Oh! What A Lovely War

It’s not making many headlines but the increasingly entrenched positions taken by both the HRI and the Turf Club right now over Simon Coveney’s administrative ambitions are taking on a trench-warfare vibe, principally over money of course, but also as a consequence, the theory of independent regulation within Irish racing.

Of course practise is very different from theory - both sides of the one coin and all that - and the everyday reality is that those in charge of the purse-strings are basically in charge full-stop. But in an industry as reliant on perception as racing is, this is not a superfluous matter. For one thing it is wrapped up in a lot of more prosaic stuff, such as cash and political clout.

We are well past Coveney’s self-imposed April 1 deadline for racing’s new “appropriate governance structure” and yet the Turf Club and HRI still stare across no-man’s-land at each other.

Don’t forget Coveney ordered the Indecon report at the start of 2012. The final report consisting mostly of the bleedin’ obvious was delivered in the middle of 2012. Then another report ordered at the end of that year surfaced in early 2013. And now over a year later, to quote the wonderful Captain Blackadder, both sides have moved no further than an asthmatic ant with heavy shopping.

Basically it appears to come down to control. HRI essentially has it, since it’s in charge of the money the Government gives to racing. That role includes the allocation given to the Turf Club. But those hardy squaddies at the discussions front indicate everything has got bogged down over the Turf Club’s own revenue streams which HRI wants and the bowler-hat brigade have no intention of coughing up.

“If we do that, we have no independence at all,” is the defiant comment from one Turf Club member. No doubt there are plenty who would point to any independence the regulatory body has now as being mostly illusory. And they’d have a point. Economically, socially, politically, in fact anyway you like, the police and those they police are irrevocably intertwined.

But here’s the thing, lumping integrity in with everything else in a convenient one-size-fits-all body has contributed significantly to perceptions of the BHA’s shambolic performance over the Godolphin steroids-saga, where the body charged with promoting the sport reacted with a real-politik fudge that convinced no one and wound up severely damaging its own reputation.

Now the odds are that even an ostensibly independent regulatory organisation would have played ball in any fudge too. Idealistic loner police mostly reside only in fiction. But what it did show is that the theory of independent regulation is not something to be casually tossed aside in some bureaucratic spring-clean that might keep bean-counters happy in the short-term but lays landmines for the future.

What’s ideally required is a meaningful, properly-resourced and motivated integrity service. Punters don’t care under whose umbrella that comes. In perception terms though, tossing integrity and governance into the same hat is an automatic recipe for suspicion. In reality the suspicion will probably be always there. But the perception is still not irrelevant.

The Turf Club has hardly emerged from the anabolic-steroids issue with its reputation enhanced but ultimately it could turn out to be a vital weapon in its current scrap. Already they look to have HRI over a financial barrel in terms of its proposed new testing regime, although significantly, no one’s actually come up hard figures yet in terms of how much it will cost. Nevertheless the impact of the whole episode has put a renewed focus on the importance of integrity in the industry.

Coveney clearly wants a single entity for racing and since he’s holding the money-hose, anyone opposing him could be fighting a losing battle. But that’s been the case for a while now, and still there’s been no breakthrough. Is the Turf Club holding out for a negotiated peace? And have circumstances conspired to give them a chance of getting one?

All one can say about Kingman’s Greenham performance is ‘Wow.’ That was seriously impressive. He is clearly a Group 1 winner in waiting; just maybe not the Newmarket 2,000 Guineas. It’s not surprising John Gosden has qualified Kingman’s Guineas ambitions in terms of ground conditions because the issue of negotiating the dip might not be straightforward with this colt.

Since the French Guineas has a history of being decided by the draw, and a mile looks to be Kingman’s trip, it might transpire the Curragh ultimately winds up providing him with his best chance of a classic victory.

And finally, it was noticeable how the dozen jockeys that got bans for disobeying the instructions of the starter at Tramore didn’t follow the lead of their Aintree Grand National colleagues by refusing to play ball with the enquiry process: maybe because it was an Opportunity Chase for novice riders.

Even more noticeable though is how such incidents can’t simply be dismissed as one-offs. Jockeys are clearly under pressure but when a starter reports riders have “disobeyed his instructions by coming forward without being instructed to” then they are clearly thumbing their noses at the official’s authority which is simply not on no matter how much platitudinous claptrap is uttered in mitigation.

The nature of tape starts in National Hunt racing inherently means false starts are always going to be an issue. The starter’s job is mostly straight-forward, but sometimes it’s an unenviable one, and one that would be helped by everyone involved playing ball.