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Revelations in the RP are both surprising and depressing. Is it any wonder some trainers have upped sticks to France! Hard too to believe the likes of Hayley Turner has put up with these shortcomings for 20 years. If there is not a degree of glamour and romance surrounding horse-racing it will not attract followers. Racing also needs presenters of the quality of Nick Luck and Lydia Hislop on terrestrial and digital to sell the game. They won’t show up if there is any degree of “squalor” about its environs.
No excuse for that ‘level’ of women’s facilities being made available for them in this day and age.
Granted seeing women jockeys wasn’t really a big thing at one stage back in the day (way back in the day may I add) as you only had a selected few excelling in the 80s with the likes of Gay Kelleway (first woman to ride a Royal Ascot winner in 1987) and Gee Armytage (first woman to ride a winner at Cheltenham Festival in 1987) that were notable names paving the way at that time.
On the flat you then had Alex Greaves who had a raft of notable female firsts like becoming the first female apprentice to ride out her claim, the first to ride 100 winners on the flat, the first to ride a four-timer, the first to ride in the Derby (1996) and obviously the first to ride a G1 winner (dead heated) on the flat (1997).
The literally recently retired Hayley Turner started riding as an apprentice in 2000 and yet here we are some 25 years later and her colleagues are still by and large only given some pokey little over large closet space to operate from…….it really is a disgrace!
Courses have been aware of this for sometime and many aren’t pulling their fingers out to improve. It is disgraceful and they should be ashamed.
The more I know the less I understand.
“On the flat you then had Alex Greaves…the first to ride a G1 winner (dead heated)”.
I am not sure why Alex’s achievement always has to have this asterisk placed next to it. She rode a Group 1 winner – that’s all there is to it. No qualification is required. It counted as 1 winner in her tally that season, not as half a winner.
“Racing also needs presenters of the quality of Nick Luck and Lydia Hislop on terrestrial and digital to sell the game.”
Lydia, yes. Not sure where she was during RTV’s coverage of Aintree.
But Nick “William Hill Ambassador” Luck? I don’t believe anyone on a bookmaker’s payroll is on the side of racegoers and punters, no matter how much he tries to suggest otherwise on his Sunday show (particularly nauseating when he is sucking up to his mate Channing).
No doubt he will be disappearing soon for a nice little payday as part of NBC’s coverage of the Kentucky Derby. Who cares about the 2,000 Guineas?
This will open a real can of worms now!!
The audacity of these jockeys!!!
They’ll have to look into the standard of the stewards facilities now and if rumour is correct, the wildly fluctuating temperature of the port at the various racecourses.
It needs to be a condition of racecourse licenses. They’ve shown they won’t do it off their own volition even with a well publicised deadline.
It’s been said enough times, the BHA are totally useless.
Ralph Beckett summed it up well yesterday on Luck on Sunday. We are still on our way down the way the sport is run in this country.“Lydia, yes. Not sure where she was during RTV’s coverage of Aintree.”
She went along that long and winding road to Aintree with Ruby but never appeared to arrive at her destination.
They might have been better off spending the (embarrassing) David Power Cup money on upgrading a few facilities for all the jocks rather than dishing it out to the few who don’t really need it.
Cormack
Things must be bad when C4 Racing’s Andrew Franklin is moved to write to the RP to attribute blame to the BHA and the RA alongside the tracks for “the shame under which the sport is now reeling.”
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