Sense of perspective

The Soviets had sent a dog into space before they sent Yuri Gagarin. When the astronaut Gagarin, after his feat, came to London, he was mobbed by admiring crowds, an adulation which, at the height of the Cold War, alarmed some of Harold Macmillan’s ministers. It took the old maestro himself to put things into perspective. ‘Just be thankful,’ he told his Cabinet, ‘that they didn’t send the dog.’

Jump racing, too, needs a sense of perspective. With the finances of British racing, following a European Court ruling, in the hands of m’learned friends and potentially facing meltdown, and with the hunting ban on the way, many are rushing round insisting, ‘We’re all doomed.’ There are daunting problems to be solved and worries about the future supply of point-to-point horses for jumping when hunting goes. But in the end financial problems are technicalities. As another former Tory PM Sir Alec Douglas-Home used to say when confronted by questions on economics, ‘We have frightfully clever people whose job it is to sort these things out.’

After Kempton on Boxing Day, I remain an optimist. A massive crowd of 21,000 cheered the three-milers past the stands first-time round as well as at the finish. They cheered the 26-year-old Desert Orchid, three times a winner of the King George VI Chase, as he was paraded. And they applauded worthy losers as well as winners. The audience for jump racing is there, and I have never looked forward so much to a Cheltenham Festival. Last year the four major Festival races had such short-priced favourites that the best odds you could get for a four-horse accumulator were 12–1. This year there is real competition.

At Kempton, the novices Ollie Magern and Trabolgan, ridden respectively by Carl Llewellyn and Mick Fitzgerald, pulled 14 lengths clear of the field as they fought out an epic duel after the last and were separated only by a head at the line.