The turf: Racing heart

Expensive research projects don’t always produce the results anticipated by those who commission them. Take the cosmetics company which launched a study into what perfume drove men wild and came back with the simple answer: bacon. It made me think of the millions of dollars America’s aeronautics industry spent on perfecting a ballpoint pen that would write upside-down in space. Meanwhile, the Soviet astronauts made their notes at any angle in pencil.

I wasn’t surprised, though, to hear that recent medical research had revealed that horseracing — apart from being the most sociable sport of them all — is more exciting than football and rugby. So confident of the findings were the Kempton authorities on Racing Post Chase Day last Saturday that they allowed racegoers to register to get their money back if a sample who took part in an experiment failed to be aroused by the action.

Several hundred registered for the potential bonus but the sample whose heart rates were measured and whose excitement levels were recorded through skin conductors attached to racegoers’ fingers all proved to have been significantly stimulated by the experience.

I was certainly not immune but I am afraid that what sent my heartbeat soaring even more than the action was my discovery on taking out my new mobile phone to ring my bookie with a last-minute thought before one race that my son, on setting me up with the new instrument, had thoughtfully locked it. By the time I had established how to free it for action (and, yes, all I had to do was press the word ‘unlock’ on the screen, but that wasn’t how the old one worked) it was too late.

I would have had the blips racing across the monitor screen for the wrong reasons, too, during the closing stages of the Racing Post Chase when, after an excellent display of jumping, the ever-consistent Richard Johnson brought home Quinz as the 8–1 winner.