When he was awarded the Cartier award of merit for his lifetime contribution to racing, trainer Barry Hills insisted that racing should continue to be fun, and if that meant a little bit of skulduggery then so what. It drew the biggest applause of the evening.
It has been a bizarre year for the racing community who exist in a strange limbo somewhere between sport and business. The racing itself has been fun. When the young pretender Long Run took on two former Gold Cup winners at Cheltenham and beat both Denman and Kauto Star, the race had everything: power, athleticism, canny professionalism, youthful exuberance and sheer class. In the Flat season to follow we had the mighty Frankel to admire as he extended his unbeaten sequence to nine, including victories in the 2,000 Guineas and the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot on the new Champions’ Day.
Racing politics, though, proved even more depressing than the Westminster variety. There are a thousand fewer horses in training than three years ago. Because prize money is so low in Britain, good horses are streaming off to Hong Kong, Australia and the UAE in a talent drain. One owner told me: ‘If you are offered £200,000 for a horse, you look at the UK programme book for where the animal might earn that kind of money — and you sell.’
This year finally saw the sale of the Tote, the pool-betting business previously owned by the government. We also had the long-running controversy over use of the whip and a trial of strength between owners, represented by the Horsemen’s Group, and the racecourses. So in this season of awards, here are mine.
Comeback of the Year goes to the incredible Kauto Star. After Long Run beat him into third place at Cheltenham and he pulled up at Punchestown, critics wrote him off. But he came back and won his fourth consecutive Betfair Chase at Haydock in November, giving Long Run a jumping lesson. Haydock has never seen such emotion.
Newcomer of the Year has to be the charming Sheikh Fahad al Thani. His first day on a racecourse was watching the French-trained Makfi win the 2,000 Guineas in 2010. Now he owns Makfi, the foundation sire of his stud, and his Pearl Bloodstock has 40-plus horses in training, one of which won the Melbourne Cup. He and his brothers in QIPCO Holdings, the Qatari investment vehicle, sponsored the first Champions’ Day at Royal Ascot, the nearest thing the UK yet has to a Breeders’ Cup.
Woman of the Year has to be Hayley Turner. When she won the July Cup on Dream Ahead we celebrated the first unshared Group One victory by a woman. When she did it again, taking the Nunthorpe on Margot Did, racing writers could at last relax. From now on a jockey’s gender is irrelevant.
The whip controversy all but ruined Champions’ Day so Chump of the Year is the British Horseracing Authority for introducing the new rules without a trial, at the worst possible moment and with out-of-scale penalties that it was rapidly forced to revise.
The BHA’s chairman Paul Roy said he should be judged on the outcome of the Levy and the sale of the Tote. But the total yield from the Levy paid by bookmakers to help sustain the sport is the lowest since the turn of the century, and in a two-horse race for the Tote the BHA managed to back the loser, supporting Sir Martin Broughton’s SIP Group and sounding sour when Betfred bookmaker Fred Done won. Many now reckon that Roy should quit. With the touch he has displayed he could always switch to the Rugby Football Union.
His only rival for Chump of the Year was surely top jockey Kieren Fallon, who thought he could just walk away from a lucrative contract to ride a Turkish owner’s horse in his three-year-old career when Coolmore came beckoning with a more attractive Derby ride. An Appeal Court judge granted an injunction stopping Kieren from riding the other horse in the Derby insisting, ‘There is nothing special about the world of racing that entitles major players to act in flagrant breach of contract.’
Unluckiest Sportsman Rider of the Year is surely Richard Hughes, the best Flat jockey riding, who had no chance of mounting a challenge to the consistent Paul Hanagan for the jockeys’ championship because of the way the totting-up procedure multiplies jockeys’ penalties for riding offences.
Hardest is how to rate the Horsemen’s Group, which more or less unifies the voices of riders, trainers and owners. It qualifies for an award as Most Powerful New Lobby in Racing. But the blunt instrument it adopted of a ‘tariff’, setting minimum acceptable prize-money levels for races, and encouraging its supporters to boycott courses that missed the mark, also qualifies the group for Clumsiest Campaign of the Year. Some tracks reacted predictably. They met the tariff criteria per race but only because they were dropping the quality of the races — so encouraging more owners to sell their better horses to race abroad.
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