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If journalism really is “the first draft of history” then the opening paragraph of racing`s obituary was written in 2024. The forecasts are that racing is on its deathbed, a prognosis based on dispiriting retelling of its many ailments.
Income is in greatest need of resuscitation. The newly, 2024, elected Labour Government found, so they say, a £22billion ‘black hole` in the balance sheet left by the previous government: late in the year Racing discovered a £3billion ‘black hole` in its finances due to a decline in betting turnover and the consequent reduction in taxes bookmakers pay to the Levy Board to redistribute throughout the sport. People`s betting habits have changed – shifting to football, cricket, golf, darts (!), politics even in the 2024 election year: to be frank, anything bar racing. Dips in our sport are nothing new but “those who don`t learn from history are condemned to repeat it”.
We used to have a Racing Calendar, beginning in 1727 as a weekly broadsheet on yellow paper publishing all the entries and all the Rule changes and edicts handed down by the Jockey Club who held power until 2006. You can still get a tarted up fortnightly illustrated version, but all practical work – entries etc. - is done online. I can`t begin describe how the sports putative leaders, the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) has messed around with the Fixture List – for example the trainer`s and jockey`s championships do not cover the whole year but are squeezed into the summer months. And the jockey who rides most winners in a calendar year is not champion – ‘explanations` would only confuse the issue further, the simplest is that the winter fixture list on synthetic surfaces at either end of the turf season ‘doesn`t count`.
The most contentious of all racing`s debates is over the whip, the use of which may be abolished sooner rather than later. When the Cesarewitch winner was disqualified due to the winning apprentice rider`s excessive use – and then restored on appeal because one of his intended hits missed - the pickle racing has got itself into over the topic looks insoluble.
The fact that several of racing`s ‘skippers` – CEOs and Chairmen - have deserted their posts at the BHA and Jockey Club (and other acronyms) this past year can`t be coincidental. The half-page advert in the Racing Post for a new CEO at the BHA contained well over a thousand words concerning the dynamism and business experience that the winning candidate would demonstrate. Knowledge of horses and horseracing? Didn`t get a mention: Admiral Rous (more of whom later) turning in his grave.
What isn`t debatable is that the bloated fixture list, attended by declining crowds; declining public interest (see absence of racing from daily papers); even the prominence given to other theatres of betting in the sole trade paper, the Racing Post, all these are ringing the tocsin bell. There is little or no interest in the eighth and ninth (bad) races at woebegone sand fixtures on freezing winter nights when the alternatives are Manchester United and Liverpool playing in the Premier League, or England playing Test matches in warmer climates: somebody is potting the last black ball at the World Snooker Championships or hitting the winning bulls eye at the Darts Final. Bookmakers promote such betting mediums ahead of racing and why not? Their raison d`etre is only to make the maximum money.
In 2025 the Calendar overflows with a glut of 1465 fixtures. A minority of them will be reported – the high days and holidays - because newspapers no longer pay journalist`s expenses for day to day coverage. Televised racing is maintained with two dedicated channels – but nobody is betting both will survive the year.
So we play the blame game – and the bogeymen are…the politicians and their ‘affordability checks`. Bookmakers have always cancelled winning accounts (as they have turned a blind eye to losers who were sufficiently powerful, particularly politicians). The state classifies everyone, winners and losers, as potentially “vulnerable” and, in effect, wants to take power of attorney over every punter`s gambling: to save them from themselves. A debate on the checks will take place in Parliament on February 25th. There is no betting on whether there will be a favourable resolution.
Crass, arbitrary limits on what people can bet are the equivalent of the Indian betting tax, crude levers dictating people`s lives - with the identical result – betting driven underground to the murky depths of the unregulated market. In the spring Racing`s cheerleaders (failing miserably) attempted to raise the sport`s profile. 100,000 signatures to a petition to stimulate parliamentary debate on the matter: predictably it got us precisely nowhere.
A sclerotic racing administration is palsied while new appointments “settle in”. If racing gets “the rulers it deserves” we must be guilty of some pretty heinous ‘crimes`. Bring on the new ‘gold rush` of Artificial Intelligence (AI); it can`t be worse than the garbled letter of the head of the Gambling Commission to the Racing Post, justifying the strangulation of betting in the UK.
Cheltenham jumping mania occupies the winter months so the sand debut of future One Thousand Guineas winner Elmalka (Dubawi) went largely unremarked. The two salient facts from the latest Cheltenham Festival in March were the cost, £30, to have your vehicle pulled out of the flooded morass of the car parks - when you`d already paid upwards of £100 to get in. The other was a meeting dominated by arguably the best pound for pound trainer, jumps and flat, in the world – Willie Mullins who won the Grand National to become the first foreign, i.e. Irish-based trainer to win a UK jump trainer`s title since the immortal Vincent O`Brien. And Mullins had a winner at Royal Ascot too.
Enough of the gripes and groans – for the moment. The season`s champions deserved their due: Oisin Murphy for coming out of the shadows of suspensions to win his third title: the almost inevitable seventh trainer`s title for Aidan O`Brien principally founded on the enigmatic Derby winner City of Troy.
O`Brien is never guilty of underplaying his horses and City of Troy was another “best ever” though designating the colt`s sire Justify as “Galileo with more class”, took some swallowing. When Justify who stands in America, has matched Galileo`s twelve Championships or achieved his 100th Group One winner such as Galileo did with Content in the Yorkshire Oaks, then comparisons can be drawn. He died in 2021, incomparable.
After ignominy in the Two Thousand Guineas City of Troy was triumphant at Epsom, a miserable flop in America`s Breeders` Cup. He raced everywhere but in the country of his birth, Ireland where he has gone, along with 2023 Derby winner Auguste Rodin to stand at Coolmore where, for the moment, at least, Wootton Bassett holds sway.
The first colt in eighty-six years to win the Two Thousand Guineas who had not raced at two, Notable Speech (Dubawi) had a similar up and down cv to City of Troy`s, bouncing back after defeat at Royal Ascot to win another Group One in the Sussex – before subsiding again. Elmalka`s One Thousand was followed by four defeats and the Oaks winner Ezeliya (Dubawi) didn`t race after her Epsom victory. Jan Brueghel (Galileo) at least maintained his unbeaten (four race) career in the St Leger though his last three wins were hard won gritty struggles.
Guineas runner-up Rosallion (Blue Point) had strong claims to be the best miler for his Irish Guineas and St James`s Palace (Gr1) victories but he wasn`t seen again after injury at Royal Ascot.
The sprinters spent the season leapfrogging. Arguably the best was 47.000gns bargain Bradsell (by Tasleet) but in the Breeders` Cup sprint Starlust (Zoustar), behind Bradsell on other occasions, turned the tables.
Aidan O`Brien still needs three more titles to reach Sir Michael Stoute`s ten. But at 53 O`Brien is at the height of his powers aided by the best jockey in the world Ryan Moore. Then again there will never be another Sir Michael (78) whose stellar career, champion ten times, concluded at the end of the 2024 season. His achievements not only featured a constant stream of Derby winners (six), and triumphs worldwide but in his singularity and presence Stoute stood apart and above his contemporaries - bar the late Sir Henry Cecil who held the same number of titles.
Sir Michael`s name and that of Shergar`s, winner of the 1981 Derby by ten lengths and stolen from Ballymany Stud in Ireland two years later names, are coupled in the history of the Turf. The great trainer will be much missed.
Champion stallion, for the first time, aged 19, was Dark Angel. Perhaps his best offspring was the 2020 champion sprinter Battaash and Dark Angel became the first champion for fifty years whose offspring were predominantly speedsters. Agency for Dark Angel`s success - with no less than two hundred and sixty representatives – rested largely with multiple Group One miler Charyn. Former champion Frankel dropped to fifth but the emerging force of Amo Racing were happy to go to 4.4m gns for a record breaking yearling by Frankel, the greatest racehorse in many people`s experience.
Godolphin`s Dubawi sired the highest number of stakes winners. But Galileo fathered undisputed staying champion Kyprios, the six-year-old winner of all his seven races including the Ascot Gold Cup.
German-bred gelding Goliath beat the subsequent Arc winner Bluestocking (by Camelot) in the King George & Queen Elizabeth (Gr 1) and reignited the debate on whether geldings should be allowed in all Group One races. The argument for and against droned on, as dog-eared as that over the whip.
The Flat season ratings suggested 2024 was not a notable year. The inconsistency of City of Troy and the previous year`s Derby winner Auguste Rodin led to the conclusion that it wasn`t a “vintage year”. Every year has a ‘vintage` but some are great, some good and some ordinary – plonk.
One trainer, Ralph Beckett, 53, would surely wish to ‘bottle` his 2024 season. One of the rewards for the handler of Bluestocking and Starlust was that the 4m gns Frankel yearling headed to his Hampshire stable. Beckett was only seventh in the trainer`s table accumulating just short of £4m prize money. But the sheer numbers of his first time out two-year-old winners was breath-taking and any one of half a dozen could be the game changer in 2025. Beckett had forty-nine two-year-old winners, an overall strike-rate approaching one in three. For many shrewd observers the one to follow will be the once-raced Bright Times Ahead, a 460,000gns buy, related to many winners and by Lope de Vega also sire of Godolphin`s Shadow of Light, winner of the top two-year-old`s Group 1, the Dewhurst Stakes.
I confess I am influenced by the proximity of my neighbour Beckett and my involvement with Highclere Thoroughbred Racing but a mention must be given to their Newbury maiden winner Centigrade (Too Darn Hot) as a dark horse for the 2025 Classics.
If the year was notable for anything it would be the Sales spending spree of the football agent extraordinary, Iranian-born Kia Joorabchian (53). He would pay more for a middle of the road footballer than his 4.4m gns Frankel yearling – a mere item in his 24m gns bill for a bunch of choice yearlings, plus another 8m gns for breeding stock. The talk is that he has bid £2.5m for Sir Michael Stoute`s historic Freemason Lodge, Newmarket stables. Such commitments illustrate Joorabchian`s intent to become a ‘third force` - along with Coolmore and the Gulf Arabs.
Joorabchian is though taking off from a virtual standing start. Coolmore`s ‘inheritance` stretches back over half a century with John Magnier the great mind behind the constant success. Sheikh Mohammed, who has spent far more and achieved marginally less, could afford to buy Warren Place stables in 2015 after Sir Henry Cecil`s death – and promptly moth ball this iconic yard. The Sheikh has changed personnel - trainers and jockeys - but the continuity, while not obtaining the hegemony he has sought, has changed the map of racing.
The old order will resist upstart rivals and there is no return for failures to become top dog– people with seemingly endless money and ambition have always come and gone from the game. The only thing that seems permanent is the lack of quality and foresight of racing`s autocratic governors.
Rs of the 2024 Flat season awards
Shadow of Light would have remained unbeaten for Godolphin had he not been touched off in the Gimcrack. With money being poured into bloodstock at the very top end of the market we may not see, hopefully, another Dewhurst, the season`s defining Group 1 juvenile race, consisting of just two Godolphins, two Coolmore`s and one make weight. It`s the kind of scenario we`d been dreading for years – racing reduced to a sterile duel between the two behemoths. 2025 will tell us whether money can buy a permanent seat at the top table.
Phil Bull of Timeform was wont to say “What makes it worth living through the dark winter months is the prospect of seeing how last year`s juveniles turn out.”
Coolmore`s The Lion in Winter (Sea The Stars) looks a possible ‘bargain` at 375,000gns. He only won at Group 3 level but remains unbeaten and showed singular speed for one so stoutly bred. He`s winter favourite for both the Guineas and Derby. Coolmore also had the undisputed champion two-year-old filly Lake Victoria (Frankel) winner of all her five races three at Group One culminating in the Breeders` Cup Juvenile Fillies`. Perhaps the old order is not ready for change, just yet.
Still, if racing is to thrive, survive even, then it must have depth. One salutes the likes of Three Dons and Jordan Electrics the most prolific winners, seven winners apiece during the 2024 season. Three Dons didn`t succeed until he was five when, last May, he narrowly won a minimus handicap off a derisory mark of 46. However, he was now in the hands of underestimated trainer Tony Carroll who year in year out makes bricks without straw. Three Dons, won six of his next nine starts rising to a respectable middle of the road 80 rating.
Jordan Electrics at the age of eight won seven times. Over the course of his career he has shot up 40lb in the weights to 102 – despite changing trainers four times. These are the kinds of horses that keep those who cannot compete with the financial muscle of Coolmore, the Arabs and now Joorabchian, in the game.
And racing`s everlasting virtue is that is as much about sentiment and romance as it is about the struggle for ascendancy and financial gain. Sometimes though the clouds are darker than mere financial ones. Two jockeys were killed in 2024 at opposite ends of the globe. They`d been friends from their time at the stable of champion jumps trainer Paul Nicholls in the West Country. Stefano Cherchi pursued his career in Australia where he died after a fall at Canberra racecourse: his friend Keegan Kirkby was killed in a fall at an amateur point to point in Kent. The horse that led Kirby`s funeral cortege died the next week in a race at Cheltenham.
We cannot dwell on the low points. A new turf season will soon be upon us. It will be the first, in thirty-five years, without Franny Norton (54), who hung up his saddle, concluding a career of nearly 2000 winners, many in India where he was once a winter fixture. The most lurid scriptwriter could not have dreamt up his swansong - an incredible last day treble at Chester, a racecourse where he was regarded as ‘king`.
Racing constantly seeks a ‘monarch`, a strong man, a benevolent dictator such as Admiral Rous, racing`s saving grace who rescued a corrupt sport from oblivion in the nineteenth century. Boy do we need a saviour now.
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