Trainer Madeleine Tylicki and First To Boogie© Photo Healy Racing
It was freezing cold at Punchestown on Sunday but only a truly cold heart couldn’t respond to the circumstances surrounding First To Boogie’s success. He was a first winner as a trainer for Madeleine Tylicki. She took out a licence in June and for most of the last four weeks she has been at the bedside of her stricken brother Freddie. Racing is famously a magnificent triviality but First To Boogie’s otherwise mundane handicap hurdle success was proof once again how winning and losing remain anything but irrelevant.
It has become another cliché that when terrible accidents occur in racing, like the one that has left Freddie Tylicki paralysed from the waist down, they automatically place other problems in context. And just because something is a cliché doesn’t make it untrue. There can hardly be a starker context than the one Tylicki and his family are facing into. But there was also no mistaking the uplift that this success provided the whole family.
Racing’s latest winning trainer had barely started leading First To Boogie back to the winners enclosure when she was face-timing her delighted brother in London. The thrill provided by the win, and it was a well-backed win too, was unmistakably authentic, as was Madeleine Tylicki’s impressive reaction to the attention it inevitably generated. Her prediction that while her brother faces a tough battle, he would ultimately come through, was even more persuasive for the realism it contained. Most obvious of all was the sense that despite everything the win mattered.
Those of us peering in from the outside can sometime be baffled by the hold this racing game has on those involved. Terrible incidents can’t loosen the grip that horses have on people. It’s the same even when events turn tragic. Blows that would make many shy away from even reminders of such circumstances can’t shake it. Maybe some of that is due to the business side of things and the need to make a living when you’ve known little else. But it can’t be just that. More likely is the pull this sport exerts and the remarkable resilience and spirit of those in its grip.
It certainly places its politics in context, especially how the bureaucratic default state is usually inertia. Change after all is uncertain and we keep getting reminders of how dangerous uncertainty is politically. It’s the most inert institutions that most often require change however and given the industry’s innate conservatism, as well as a widespread reluctance by most anyone to publicly peep over the parapet on most anything, racing remains largely a preserve for those who, in the vernacular of the wonderful ‘Yes Minister,’ are regarded as “sound.”
On the back of the public controversy surrounding Brian Kavanagh’s reappointment for a third term as HRI’s chief executive, the time is ripe for major reform in terms of racing’s responsibility to conform to state guidelines in return for significant state money, and to be seen to do so.
So there has been interest in the two new appointments to the HRI board by the Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed, announced on Friday, appointments which represent the Minister’s, and by extension the public’s, eyes and ears around the table. It looks an opportunity to introduce some fresh thinking to what has plainly become a stagnant process and a chance for racing’s administrative rituals to be examined by fresh eyes.
Maybe the new appointees, Elizabeth Headon and Peter Nolan, will provide such a breath of fresh air. Neither is particularly high-profile within racing although Headon, who has worked with several PR companies, is what is termed a corporate affairs adviser to Coolmore. As for Nolan, some cursory racecourse enquiries revealed little beyond press release details about how he has experience in risk management in the banking industry. On the face of it, they don’t seem to represent obviously fresh voices in an area which requires them. But they could surprise us.
It has been pointed out to this space how stewards sometimes don’t hold enquiries into apparent improvements in form even when circumstances would seem to justify it. For instance when Kilkeaskins First won a handicap at Fairyhouse last week he boasted form figures of p0p0000 and was backed from 33-1 to 14-1, circumstances which on the face of it would look to justify the stewards asking a few questions. No enquiry was held.
That was noted by some punters as an example of stewards falling down on the job and failing to go through the motions but the explanation is less dramatic. Apparently a quick consultation with the handicapper revealed Kilkeaskins First had done nothing exceptional to win in handicap terms, even despite such unimpressive form figures. Whether there’s a case for more transparency in such matters is perhaps a debate for another day. Those finishing in behind in such a bad race might have more immediately pressing concerns.
It’s fair to say Paddy Brennan enjoyed a good week. The jockey joined an elite cadre of 23 jockeys to have ridden 1,000 National Hunt winners in Ireland and Britain. If that momentous winner came in a mundane midweek fixture at Warwick there was nothing nondescript about landing the Betfair Chase on Cue Card. And it proved once again how formidable a customer the Galway rider can be on the big occasion.
It was interesting at Warwick how he claimed never to have felt like the most talented jockey. He’s hardly especially stylish in a finish either. But Brennan has always been an interesting customer, not hiding behind the usual clichés and instead prepared to reveal something of what is clearly a relatively intense personality. Intelligence and sporting ability are hardly synonymous. However Brennan’s capacity to think his way through a race continues to be rewarded.
There was a time when punters would specialise in betting on photo finishes. It still happens but technology appears to have removed much of the uncertainty, although judged by a finish at Dundalk last Friday not completely. Watch the race cold and as they flash past the post try to work out how Bomber Jackson on the inside hasn’t won. And then try to work out how those betting seriously on photos manage to make it pay.
