Brough Scott reflects on the task of selecting the winners

Time to celebrate, time for some of us to feel humbled while the unsung have their day in the spotlight. Welcome to the Godolphin Stud and Stable Staff Awards 2019.

There are two things everyone should know about life in stables. First, that finding enough people keen and able to take up its challenges is more difficult than ever. Second, that meeting the best is to renew your faith not just in racing but in life itself. It’s that second thought we celebrate on Monday night.

To say that chairing this judging process since the awards began has been one of the most rewarding things I have ever done is no self regarding flannel.

To read through the first citations is daunting enough. In the first phase I and another judge had some 50 entries in the Leadership category which we had to reduce to ten.

However you handle it, that amounts to 40 bits of rejection, but it’s nothing compared to the hurt you have to cause in the next phase which comes before Christmas.

That’s when you receive the final ten entries sent on from another category and have to whittle them down to three. That involves ten crucial phone calls striving to give each of them the fairest chance and knowing that the seven you drop are missing out on up to £2,000 each of the final three receive before we choose between them on Monday in London.

Ten phone calls are not as easy to fix as you think. Ringing during the working day may bring a friendly enough reply but the sound of horse shoe on the road suggests that you are unlikely to receive full attention.

Add a few answerphone false starts in the evening and ten calls can lead to 30 and a mounting panic that you still have not talked to that impressive-sounding prospect from the West Country.

What happens on Monday at the BHA HQ in London is both the simplest and most difficult task of all. Two of us judges see each of the final three candidates in our category in turn and decide which one to put forward as the winner.

At this stage Alice Plunkett and I are judging the Dedication to Racing trio – three amazing people with well over 100 years of service and many lorry loads of common sense them. John Bottomley, David Macleod and Jaimie Duff, it will be a pleasure to me you.

The city offices are so obviously not the candidates’ natural habitat that the interviews would border on the absurd if it were not for the inspiration the individual stories give to us listening judges.

There are only two problems, trying to stop each talk overrunning as the stories come tumbling out and then picking one ahead of the others.

But let’s not get overwhelmed with worthiness. It may be the Oscar season but luvvies these most certainly are not and choosing who should get £5,000 rather than £2,000 of Godolphin’s super generous sponsorship is strictly a first-world problem. Especially when you remember that an equivalent sum goes to the respective stables.

We are there to make a choice in the best way we can. Of course it’s an inexact judging system but within the constraints find me a better one. In 15 years of judging this competition I have had very few complaints but at the grave risk of going anywhere near the Brexit shambles it’s this deal or no deal.

And you can be certain that nobody will call us traitors.

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