Does horse-racing have a future?

Asked, after his Imperial Aura’s impressive win in the Northern Trust Novices’ Handicap Chase at the Cheltenham Festival, if he had been worried about one particular challenger in the race, Kim Bailey wryly replied: ‘Of course I was worried. I’m a racehorse trainer.’ Trainers now have a lot more to worry about. When we finally resume racing — and few expect it to be after the six weeks originally announced — how many of the 14,000 racehorses in training as the suspension was announced will be coming back? How many owners whose businesses have suffered from Covid-19 will see paying bills for forage, farriers and vets’ attentions as a priority use for their remaining funds? How many self-employed jockeys who were struggling anyway to make a decent living will have departed the sport to seek something more secure? Certainly some will be struggling with their weight: for the few days that racing in Ireland continued behind closed doors after the British shutdown, jockeys’ weights were all raised 2lb because they couldn’t use the on-course saunas.

Most popular

Matthew Parris

What if Trump is just bonkers?

The only racing figure I know who has contested the inevitability of the shutdown is the former chairman of the old British Horseracing Board Peter Savill. He says that by failing to carry on behind closed doors, racing has missed a great opportunity to showcase itself to a world deprived of so many other pleasures. He argues: ‘If you can’t find a way to keep a small group of people apart on a racecourse built to hold tens of thousands, you can’t be trying very hard.’ But I doubt it would have been worth the PR downside of the perception of racing having been treated as a special case.

As the jockey Barry Geraghty says, it is a question of lives over livelihoods at the moment and the final racing memory for some time will have to remain the sight of jockey Aidan Coleman riding Charlie Longsdon’s Glencassley to a well-judged victory in a Wetherby bumper at 5.25