Better late than never

When I wrote a chapter yesterday afternoon, we didn't yet know whether racing would resume on Monday and whether, if the sport did indeed get the go-ahead, Hope Is High would get a run at Yarmouth on Wednesday.  We now know, on Sunday evening, that racing is indeed set to resume tomorrow and that Hope is indeed running at Yarmouth on Wednesday.  Good news in both cases.  It'll be a shock to go to the races again - I've got rather accustomed to not leaving Newmarket and being in a daily routine which encompasses not much of a variety of events, so the thought of driving a horsebox to Yarmouth and then going through all the necessary rigmarole once we get there is quite daunting - but it'll be good to get started.

Hope has never won first-up in her five previous seasons of racing, but she's very well and ready to run a bold race.  However, it's a competitive race and I feel that some of her rivals, in particular Cotton Club and Dubious Affair, would need to under-perform for her to win.  But she'll do her best, as always.  Funnily enough, getting a run wasn't much of an achievement.  In general, getting a run with a horse in June won't be easy, but the 'firm, good to firm in places' going has meant that the declarations weren't numerous.  There was actually a need to eliminate one horse from our race (thirteen were declared and twelve was the limit) but six of the races on the card don't have a full field.  But that, I am sure, will prove to be an aberration in the picture of June as a whole, and wholly the result of the very fast ground.

One interesting and rather dispiriting aspect of racing's resumption has been the mass of very negative responses to Matthew Hancock's joyous tweet announcing the return of the sport.  This seems to have attracted plenty of comment, and I believe that Nick Luck brought the subject up in an interview with Nick Rust in Luck On Sunday today.  Overall, though, I don't think that we need to be too depressed about this outpouring of anti-racing sentiment.  I think that the problem is that Johnson, Gove and Hancock have pissed off so many people over the past week by tying themselves in knots in a vain attempt to convince us that Dominic Cummings is a more admirable human being than he is that at present any of them could tweet 'I respect the Pope for his piety' and they would stir up a hornet's nest of disagreement and resentment.

Overall, though, notwithstanding that this government has earned itself some well-deserved opprobrium this spring, we're much better having friends in the Cabinet than not.  The current BHA hierarchy can take a lot of credit for the fact that so many politicians are currently favourably disposed towards our sport, and it would be wrong not to give them credit for that.  And the nice thing is that, now that the return of racing has been confirmed, the unfair torrent of undeserved criticism of the BHA seems to have dried up.  Better late than never.