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Our sport has sadly lost its greatest prize to the modernising agenda

Goodwood: lovely scenery, ugly scenes
Goodwood: lovely scenery, ugly scenesCredit: Edward Whitaker

I was sad, but completely unsurprised, to read about the recent events at Goodwood and Ascot, which suggest the problem of racecourse behaviour is becoming intractable.

I first wrote about it in this paper in 2000. Every time I returned to the subject I was asked by people within the industry – in ways that varied between the beseeching, the dismissive and the frankly irritated – if I would very kindly shut up about it, and at a Racehorse Owners Association event I was singled out by Rod Street as one of the barriers to progress (I was almost flattered).

Fair enough: these people have their profits to consider. Nevertheless it was surely obvious (or perhaps not, from within the protection of an executive box) that filling racecourses with people who did not give a stuff about the sport could never be a viable long-term strategy, and that the modernising agenda could only ever work up to a point, because fundamentally racing is not modern.

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