just push more and more breeders down the road of producing short-distance horses unless there is incentive in the racing programme to race stayers, that incentive being that the opportunities for stayers are too plentiful and too good to ignore.

Thank God we have the EBF doing plenty to encourage the breeding and racing of stayers.  There used to be more races for stock whose parents had raced over a distance, eg the Hyperion Stakes at Ascot, but in time we got down to, I think, only the Chesham Stakes and the Washington Singer Stakes.  The EBF has done a very good job in pushing to have some more of such races introduced, even if I'm a bit doubtful about the condition being that either the sire or the dam can have been a middle- or long-distance runner.  Having it apply as previously to the sire, or to both, might be better: good mares are always going to be bred from, irrespective of the distance at which they were good, and what we want to prevent is them all just going to short-distance stallions.  The condition as it is does not do this.  But good on 'em for trying this initiative.  It's better than doing nothing, which otherwise is the default setting.