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Its not a question of blame
If not "opportioning blame", then "inviting disquiet", or anything else you think fits better.
As I said before, if the act was carried out by one of the high profile operations I have already mentioned, the same people defending the decision on here would be saying "you wouldn’t see that sort of cold, business driven decision in the grass roots National Hunt game". Now that it has happened to a "grass roots" yard, by a small NH owner, you feel compelled to defend it.
It happens at all levels. One of the biggest stories at the start of the point-to-point season which finishes this weekend was that Dick Baimbridge had had a huge hole blown in his string by the sudden and most surprising transfer of his main owner’s horses to Julia Houldey. Ructions don’t get a lot more grass roots than that, and to this pair of eyes it seemed rather an odd decision given that Baimbridge had enjoyed another fine year in 2007 and had liberally employed the services of Claire Allen, ultimately that season’s champion lady rider.
The reference to Sir Rembrandt is totally spurious – it happened under a completely different set of circumstances. The driving force behind the criticism is the current situation the Alner family find themselves in.
The circumstances may differ somewhat, but at their core both instances concern themselves with how the Alners have coped with being relieved of key components of their string of horses, and as such the comparison is far from spurious.
None of which, of course, should be taken to make light of the actuality of Robert Alner’s appalling injuries, absolutely not. However, now, as then, there is a stoicism about the family’s latest response which indicates they will absorb the disappointment of losing the horse in question rather than rant about it, and carry on the best they can hereafter.
Jeremy
(graysonscolumn)Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
It is a shame that The Listener has moved stables but good luck to Nick Mitchell with him and if does win some prize money then hopefully the owner will give a percentage to the Alner fund as a goodwill gesture.
Sally still has Miko de Beauchenne at the yard who will be the main stable star next season and i really do hope he picks up a big race.
The picture you paint, Maxilon, isn’t quite on a par with the updates provided by Sally Alner, but I presume you’re in a better position to comment than me.
Where does the horse stand in this arguement? The Listener is a horse with huge potential, but seems to need campaigning in Ireland most of the time; in the present circumstances it would be difficult for Mrs Alner to do this without the help of Nick Mitchell who, I would presume has virtually trained him for the last season.Perhaps it is an act of goodwill on the part of the owner to give Mr.Mitchell a good start in his training career. It must have been very difficult for Mr. Mitchell to be virtually running the Alners yard without having the official recognition for it..most assistant trainers must have ambitions to start their own training establishment eventually, and there was never going to be a right time for this to happen. I’m sure that any success that The Listener has will be attributed, in the main, to the groundwork that the Alners did with him. Good luck to all of them at this unfortunate time, but let the horse fulfill his potential. It would have made even less sense to move him to a completely different trainer who didn’t know him at all.
Though slightly off topic, Robert Alner’s progress can be monitored via the following link:
I haven’t read the Down article, but from what’s has been posted here, you would think that the owner had nipped round to the hospital and switched off Robert Alners life-support-system, rather than merely moved his horse to another yard.
The simple fact of the matter is that Robert Alner, very sadly, appears unlikely ever to recover sufficiently from his accident, to be able to train racehorses again, and it seems to me the owner was left with a choice:
Either leave the horse with Sally Alner (who has plenty more on her plate to be worrying about right now, than training racehorses). Or move The Listener to Mitchell, and do the right thing by the horse.
Down would appear to have drawn a straight-line between the removal of the horse, and support (or lack of it) for the Alners – offering nothing more as evidence than the horse moving to Mitchell.
Such a correlation would appear unsubstantiated, and sounds like drama-queenery of the highest order, on Down’s part.
Wasn’t the point of the Robert Alner Trust Fund to raise money for the installation of certain aids to help Robert when he (eventually) returned to the yard? Has he not progressed from the stage he was at when Andrew Thornton made comments to the effect of the above?
I obviously agree with Grass’s far more eloquent sentiments, but with conflicting stories as to Robert’s immediate improvement and likely level of recovery the waters are just being muddied further.
Grasshoppers post makes sense – plus we are not privvy to what has gone on behind the scenes.
The owner has bills to pay and the future of the horse to consider, whatever the sentiments regarding the unfortunate circumstances of Robert Alner’s accident.
Alistair Down reacts over-sentimentally to most things and this is just another example.
Firefox, whatever post of Salselon’s you are referring me to still does not give you any insight into my viewpoints in general, not least on a different subject to that which is under discussion.
Besides which, who says Down is a recovering alcoholic????? Apart from himself, that is – I’ve seen him necking G&Ts since claiming to be such!!!!!
Well, that’s your opinion Corm. You are entitled to it. I disagree. I think Down was responding in a humanist sense and I applaud his sentiments.
I wouldn’t do what Mr Humphreys has done. I wouldn’t do it to my worst enemy. I consider the dairy farmer to be disloyal, quite frankly. And worse. Some things are bigger than money. Money can’t help you sleep soundly at night.
To me, loyalty is something to be treasured and praised.
Do you remember the late Alec Stewart? After Daarkom and Waajib, The Stewart stable went through the mother and father of all viruses for about eight years. Still Sheikh Hamdan (and another owner by the name of Steven Hammond) sent him horses knowing full well most of them would be sick within weeks.
Loyalty.
Jim Old and Wally Sturt? Is there a more loyal pairing than this? The trainer would be muckspreading in some Dorset polytunnel if it wasn’t for Sturt. Touching loyalty of the old school.
And what about the Niarchos family, Prince Khalid, and their trainer Henry Cecil. In several disastrous years, he lost his missus, his twin brother and couldn’t buy a winner.
Still they backed him. Look at him now.
Jumpers might remember David Gandolfo and his loyal band of owners, who stuck by him when he didn’t have more than a couple of winners for four years.
Kim Bailey? What was it some genius was saying on here a few weeks ago? Yesterdays man. Can’t train ivy up a s**t covered trellis.
Yesterdays man can’t stop banging them in at the moment. Hottest trainer in the country.
There’s a wider issue too. You should never kick a man when he’s down – even your enemy. First thing a man learns from his Dad.
And from his Mum, he learns that if you do kick someone when they are down, then karma will get you. What comes round, goes round.
The very best of luck to the Alners.
So the owner is morally obligated to keep the horse with Sally Alner simply because her husband has been the victim of an accident beyond his (Humphreys’s) control?
Complete and utter garbage.
If Humphreys had come out and said Robert Alner was an appalling trainer, and that he wouldn’t consider sending horses to him again, then you may have a point Maxilon, but he’s simply moved one horse (and moved him into the care of the person who looked after him most of the time anyway).
Some people find pity offensive and I would guess that the likes of the Alner’s and Henry Cecil are very proud people. Not withstanding the fact that something this trivial wouldn’t be enough to phase in them at a time when physical and mental wellbeing were in question, I would suggest that they would hate the idea of being given horses because the owner ‘felt they had to’.
Nobody is obligated to do anything, especially when considering the cost of keeping a racehorse in training, and it might just be that Prince Khalid and company simply thought Henry Cecil was a brilliant trainer and the right man to train those horses. Loyalty may have been an issue for some, or all, of the owners mentioned, but it is simply a perception and only meaningful to the people involved. It would have been their choice, their money and their risk.
For all we know Humphreys may have been considering the move for some time, knowing that Nick Mitchell had planned to leave the Alner team to begin his own training operation. Your constant sniping and emotional preaching (we really don’t need life lectures and instruction on what it means to be loyal) could, in fact, be on the back of nothing more than a coincidence, however unfortunate the timing may be.
Alistair Down has had problems, well publicised problems, and if he is working through those then all credit to him. However, he shouldn’t use his now utopian view of the romance of racing to take a trivial matter out of context and needlessly villify a man for protecting his investment.
Using Kim Bailey as an example is interesting.
His improvement in form coincides with the arrival of a new head lad.
At the end of the day racing is a business, and owners upmost responsibility is to the horse and themselves.
If they think Nick Mitchell is going to serve them better than that is their perogative.
I doubt very much that any of the Alners give a crap, and i’d be disapointed if they aren’t embarassed by Down’s piece (which I haven’t seen, but his writing doesn’t take much guessing at).
Everyone in this business knows it won’t be the last time. Robert Alner’s ill health is irrelevant – the running of his yard isn’t.
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