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DAVID CARR |
Weblog: What do you mean the Wi-Fi doesn't work? The life of a Racing Post reporter
Epsom is not the only fruit
Who needs the Derby? No Camelot at Musselburgh but it was still a cracking day.
Their richest card of the year, with £152,000 in prize money, a red-hot 5f handicap and a really competitive three-year-old 1m4f event.
It drew half a dozen runners from Newmarket plus the town's most notorious export, let loose with the roving mic for 'Thommo TV' - highlight of which was his being introduced to a German woman and saying 'hulloo' in what was clearly supposed to be her native accent but actually sounded more like the Swedish Chef from the Muppets.
Good racing, notably a decent two-year-old event whose impressive debut winner Ahern looks every inch Royal Ascot material, drew a good crowd.
Long queues at the toilets included a lad with an interesting take on 'the only gay in the village' - tight shiny red T-shirt and shorts, coupled with blue wellies.
Loads of good stuff in the racecard, including a profile of David Nicholls in which he said his favourite memory of Musselburgh was the occasion he was riding in a 1m4f race and got brought down, breaking his wrist, collarbone and two ribs. Which makes you wonder what his least favourite memory of the place was.
Great to see racing in the headlines today - just a shame that nobody seems to know what our most valuable event is called.
Time and again newsreaders announced the Jubilee weekend started with the Queen's visit to the 'Epsom Derby'.
Pedantic though it may be to correct them, it is the Derby or the Investec Derby. It does not need identifying by its location - it is the original which the rest of the world has copied.
Nobody said last month that Chelsea won the Wembley FA Cup Final. Nor does anyone feel the need to describe Her Majesty as 'Queen Elizabeth II of Britain.'
Which leads into the first instalment of 'reasons to be cheerful it is 2012 not the Silver Jubilee year of 1977' for people in racing:
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Racing may have been a staple of the television schedules back in 1977 but it was still largely a once-a-week affair outside the major festivals and without even any teletext back then finding out how your horse had fared in midweek often meant waiting for the results to be read out on the sports news on Radio 2. Now anyone with a satellite dish and Racing UK subscription can see every race live.
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Health and safety rules are the bane of everyone's life - until they save it. Racecourses are unquestionably safer for jockeys - none of the concrete posts that killed poor Joey Blanks at Brighton - and for horses, none of whom hard is now asked to race on bone-shatteringly hard ground.
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The Sex Discrimination Act may just have come into force and a woman prime minister was only two years away but racing still had a long way to go in 1977. Charlotte Brew might as well have had two heads for all the fuss she caused by riding in the Grand National. Now Hayley Turner, Cathy Gannon, Lucy Alexander and the rest ride winners every day and nobody thinks twice about it.
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Nobody would suggest the way racing is run in 2012 is perfect but at least we have escaped the iron rule of the patrician, self-elected Jockey Club. Whatever the faults of the BHA, Horsemen's Group and RCA as they attempt to thrash out a new power structure they are all aware they must govern with consent of 'stakeholders' - and they are even prepared to admit to the importance of betting for racing.
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