Horse racing

For Coleridge, ‘…the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us’. Not in racing it isn’t. However sharp the instincts of bright young apprentices on the way up, however exciting the pace shown by a novice horse on the home gallops, there is simply no substitute for racecourse experience. Odd, then, that English trainers have mostly been slow to make use of one of the world’s most battle-hardened front-line jockeys, who has chosen this season to base himself in Britain.

Let’s get the crowing over first. The returns from our Twelve to Follow over jumps last season were somewhere well south of disappointing but for those who kept faith the Flat season is bringing handsome recompense. Almost immediately, Hugo Palmer’s Labrega won at Haydock at 9–2. Then, in the very first race at Royal Ascot, the Queen Anne Stakes, Eve Johnson-Houghton’s Accidental Agent flew home under Charles Bishop, named as the jockey to follow this season at a whopping 33–1. ‘Stand by for a shower,’ said the emotional trainer after landing not only her first Royal Ascot winner but also her first Group One.

On the famed Whitsbury gallops, as corn buntings and stonechats fluttered from the fence posts, a dozen of Marcus Tregoning’s team were stretching nicely. The sun reflected from the chestnut flanks of the filly Viva Bella. The handsome head of Moghram, a muscular Sir Percy colt owned by Hamdan Al Maktoum, stood out against the blue sky above the lush downland where horses have galloped since the 1880s. It called for poetry, not prose. But at Whitsbury you are never very far away from history either. In the spacious main yard, with its thatched roof, riders used to get their orders from Sir Gordon Richards. In Major’s Yard, further down the hill, is the box that Desert Orchid occupied when the spectacular grey was collecting King Georges like postage stamps for David Elsworth.

In his days as a novice jockey in the West Country, Bob Davies, who was to ride more than 900 winners, asked the trainer of the horse he was about to partner over 24 fences: ‘How does he jump?’ ‘No idea,’ came the reply. ‘That’s for you to find out.’ The pair survived the experience and Bob Davies has just retired after 35 years as the clerk of the course, company secretary and general manager who put Ludlow on the map. Having at one stage simultaneously held similar roles at Hereford and Bangor, he was a one-man demonstration of changing times. In times past, it did not occur to the powers that were that former jockeys might hold official posts in racing.

When the photo finish confirmed that Tiger Roll and Davy Russell had held on to win the Grand National by a head from the fast-finishing Pleasant Company, the crowd’s exultant cheer could have been heard over the other side of the Mersey in Birkenhead. As ever there was a grand storyline: the oldest jockey in the race, at 38, won on the smallest horse running for an owner (Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary) who had once sacked him while urging him to prove him wrong. Continuing that process, Russell will be this year’s champion jockey in Ireland. He was the leading rider at this year’s Cheltenham Festival and his own words afterwards made it utterly fitting that on the 14th attempt Davy should have made it on to the Grand National’s honours board.

At soggy Newbury last Saturday racegoers were still reliving memories of an epic Cheltenham Festival. ‘Were you there for that mano a mano Gold Cup between Native River and Might Bite?’ people were asking each other. ‘With the likes of Presenting Percy, Balko Des Flos, Footpad, Samcro and Laurina flourishing are we ever going to beat the Irish at Cheltenham again?’ No excuses, then, for taking my first opportunity for Festival reflections, especially since Roksana, the winner of the most important event on the Newbury card, the Grade Two EBF and TBA Mares ‘National Hunt’ Novices’ Hurdle Finale, was ridden by Bridget Andrews.

You can tell by the tone of the jokes how most occupations are regarded and we’ve all heard the traditional ones about the old enemy. ‘Why don’t sharks attack bookies?’ ‘Professional courtesy’. ‘Why did God invent bookmakers?’ ‘To make used-car salesmen look good.’ ‘Why are bookmakers buried an extra six feet down?’ ‘Because deep down they are very nice people.’ OK, such stories are applied to lawyers too. And journalists. But as a Racing Post headline confirmed last week, bookmakers are under heavy pressure. William Hill has been fined £6.2 million for breaching regulations on social responsibility and on money laundering.

Write a few books and you have to listen politely at parties as people who have never opened yours tell you, at some length: ‘I’ve always felt I had a book in me.’ Many things in life look easy until you have to knuckle down to it, hence the golfer Gary Player’s sardonic comment to someone who remarked on his good fortune: ‘Yes, and it’s strange how I’ve found the harder I practise, the luckier I get.’ Player’s remark came to mind after Jack Quinlan’s success in Saturday’s Betfair Hurdle at Newbury when he rode Amy Murphy’s Kalashnikov to a convincing victory in the Betfair Handicap Hurdle, the richest of its kind and the hottest contest yet this season.

If there hasn’t yet been a hurricane called Bryony there should be. The impact of Bryony Frost, just 22, this jumping season has been quite extraordinary. Since turning professional last summer, the 5lb claiming conditional has won six races on Black Corton, including the Kauto Star Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day, making her only the second girl after Lizzie Kelly to win a Grade One. She won Wincanton’s Badger Ales Chase on Present Man, she won Warwick’s Racing Post Chase on Milansbar. Last Saturday I went to Cheltenham hoping for a quiet chat. Some hope. Yet again Bryony dominated the day’s ITV coverage.

I have never been one for system betting but one little piece of guidance returns to my mind at the start of every year: back Nicky Henderson’s horses at Kempton in the run-up to the Cheltenham Festival. His runners always do well at the Thameside track, although that is not the only reason why the champion trainer has promised to chain himself to the earthmovers if the Jockey Club perseveres with its shameless plan to sell off the course for housing. Like me he simply cannot see any sense in destroying one of the fairest venues for quality jumping, home of the iconic Boxing Day sporting event the King George VI Chase, won four times by Desert Orchid and five times by Kauto Star.

Jeremy Clarkson wrote recently about a day at Newbury. He declared: ‘Claiming that horses are different is like saying ants have recognisable faces. They’re all just milk bottles. Identical.’ He went on to insist that ‘in horse racing there never is any action. It’s just meat running about.’ Pausing only to note that he was ‘taken into the paddock so people could take my picture’, Clarkson added that at summertime racing events such as Royal Ascot or the Melbourne Cup ‘women decide that in order to watch a horse running along they must not wear knickers and should fall over in the paddock every five minutes’. For the Great Ego provocation is his default mode and self-promotion a religion but I have rarely read anything sillier.

Spotting Mark Grant’s name on an Ascot racecard, I remembered a dashing young mop-haired rider I first encountered some years back as stable jockey to the splendid Andy Turnell, with whom I once shared a syndicate horse. Since that first meeting, Mark has not become a household name. Last season he had only 82 rides and produced just four winners. Since April 2013, he has won only 13 hurdles and 14 chases from 564 rides. But here was Mark, hairline receding yet enthusiasm undimmed, riding Count Meribel for the all-conquering Nigel Twiston-Davies stable in a novice hurdle. He rode him well, too, getting the four-year-old into a nice rhythm for a convincing victory that completed a hat trick for the pair after two earlier victories at Carlisle.

Richard Johnson may already have 100 winners in the bag, and Paul Nicholls may already have banked £750,000 worth of prize money for his owners, but for most racing fans Cheltenham’s November meeting marks the start of the true jumping season. There was a moment last Saturday, as the incessant rain — one that found a Barbour no impediment — soaked through my shirt, my boots proved as waterproof as cardboard and my racecard notes dissolved to soggy tissue, when I pondered whether it might have been wiser to be addicted to a warmer, drier sport: women’s beach volleyball, perhaps. But it was a brief moment.

Imagine Ryan Moore getting caught on the line by a rival’s late spurt at the end of a Newmarket race and being so upset that he goes to bed without supper, crying like a baby. Then imagine him offering to recompense the owner personally for his lost bets. That is how the popular George Fordham, champion jockey 14 times between 1855 and 1871, behaved after losing that way in 1962. Famed for his scrupulous honesty in the days when racing was riddled with corruption, Fordham has attracted less attention than his younger rival Fred Archer, known as ‘the Tin Man’ for his relentless pursuit of money. But when the two of them met in the two-horse matches that were common at the time, it was Fordham ‘the Demon’ who regularly came out on top.

The mission was simple: take a load of garden refuse to the council dump and be back in time to drive Mrs Oakley to an urgent appointment in Oxford. On my return, there was no Mrs Oakley in sight. Strange, since she is the sort who will camp out at the station the evening before to catch a 9 a.m. train. She had a house key; I didn’t. Half an hour of fretting later, as I mounted a ladder to peer through the bathroom window for fear she might have slipped over and knocked herself out, an enraged Mrs Oakley appeared beneath me. She had frozen stiff on the nearby bridge, where she had walked to cut me off on the only route home to save us motoring time.

Racing is an expensive sport to stage. Courses and grandstands have to be maintained, health and safety regulations have to be observed. Human and horse ambulances have to be provided, turnstiles have to be manned and, to maintain the ‘integrity’ of a much gambled-on sport, stables have to be guarded, and photo-finish and race-patrol cameras have to be provided. Recognising this, as they sought to clean up gambling laws in the 1960s, our politicians introduced a rare example of ring-fenced taxation: they sanctioned a levy system on bookmakers to make them responsible for producing a significant contribution to racing’s costs. By 1978 the Gambling Commission was complaining that racing had become ‘addicted to subsidy’.

Racing moves off the back pages only when its opponents have bad news to gloat over. Two examples lately have been the disciplining of Irish jump jockey Davy Russell for striking a wayward horse, and the death of the Flat-racer Permian, trained in Yorkshire by Mark Johnston, after he broke a leg as he crossed the finishing line at Arlington Park in Illinois. The Russell saga reminded me of the morality tale of the frozen bird in a Russian forest that falls from the sky exhausted. A kindly hunter places the tiny creature inside his fur jacket, where it thaws. Anxious to carry on his shooting, the hunter spots a heap of still-steaming elk dung and places the creature in it to continue its recovery. Restored to health, the rescued bird sits up and sings joyously.

Having spent three quarters of my life covering politics and the other quarter following racing, I am often asked what the two have in common. One answer is that politicians are often gamblers. David Cameron tried to solve his party’s divisions over Europe by launching the Brexit referendum and failed spectacularly when an irritated electorate overturned the odds. Despite having a workable majority, Theresa May bet the Tory farm on a snap election seeking to increase it and she, too, lost on an apparent certainty. Playing party political games with the nation’s future, neither deserved any better. Certainly, I find few in racing who believe that Brexit, especially May’s beloved ‘hard Brexit’, is going to help them.