Some things are hard to forget

Last week saw the launch of the second edition of the Racing League which will take place during August and September in the UK. The concept was inaugurated last season in an attempt to attract a new audience to the sport but on that score it was a resounding failure.

The organisers have made wholesale changes to the structure to this year's competition, by all accounts listening to feedback from the public, which now sees 21 trainers representing Ireland compared to just 2 last year, but it again looks doomed to fail. The biggest issue is that nobody cares. You cannot simply invent a narrative such as regional teams pitted against each other and expect an audience to buy into that.

While many of the top stables and jockeys in the UK have signed up to this year’s event it certainly hasn’t been the same story in Ireland where our top four riders from last season - Colin Keane, Shane Foley, Chris Hayes and Seamie Heffernan - are conspicuous by their absence, as are leading trainers such as Aidan O’Brien, Ger Lyons, Dermot Weld and Jim Bolger.

The fact the 42 races that comprise the league are entirely made up of mediocre Handicaps also doesn’t help. They are simply bog standard races with inflated prize money and instantly forgettable.

Each of the seven regional teams competing this year have been assigned a ‘captain’ whose role is undefined but appears to be simply designed to expand the reach of the event. Presuming that is the objective it seems pointless that all the ‘captains’ are already associated with the sport. it would make more sense to use non-racing personalities who by definition would have non-racing followers on Social Media and could potentially amplify the Racing League to a ‘new audience.’

So far the Team Captains have been involved in picking the riders to represent their respective teams but as all the Irish-based riders ended up on the Ireland Team it seemed a bit pointless. If the Team Captains had instead been allowed to pick the trainers to represent them in the Handicap races it might have been a bit more fun. I’d imagine the first names on Kevin Blake’s team sheet for Ireland might have included the likes of Charles Byrnes, Ronan McNally and Tony Martin.

The perennial question in racing - if you had a good horse where would you send it to be trained? Is something that fans of the sport knock endless fun out of. Aidan O’Brien and Willie Mullins are always high on such lists but it would be hard to beat Bob Baffert. The controversial American trainer is persona non grata to most within the sport following the multiple drug test failures of his horses in the States, but it’s not hard to see why his owners love him. Amr Zedan, who owned Baffert’s disqualified Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit, bought Country Grammer for $110,000 in January 2021 and in two races this year the horse has netted a cool $17.2 million having finished second in the Saudi Cup before winning last weekend’s Dubai World Cup. That’s some return on investment by any standards and might come in handy for Zedan who has recently thrown his hat into the ring as a potential buyer of Chelsea Football Club.

Finally, it was lovely to see Nina Carberry back in the limelight in recent weeks, culminating in her winning the final of Dancing With The Stars 2022 on Sunday night. Nina was a supremely talented jockey in her days as an Amateur Rider and has always been a wonderful ambassador for horse racing. Her new found celebrity is much-deserved and I doubt we’ve heard the last of Nina now that she has been discovered by a wider audience.

Horse racing certainly got behind Nina in her bid to be crowned the Dancing Champion with a ‘Vote For Nina Median Auction Race’ run at Naas on Sunday and of course we can’t forget the weekly video support she got from her good friends Derville and Noel Meade. Once you’ve seen those videos they’re certainly not easy to forget!