Five decades on and I just don’t have the answers

I’VE been following racing for 51 years now, although I accept that in 1970 I was more interested in Nijinsky, Lester Piggott and the Derby than I was in the flawed governance of the sport in Britain.

Little did I know then that the problems engendered by inadequate funding, sketchy financial strategy and the human tendency toward self-interest and dissatisfaction would still be rumbling on five decades later.

Back then, of course, the world was a simpler place. The Jockey Club was in charge so we portrayed them as a bunch of chinless, port-swilling toffs and laid all of the blame at their door. Then we got rid of the Jockey Club and made some faltering steps towards democracy, in the expectation that everything would be all right. Only it wasn’t. It got worse.

If you trawl back through the racing archives, you’ll find any number of stories that, with a few names removed and cultural detail redacted, could have been written at any stage of the current millennium and a fair chunk of the previous one. The Suez crisis may have been raging in 1956, but racing was still in turmoil, I’m pretty sure.

Various incarnations of racing’s ruling body tried and failed to sort out any of it: prize-money, data rights, whip rules, etc. Then the outside world started poking its nose in, animal rights became an issue, and once the government started wanting a say in how best to stop people betting, we knew we were doomed.

I spoke to racehorse owner Charles Cyzer about 15 years ago and he showed me some yellowing racecards containing heats he’d won in the dim and distant past that were now being run for less money than when you could buy a pint of ale for a shilling. This week Alan King said much the same thing to me about jump races that had not only failed to keep pace with inflation but were now being lapped for the second time. He’s convinced the money is there, but nobody quite knows who’s got it.

The horsemen are revolting, the BHA is either in charge or not, depending on which week it is, and after 30 years of writing pieces attempting to unravel racing’s Gordian knot I realise that not only do I not know the answers, I’ve reached the point where I don’t have a clue what the questions are either.