Blow By Blow the only favourite to win at Navan© Photo Healy Racing
As a rule it’s best to be wary of ‘Is It Just Me’ blogs. But is it just me or is this persistent whinge about Ireland’s National Hunt game getting really old? Yes the game is dominated by an ownership and training elite but that’s nothing new. And yes some winter racing is uncompetitive as a result. But it’s remarkable how so many who previously prided themselves on being economically hard-nosed when things were flying now seem oblivious to the idea that they’re in business and have no divine right to financial survival.
Hopefully it’s possible to point this out without coming across like some jackbooted, right-wing nut-job. There are worse problems than a chronic lack of money, but not too many as insidious. So sympathy to those finding it tough is automatic. But — always the ‘but’ — even when those of us who’ve experienced trudging to the dole window on the back of harsh economics aren’t excused from acknowledging financial reality, and I don’t recall much institutional solidarity on that trudge either.
Maybe it’s government’s subsidy that encourages notions of the pot being magically divvied up within Irish jump racing. But it’s unrealistic. Yes, moves to generate special conditions races, or restricted races, or put in place bonus schemes for smaller players are worthwhile but they’re essentially fiddly. The stark reality is that if what you’re doing isn’t paying, then it’s time to do something else, and that applies whoever you are and wherever you happen to live. The rest of us have to operate like that so why should racing, and specifically, jump racing, be different?
Some seem to believe it is, and are able to back it up with statistics that make this particular ‘Is It Just Me’ as hopelessly vague as the suspicion that statistics often fall short of reflecting a true picture unhelpfully shorn of hard facts.
For instance horses are supposedly impossible to buy yet those within the bloodstock game insist prices are no more expensive now than they were ten or twenty years ago. It’s not like the majority of horses racing for Gigginstown, Rich Ricci et al weren’t on the open market for everyone to buy at some stage either. And it’s not like there aren’t examples — Gordon Elliott being a prime one — of those who’ve managed to survive and even thrive during the worst of the economic recession when luxury items like racehorses were plainly among the first things discarded.
In fact the current National Hunt scene is, as per normal, a reflection of a wider economic picture where consolidation and rationalisation are the buzz words. They are phrases that can often be translated into less jobs, less pay and less security for most of us, and greater everything for the fortunate few, which is a crappy outlook but one the rest of us have to live with it and which makes those believing they are somehow above one of racing’s few definitive facts — the bottom-line - come across as presumptuous.
Anyway Cheltenham is almost upon us and no doubt a vintage festival for the tenuously based but enthusiastically embraced ‘Team Ireland’ will have plenty wrapping the green flag around what will be lauded as a fantastic industry again. So overarching are the Spring festivals that much of this coruscating winter doubt will be parked to the side, ready for next winter when the ‘game is finished’ theme will probably be enthusiastically renewed again, sometimes justifiably, but sometimes not.
Because the one thing this racing lark isn’t is straight-forward, something highlighted by Sunday’s Navan card, a programme that featured five odds-on favourites, a pair of three-runner Grade 2’s and an almost obligatory Willie Mullins hat-trick as well as a Gordon Elliott double. As per usual then, except only a single favourite was successful, Mullins’s two Grade 2 winners were apparent stable second-strings and Snow Falcon firmly put a pair of shorter-priced Gigginstown rivals in their place.
Definitive conclusions can hardly be drawn from any single day. But it was still a handy reminder that we should be wary of presumptions, including doom-laden predictions as to how the game is supposedly finished. It’s been finished a lot of times over a lot of years.
There are few more pressing financial pressures within racing than when jockeys suffer serious life-altering injuries, something which is sadly inevitable given the perilous nature of the job. How the various funds overseen by the Turf Club and the Irish Injured Jockeys charity might be better structured to encourage public donation has been a matter for debate in recent weeks although a situation where emergency fundraising activities have to be undertaken on a piecemeal basis surely isn’t desirable.
A noted colleague has pitched the idea of a levy on either winning bets — say one per cent — and/or a percentage from winning prizemoney on races worth a certain amount — say €100,000 and more — going to the Injured Jockeys Fund. This he argues would provide a regular flow of income to a fund which would be available in case of emergency rather than having volunteers financially fire-fighting. Is he right?
He certainly makes a lot more sense than those peddling the line that Ruby Walsh might be experiencing some psychological block about final fences. As steaming piles of horse manure go, this is a beauty. Black Hercules’ Navan fall is being added to the Valseur Lido spill in the Irish Gold Cup as supposed evidence of, well, I’m not sure; maybe a classic example of two and two makes a theory.
Speaking of which, no one beats Paddy Power out of the PR traps and they made great play of a female online punter in line for a Scoop 6 bonus in England at the weekend. “This is one for the girls,” she is quoted as enthusiastically saying, the press-release stressing how keen the punter was for it to be known she is female.
Maybe just as keen as Powers in fact: if there’s a new betting market to be opened it is surely with women, traditionally the sex mostly too sensible to try and get the better of bookmaking conglomerates.
