Tapping the ball into this most open of goals is necessary and healthy

Finally! A Hall of Fame for British horseracing has been an obvious thing to arrange for decades and at last it is happening.

It comes with limitations and of course it doesn't solve any of the really pressing problems the sport faces right now. But if you don't value your own history, you can't expect anyone else to do so either. Tapping the ball into this most open of goals is necessary and healthy.

We prattle endlessly about the rich heritage of horseracing while doing remarkably little to preserve it, or to make a show of it. Suppose a teenager with a nascent interest in the game hears tell of someone called Lester Piggott and wants to find out more, where do they go? At the moment, we're leaving them to Wikipedia. Meanwhile, the US has been carefully curating its own Hall for 70 years.