Working partnerships don’t always bring the results expected. I heard lately of a 12-year-old girl encouraged to spend a day on work experience with a relative in the building trade. After a day sorting correspondence, tidying files and making cups of tea on demand, young Emily returned home with a crisp ten pound note. Her proud mother took her down to the building society to open a savings account. ‘Well done,’ said the lady on the till. ‘And will you be working again next week?’ ‘Oh, that all depends,’ said the child, ‘on whether the sodding bricks turn up.’
This column was to have been devoted to our Twelve to Follow. But selections must wait. Racing is in a total tizzy over the Godolphin affair, a public relations disaster of epic proportions. How could it have happened? How far does corruption go? Will the Maktoums pull out? Mahmood Al Zarooni, who was training half the 450 string which Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed keeps in Newmarket under the Godolphin banner, has confessed after drug tests by the British Horseracing Authority to administering anabolic steroids to a number of his horses. He has been banned from racing for eight years. His career is over. An appalled Sheikh Mohammed has closed down the yard until every horse is certified free of contamination.
Sheikh Mohammed has not just used horseracing as the brand image for Dubai as a nation, he has also campaigned against the weakening of the breed in America where horses are allowed to run with Lasix, a drug which lessens the likelihood of them bursting blood vessels under the strain of competition.
In Britain horses running in Godolphin’s blue have been a byword for probity. Punters could back any Godolphin horse knowing that the objective was nothing but winning races. So if corrupt practices have reached their level is racing totally bent?
Time, I think, for a little of the late Michael Winner’s ‘Calm down, dear’. Just 0.2 per cent of the horses tested each year reveal illicit drug traces. Sheikh Mohammed is a proud sportsman who loves his horses. He used to spend hours sitting in the box with his favourite Dubai Millennium. He loves to win and has spent many millions trying to buy success, and, as I keep telling my grandchildren when they are tempted to nudge a snakes-and-ladders dice, he knows there is no point in winning if you cheat to get the result.
He imported Dubaian Zarooni alongside his already successful trainer Saeed bin Suroor because his 450 horses in Britain had become an unwieldy empire impossible for one man to handle. I suspect that the new kid on the block tried too hard to achieve results to please his master and fell into the temptation of bending rules which are absolutely clear. In Australia, even in Dubai when horses are not competing, the use of anabolic steroids to aid the recovery of injured horses is permitted. In Britain it is forbidden. Perhaps, too, Zarooni thought, coming from the culture he did, that the racing authorities wouldn’t dare test Godolphin horses.
What has terrified some in British racing is the thought that Sheikh Mohammed, like other super-rich men before him, might react to the disgrace by pulling out of horseracing or at least out of Britain, imperilling the livelihoods of several thousand people. I do not believe he will. Faced with an earlier setback in his racing career, Sheikh Mohammed was asked if he felt wounded. He replied that he felt like a lion with a thorn in its paw.
He may have ignored interviewers’ questions about the Zarooni affair, he may have doubled the size of his entourage, but he attended the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket last weekend to see the victory of his Dawn Approach, trained in Ireland by Jim Bolger. The pride and the enthusiasm are still there.
There is, I believe, another factor that will ensure that Sheikh Mohammed and the Maktoum dynasty in Dubai maintain their huge interests in British and Irish racing: the arrival of the Qataris as a burgeoning rival force in British racing. The Guineas meeting at which Sheikh Mohammed triumphed with Dawn Approach was sponsored by Qipco, the business empire controlled by the Qatari ruling family who have untold riches yet to come from the liquid natural gas assets under their control. It was only by half a length that the enthusiastic young Sheikh Fahad Al Thani failed to win his own sponsored prize in the 1,000 Guineas with the Charlie Hills-trained Just The Judge.
The Qataris now sponsor the Champions Series including the richest day’s racing in Britain at Ascot in the autumn and for good measure the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris too. It would be a mangy old lion who wimped out at this stage and left the field to them. And Sheikh Mohammed should do one thing to help improve the situation: he should ensure that in Dubai, too, it becomes an offence to administer anabolic steroids to a racehorse in any circumstances.
Comments