Energumene had an up and down week in the ante post betting for Cheltenham© Photo Healy Racing
There was no part-3 to the Paul Kimmage racing expose in Sunday’s Irish Independent but instead the investigative journalist resorted to a tit-for-tat exchange with several racing personalities that had questioned his logic in using Stephen Mahon to further advance his claims of widespread doping in horse racing.
To Kimmage’s credit he did address his previous omission regarding the 2007 Pike Bridge case and went into considerable detail around the events which led to Mahon receiving a hefty court fine and a subsequent suspension of his training licence.
The one area where I do think Kimmage is treading on dangerous ground is his assertion that the IHRB is complicit in whatever doping is going on. The sub-heading to the piece read: “We’ve been here before with omerta and a regulator that can’t be trusted.” In the article itself he says: “For three months now we’ve been doing our ‘moral duty’ and it’s hard not to conclude that racing has a cycling problem: A regulator that cannot be trusted; an unquestioning press; a contract of omerta between enforcers and enablers.”
These are strong words, but what are they based upon? The fact that whistleblower Stephen Mahon was subsequently sanctioned by the IHRB for mistreating horses? Or is it that the IHRB put undue pressure on a key witness in that case? I struggle to see a clear link between either or both of those claims that leads me to conclude that the IHRB cannot be trusted.
Yes, the regulatory body has questions to answer in a number of areas, particularly to do with its structure and lack of accountability on how it spends government funding but claiming they cannot be trusted to unearth drug cheats is quite a leap.
When you distill Kimmage’s recent articles down to their component parts you end up with something of a quandary in relation to Stephen Mahon. Many have instantly dismissed him as a credible witness because of his animal welfare issues but the primary question remains - is what he’s been saying the truth? Broadly, I’m sure he has been telling the truth - he was certainly a whistleblower and his assertion that he did nothing wrong in relation to Geoffrey’s Girl was vindicated on Appeal. But you must then determine if Mahon is correct in his assumption that both of those truths are linked and add up to a conspiracy against him.
Kimmage is convinced that this is the case. He has seen something similar before in cycling and has quickly joined the dots. The problem for me is that there are quite a few dots that need to be joined to come to that conclusion and each of those dots appear to have much less sinister undertones.
The one thing that is patently clear from all of this is that there is no silver bullet. There is not one hard piece of evidence that points to a major drug problem in racing. All we have are rumours and conjecture.
Horse racing is awash with rumours of all sorts and last week we saw another classic case of how the rumour mill works ahead of Cheltenham. Energumene drifted from 3/1 to 10/1 and bigger on the exchanges for the Champion Chase because of a rumour that he was lame. It turned out to have been based on truth as he had had a minor issue with a stone bruise. A few days later he appeared in a schooling session at Navan racecourse and his price came back into 4/1.
In a Cheltenham edition of our Jump To It video content recorded last Friday Danny Mullins was very sweet on the chances of Mullins’ other runner in the same Festival race, Chacun Pour Soi, and indicated that he would expect Paul Townend to be aboard the ten-year-old in preference to Energumene next week. Should that well-informed opinion prove to be the case Energumene is set to take another significant walk in the betting.
Willie Mullins is an undoubted master of his craft and is most likely to have both horses in peak condition for their Champion Chase assignment. He has this uncanny knack of priming his horses for the big occasions. With that in mind, it was most interesting to read quotes from him after racing at Navan on Saturday where he had schooled some of his Cheltenham contenders.”It was a slow bit of work rather than a hard bit of work and we were happy, we’ll see what they’re like in the morning. That might be enough done for horses in the early part of week at Cheltenham and the ones later in the week will get another bit.”
This was fully ten days before the start of the Festival and Mullins feels he has his horses where he wants them fitness-wise and all their work is done. On occasions over the years I’ve seen trainers galloping, and I mean galloping, horses one and two days before races to make sure they had them spot-on. More often than not that approach ended in failure which makes me wonder what might have been if they had taken a leaf out of the Mullins training manual and eased off them in the week or so before a race.
