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McGrath makes me sick.
A typical know all that knows nothing.
RFC are a disaster but so is Jim McGrath commentating.
I think you may be being a bit harsh here. McGrath ( and we are talking about the C4 one here) may come across as a little smug but I don’t think he can be accused of knowing nothing.
On a personal note I would like to see them retired, purely because I don’t want to see two fantastic horses who have been at the very top hacking around in lower grade races unable to compete or putting themselves at risk. However, if the trainer and owners feel they can compete there is no reason why they shouldn’t still race. I’m sure if either shows any sign of not wanting to race or, they haven’t the fitness to do so they would be retired. They are after all racehorses and there are many other horses of their age still running.
The obvious thing to do is to compare the place odds on an exchange or the tote with the place odds offered by bookmakers on the each way portion. Usually the bookmaker place terms are poor but occasionally they are good, in the circumstances that GT outlines. As a rule of thumb though if the each way terms are 1/5 odds they are not worth it.
I haven’t done any in depth research but I think that generaly the bookmakers place odds are better than those on the tote or betfair. I think it may have been in Nevisons book he showed this.
Well I can’t give the eloquent long replies, I prefer to keep things simpler. ‘Chasing a terrified animal for miles with a pack of baying hounds in order to kill it is cruel’. You can give all the justification for fox hunting that you want but that is what it boils down to. I would have more respect for the hunting community if they were honest. They talk about conservation etc, but the reason they do it is for fun.
On the original topic I agree with Cormack. Racing does need the permission of the public to take place. As it is, it is a minority sport which the vast majority of public couldn’t care less about. It is for that reason that we have to listen to the public. It is all to easy to take an isolationist view and say stuff em but, we need them. The Grand National is horse racings shop window and is the only race most watch. Public perception is important. To that end we have to do all we can to make it safe. If it does mean to some extent that the character of the race is slightly changed then so be it. It seems that some people have the same old reaction to change. Without change racing will die.
You asked me for evidence; and I went to some lengths to give it to you. By contrast you have not put up any evidence to support your opinion.
No. I asked for evidence that the RSPCA has lost credibility. You haven’t given any, only your own views and are trying to say that because they don’t agree they have lost credibility. The fact is the RSPCA is one of the most well thought of organisations in the country. Of course an organisation with the words prevention of cruelty to animals in it’s title wouldn’t be credible if it didn’t oppose Fox Hunting. I don’t really think I can give long eloquent posts to say why fox hunting is cruel, I think it is pretty self evident.
Emotive and ‘simple’ arguments generally suggest prejudice not rational objectivity. The word ‘terrifed’ is also used by animal rights activists to describe horses running in a race. Of course it isn’t true; and anybody who knows or observes can see that view is false; so such things need to be confronted and debunked.
I’ve never said that horses in a race are terrified, if I thought they were I wouldn’t be a racing fan, please show me where I’ve said that. I said that foxes are terrified while they are being chased although perhaps you don’t agree with that. I could be wrong of course they may be thinking ‘this is jolly good fun, must do it again sometime’. You seem to have a paranoia regarding animal rights activists and think that anyone who opposes your view must be one of them.
The idea that ‘change’ is necessarily a good thing also needs some challenge.
I never said it was
. Change as a reaction to ill informed prejudice is not necessarily progressive or advantageous;
With respect I have been seriously interested in Racing and attending meetings since around the time you were born so my views are hardly ill informed predjudice and statements like that carry no weight. My opinion on the Grand National or other racing matters is just as valid as yours.
indeed it can be the opposite; and especially when based on outdated and debunked animal rights ideology. We do not yet have rule by the (tiny vocal minority) mob. We are supposed to consider the contributions of informed opinion and scientific evidence before arriving at a course of ‘change’.
Of course it is the hunting community which is the tiny vocal minority and as was shown during their campaign ( which was perfectly legitimate and their right) some of them were as much a mob as some of the animal rights activists. Of course people only tend to consider the contributions of informed opinion and scientific evidence if it concurs with their own opinion. They tend to dismiss that which doesn’t agree with their views.
Whatever the issue; any ‘change’ – whether to foxhunting or the Grand National or any other issue – should be based on rational consideration. So has the ban on foxhunting resulted in better welfare for the fox or stag? Doubtful – may I point out the reaction of former members and directors of the LACS who point that out. The ban was the result of prejudice rather than rational considerations; and dismissed a great deal of evidence for the sake of a political agenda.
Again you seem to think that anyone who has a different view on the topic to you as
irrational and prejudiced
It also matters little whether we as individuals approve of something; the fact remains that these activities have proven conservation benefits and alternative economic activities on the land in question can have far more long term and damaging consequences for animal habitat. I have already given scientific evidence on this earlier in the thread.
Likewise we should not be interested in ‘change’ to the Grand National course unless we are sure it will benefit the welfare of horse and safety of jockey. The RSPCA was happy at changes already made this year but it did not prevent the fatalities; and in some ways may have contributed to them.
And this doesn’t mean we should not still look at the issue and dismiss any more thought on the matter.
Yes Racing needs to change – my blog is part of the Racing for Change initiative. So I am not against change where it can improve things. But we should not ‘change’ things to satisfy the prejudices of the animal rights lobby who stand against the ending of all animal domestication. The Grand National gets the biggest audience of any race in the world; tens of millions of viewers worldwide. That suggests something about it is what the rest of racing should be attempting to emulate! As well as attempting to improve saftey (which we should only be doing based on rational basis for the nbenefit of participants), we should also be looking at what is ‘right’ with the Grand National that we clearly need to keep because of the massive public interest in it. Turning it into a normal jumps race to appease those who criticise it is of little point when those critics want to ban racing full stop. Racing may be a minority sport; but the Grand National is probably one of the most watched sporting events in the world. We do not want to change that.
Well I can’t give the eloquent long replies, I prefer to keep things simpler. ‘Chasing a terrified animal for miles with a pack of baying hounds in order to kill it is cruel’. You can give all the justification for fox hunting that you want but that is what it boils down to. I would have more respect for the hunting community if they were honest. They talk about conservation etc, but the reason they do it is for fun.
On the original topic I agree with Cormack. Racing does need the permission of the public to take place. As it is, it is a minority sport which the vast majority of public couldn’t care less about. It is for that reason that we have to listen to the public. It is all to easy to take an isolationist view and say stuff em but, we need them. The Grand National is horse racings shop window and is the only race most watch. Public perception is important. To that end we have to do all we can to make it safe. If it does mean to some extent that the character of the race is slightly changed then so be it. It seems that some people have the same old reaction to change. Without change racing will die.
With respect, I find this a depressing post. It boils down to this:
(1) Foxhunting."My gut reaction is all that matters. Facts, figures on the welfare of foxes; and the experience of hunters the world over in sustaining ecological balance; these are nothing compared to my own emotional response. And why not throw in a groundless accusation of dishonesty, just to top it off?"
It is not a groundless accusation of dishonesty. Hunters do it for fun but rarely say that. They just use all the old excuses of conservation etc. If they really want to help conservation and sustain the ecological balance there are plenty of other ways to do it than chase a fox with hounds. You may come out with the protecting the countryside arguments etc but can’t counter the fox hunting is cruel argument.
(2) Racing. "
A minority sport, which the public couldn’t care less about. We therefore need to listen to that public."
Huh??
Well, of course Racing (here and worldwide) is anything but a
"minority sport"
. Fact. Don’t believe all you read in the papers.
Racing is a minority sport. Very few people are interested in it. Some have a bet now and again but would just as soon have a bet on something else. Despite the ludicrous statements that we hear from the likes of Clare Balding, things like the ‘whole country is waiting to see how Frankel does’ no one outside racing is that interested. Most people in the country haven’t heard of Frankel. Where I work,on a shift of about 80 there are only two of us who have any serious interest in Racing. A few others may have a bet now and then but most bet on the football.
The only race which most people watch is the Grand National, they’re not interested in the Derby or other races. It is for this very reason we do need to listen to them. This year brought home to many the realities which have been hidden from them for years. If we don’t listen racing is in serious danger.
Next: you haven’t taken any account of the much more nuanced arguments advanced on this thread about what constitutes
"safety"
(e.g. making the fences smaller actually works against safety).
I haven’t said anything about the recent changes good or bad. All I’ve said is we may need to look at changing some things to make things safer and to influence the publics perception.
Your final snipe at
"old reaction to change"
shows that you haven’t really understood that appeasement is only going to make things worse.
Whereas you don’t seem to want any change as you see it as others messing in your sport and don’t seem to understand that if racing loses the support of the public that will make things much worse.
Why not think about those long, eloquent posts you find so distasteful before coming out with what are (in my opinion) crude and shallow ripostes?
I have thought about them.All they are are long and eloquent posts giving the same old reasons for people to justify the activity to themselves which have been bandied about for years and years.They don’t address the basics that hunting is ‘sport’ that is cruel and done for fun. Please give arguments to deny it is cruel and tell me that the participants don’t do it for fun.Exactly the same as hare Coursing and Bullfighting. Do you support those as well ?
Well I can’t give the eloquent long replies, I prefer to keep things simpler. ‘Chasing a terrified animal for miles with a pack of baying hounds in order to kill it is cruel’. You can give all the justification for fox hunting that you want but that is what it boils down to. I would have more respect for the hunting community if they were honest. They talk about conservation etc, but the reason they do it is for fun.
On the original topic I agree with Cormack. Racing does need the permission of the public to take place. As it is, it is a minority sport which the vast majority of public couldn’t care less about. It is for that reason that we have to listen to the public. It is all to easy to take an isolationist view and say stuff em but, we need them. The Grand National is horse racings shop window and is the only race most watch. Public perception is important. To that end we have to do all we can to make it safe. If it does mean to some extent that the character of the race is slightly changed then so be it. It seems that some people have the same old reaction to change. Without change racing will die.
The RSPCA hasn’t the credibility it once had because of recent campaigns targeting hunting, foxhunting and greyhound racing. If it now targets racing too it will marginalise itself even more.
What evidence is there to show they have lost credibility ? Maybe in the in the ‘let’s put on our fur coats and then go out to chase a fox for miles’ world, but certainly not in the world that most of us live in.
Similar with the foxhunting issue. What they failed to realise is that many people who support fur and foxhunting do so for valid conservation reasons and knowledge.
Thanks for putting me straight on that one. For some silly reason I thought they did it for vanity and fun
.
As a former HR Manager and now a Trade Union representative I find cases like these very interesting. I am still always amazed at how ignorant some employers are of the law or how bad the legal advice they receive is.
It would be good to see the whole judgement but there is a bit more detail here.
http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/trainer_sack … y_1_995248It appears from reading that she was targeted before she became pregnant and the pregnancy could be a red herring. If the tribunal had found that she was dismissed for being pregnant she would almost certainly have won a sex discrimination case based on the fact that only women can become pregnant. It appears that the case surrounds the fact that the selection process used was awful and she had already been selected before she became pregnant, whether this was because she had stated she wanted to become pregnant we don’t know. There are strict guidelines and laws that need to be followed when selcting for redundancy and it seems these were not followed.
One of the main reasons the selection was unfair was that Gosden appears to not have even consulted those who had been shortlisted as he is required to do by law.
Judge Warren said Miss Bocan was not consulted until after she had already been provisionally selected, listing seven areas she was not consulted on at all, including what the criteria for selection would be.
He said: “Above all, it is clear that a decision had been made from the outset that it was Miss Bocan who would go.
“It appears that the selection criteria adopted was to ensure that Miss Bocan would be the person who would score the least.”
Judge Warren said the criteria apparently adopted were in the large part subjective and none appeared to be aimed at the skills and abilities of any of the individuals under scrutiny.
He said the scoring appeared to have been skewed entirely towards experience because the respondent was targeting Miss Bocan.
He added: “The process was carried out entirely in secret. The very fact that no-one else named on the selection score sheet was told of the process, and that they were being scored in this way, reiterates that the whole process was a sham.
“Indeed, when the other employees were provided with a letter inviting them to volunteer for redundancy, they were told not to discuss it, and they were told that someone else had been provisionally selected.”
These laws to protect employees are there for a very good reason and that is to protect employees. That is only right and proper. There is no reason whatever that the horseracing industry should be any different to any other industry. It seems to me that some people think that people who work in stables should not have the same rights as anyone else. Of course I could be wrong here they probably just think that no employee in any industry should have any rights.
Hello all.
I’ve been lurking on here for sometime before joining. I am a huge racing fan although would not call myself an expert by any stretch of the imagination. I hope to join in the debates as it’s really interesting to hear others opinions even if they differ from my own. I’m not really a betting man nowadays just into the sport. I wrote the following for another forum (non racing) as an introduction on a sports betting section. It may be a bit long but hope it gves an insight to me.
Ever since I was a child I have had an interest in gambling of some kind. At school I used to organise jumping bean races and acted as the bookmaker. I would buy a tube of five jumping beans. These were real Mexican jumping beans which were a small nut shaped object with a live worm of some kind inside. If you shone a light or heated them up they would move. On a sheet of paper I drew to a small circle in the middle and a larger one on the outside. Each bean was marked with a different colour. I placed them within the small circle and shone a light on them. The first bean to reach the outside circle was the winner. I used to take bets on which one would reach the outside first. I made a bit of extra pocket money this way, particularly from one of the richer kids who
insisted on betting ten pence each time on the worse bean. Ten pence was a lot of money when your pocket money was just forty pence per week. This must have been around 1976 0r 1977 and I was 14 or 15 at the time.As a child and a young man starting work I had no real interest in Horse Racing as such although, even as schoolboy I like everyone in the country had heard of Red Rum and his trainer Ginger McCain, the greatest Grand National horse in history who, in a five year period between 1973 and 1977, won the National 3 times and came second twice. Rummy was stabled behind McCain’s used car lot in Southport and trained on the beach. He was a real celebrity who opened supermarkets, appeared on Sports Personality of the Year, you could even buy posters of him. He was the Cheryl Cole of the seventies and would almost certainly been an X factor judge had Simon Cowel been around at the time.
At the age of 21 one day changed my life. Tuesday 5th April 1983. The Grand national was due to be run on the Saturday. I knew nothing about the sport but as usual fancied a bet on the race. On the Tuesday I
was in my local newsagent in Fishponds in Bristol and saw a publication on the stand called Racing and Football Outlook. This was a weekly publication which gave tips and write ups on racing and football betting,
the football betting was mainly the pools which most people did then, and enabled you to win huge amounts for a small outlay if you could predict eight score draws. This was of course before the lottery started in the mid nineties. The headline in RFO was for a horse called Corbiere to win the National. On the Saturday I duly placed my bet on Corbiere in the local Joe Coral shop. Of couse Corbiere galloped into history, winning at 13/1 and become the first horse trained by a woman to win the race.
From that day I was hooked on racing.I was a postman at the time and used to spend most of my afternoons in Corals, even when I was on afternoon driving duties I used to spend my time between each letter collection in Corals which was convieniently located next door to the Fishponds delivery office. I straight away started to buy both the Sporting Life and Sporting Chronicle on a daily basis, within weeks I was also getting the Handicap book ( now Raceform Update) weekly and also spending a fortune on Timeform publications.
Betting shops in those days were nothing like now. Windows weren’t allowed nor were televisions or even refreshments. The government were determined to make them places people wouldn’t want to visit. You had to listen to the races on the blower and the results and betting shows were written on a huge white board behind the counter by the mark up man as they were announced on the blower. They were dark, dirty horrible
places populated mainly by old men with fags hanging out of their mouth but, I loved it.I used to spend every minute I could watching racing on BBC and ITV and dreamed of winning the ITV Seven, a bet where you had to predict the winners of the seven races shown by ITV on a Saturday. My second year in racing was difficult and I had to record a lot of the racing as on saturday afternoons I used to watch the racing til about 2.30 before rushing down to watch Bristol Rovers at Eastville just a mile down the road from my flat. I used to go home after the football, watch the racing I had recorded, before returning to Eastville for the evening Greyhounds.
Being April the Jumps season was coming to an end, there was no summer jumping then nor winter flat racing, the year was clearly divided to Jumps in winter and flat in summer. So my first real interest was in flat racing. The first flat race I took a real interest in was the William Hill Lincoln which was won by Mighty Fly and ridden by American jockey Steve Cauthen, who soon became my first racing hero.
My first vist to a racecourse was the King George and Queen Elizabeth Diamond stakes at Ascot at the end of July 1983. I had got a voucher from the Daily Mirror for cheap entry. I backed Time Charter who duly won the big race. I was well and truly hooked by then. I used to swop shifts at work so I could work mornings and dash to Bath races and, the next winter, to Chepstow and of course Cheltenham. In 1985 I became a junior member at Cheltenham and have been a member ever since.
For the first few years my main interest was in Flat racing and I went to my first Derby in 1984 and managed to back Secreto to win at 14/1. I was now starting to do quite well and making a small profit from my betting although, of course I backed many losers but was learning all the time.
There was of course no such thing as the Internet at this time, we didn’t have PC’s at work , let alone at home, and all of my racing information had to come from books and papers. The papers were full of advertisments from racing tipsters and I decided to have a go myself. I placed an advert in a racing publication and got a dozen or so people who subscibed to my tips which I sent out by post for the weekend racing. I managed to make a small profit for subscribers over the time I did this. I called myself
Turfguide. This was quite hard work and I decided not to continue. I did however, attempt to write my own monthly racing publication, which included speed ratings, write up’s and I even managed to get the well known Bristol trainer Richard Holder to do an interview where he took me on a tour of his stables and I wrote up on his horses. I did the first issue and sent a copy to the leading Racing journalist Brough Scott for his views. He wrote me a lovely letter back saying how much he liked it. He even suggested i write to the Sporting Life and Timeform for jobs. He even said I could mention his name. He asked me to introduce myself to him when next at the racecourse, this I did and met him at Epsom.I was now totally absorbed in racing and every spare minute I was reading about and studying it. Everything from the betting to the breeding. From 1985 my summer holiday involved going to the York Ebor meeting on the Tuesday, wednesday and Thursday, followed by a rush down to Goodwood for the Friday and Saturday.
As time went on I became more interested in the Jumps and to this day that remains my main interest. Cheltenham is my mecca and the March festival meeting is, to me, the best four days sport in the world. I have had some fantastic days there. Highlights being Dawn Run win the Gold Cup in 1986 and of course the great Dessert Orchid winning in 1989, a day made even better by managing to back Ikdam trained by Richard Holder to win the Triumph Hurdle, I bet him on the tote and he won at 143/1. My favourite moment though has to be Denman winning the Gold Cup in 2008. My favourite horse of all time.
In 1991 my racing interests were curtailed when I went on a world tour. I still managed to visit racecourses in Singapore and New Zealand and also made it to the Melbourne Cup, Australias biggest race. I even remember listening to the Cheltenham Gold Cup on the world service in the middle of the night. This is the only time I have missed Cheltenham since 1985.
When I came back in 1992 my racing became less of an obsession but is still my main passion in life. I don’t go racing as much I was would like now but wouldn’t miss Cheltenham for the world.
My main interest is now in Racing as a sport rather then as a betting medium. I could quite happily never have another bet but would still love the sport.