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Why would Chapple-Hyam throw a Group race? If there’s a stable in the country who needs winners – good winners at that – it’s Pete Chapple-Hyam.
The horse was owned by his principal owner and there was good money for it. It doesn’t really add up.
Anyway, most of the juvenile races this week were a bit dubious – I’m drawing a line through the lot of them formwise. Shumoos will never lose to that ropey Hannon horse ever again, for example. And back Burwaaz next time – you’ll get your money back, meowd.
Your sentence about encountering hardened punters in the Specsavers made me roll, I have to say, Skyelaw. Thanks.
Miss Woodford,
I had to laugh at your NASCAR thing. Guns? It reminded me of the iconic
"Malcolm In The Middle"
sketch.
The father of the house takes his four boys on a bonding trip to a NASCAR event. He’s the only one who wants to go – something any dad will immediately recognise. He’s got his baseball cap and his clipboard. They’re sitting in the bleachers. Before long, the boys are asleep, time passing by. The camera zooms in on the clipboard, on which dad is eagerly filling in the racing details and ..it’s still only Lap One!!! LOLOLOLOL.
Your point about NASCAR fans raises eyebrows. Are you pulling out legs? Are you having us on? I’m sure you are. I’ve spent twenty five years of my life following British football. Occasionally, I still wake up in cold sweat at the things I’ve witnessed.
I’ve seen people punched, gouged, cut, sliced, stamped on, slashed, butted and battered within an inch of their lives at train stations, service stations, pubs, and in stadia. Saturday afternoon entertainment for the lumpen proleteriat after a hard week at the factory.
Despite being a bit of a geek, one day, a hundred Hartlepool supporters battered me and seven of my friends in the car park outside the ground. Brave of them, wasn’t it. Excellent odds. Luckily, after a while, you don’t feel any pain.
I spent two days in hospital. One of my friends lost an eye. Our assailants were all drunk. Hammered and very annoyed. It was like something out of the opening episode of "The Walking Dead". Our crime? Beating them 1-0 in the Cup.
I’ve visited America on many occasions and I can honestly say that I’ve encountered nothing similar. I’ve no doubt your great country contains brutal people of this ilk, but do they
swarm
like this? At sporting events? I don’t think so.
I wouldn’t like to hang about Madrid at night, nor certain areas of Paris, and I wouldn’t cause much bother on a night out in the Balkans, but I have always believed that when it comes to mindless, drunken tribal sporting violence – like that witnessed at Royal Ascot yesterday – you’ll never be able to top a day out in The Green and Pleasant.
Respectfully, Max.
I do envy Thomas, though. No-one serious ever reads fora. Look at Paul Roy. He’s been hammered on here for a year – positively battered, with good reason and
for
good reasons – and he doesn’t even know we exist.
Rod Street too. Despite being paid £3.5m of forumites money to do little more than rearrange the deckchairs, he won’t even answer a forumite’s questions on Twitter.
There was a letter in the Racing Post on Tuesday which said exactly what we’ve spent a year saying about racing and 60,000 plus people will have read it. It was a good, strong letter but no different from some of the posts written by the membership on here.
I’m surprised Thomas and his ilk worry. Print journalists have got the box seat, will probably always have the box seat, and because of that, in the end, I find his criticisms little more than bluster and cant.
Roy should have gone after he lambasted Betfair and invested in Betfair simultaneously. No leader wishing to cultivate managerial credibility would engage in such schizophrenic behaviour.
Canute-like, he continues to deny his own fallibility. "The only person so far I have read about is James Given waving his finger in the air," he said, in today’s Racing Post, when asked to respond to criticism of his tenure.
Crisis? What crisis!
I hesitate to feed the troll, but I disagree. I’d say Johnno was as good as any trainer operating in this country, and maybe throughout Europe.
Frustrating, irritating, annoying and difficult to predict, but a superb trainer nonetheless.
That treble Grimes alludes to came with exposed horses in three consecutive handicaps – a trio of the toughest handicaps staged in this country.
When I first joined TRF, one of the earliest threads was about an piece written that week by one Peter Thomas about the Aga Khan.
A then member kindly posted me the article as I’d missed it.
The Racing Post thousand worder – a celebrity puff piece modelled on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" – immediately prompted the Muslim spiritual leader to instruct m’learned friends.
A sly masterpiece of gossip, rumour and innuendo, the article nearly cost the Racing Post a crippling sum and Mister Thomas his beloved job. Ooops. I believe apologies were offered and accepted.
So when I read the pious Mister Thomas accuse us plebian forumites of salacity and other nefarious misdeeds, there’s a glint in my eye.
Thanks for your informative answers, chaps.
How long does Oilseed Rape bloom/emit pollen for? There’s one stable I follow that started the season like a bat out of hell and is currently right off the boil. I think he might have this problem.
And given the aggressive stance they took – pay us what we want or we pull the plug – during the last round of contract negotiations with Racing/Levy Board I’m not sure C4 can rightly be held up as some sort of punters pal and there for the sport.
LOL. Let’s forget terrestrial coverage, then. I thought it would be an obvious choice, Pete. I really did.
Oh well. The BBC remind me of a hypnotic
femme fatale
, which Mr Racing shouldn’t have anything to do with, but somehow can’t resist.
In a tight red dress, stacked high heels and smoking a lipstick stained cigarette, for most of the time she’s off and running, playing around town with anything that moves, and then, on Mr Racing’s good days, when his wallet’s full and things are sweet, there she is, on his doorstep, with a glint in her eye and the siren song of love on her lips.
Just say no, Pete.
Off to watch "Crank"
Fair points lads. Cheers.
Long shot: Are horses in the North healthier this season? There’s quite a few Lambourn yards struggling for winners at the moment and I can think of one or two Newmarket yards who should be banging them in and aren’t. And some southern meetings seem sparsely supported – Folkestone tomorrow an example.
First – far, far fewer people tune in to C4 Racing than to the BBC (when they do cover the sport.)
True, Pinza, but the ones that do tune in are committed viewers and Channel Four
cater
for them. Week in, week out, they are there for the sport.
The BBC won’t even cover Glorious Goodwood any more. Nor the Betfred meeting at Haydock. Newbury’s Horris Hill meeting. The Spring Cup/John Porter meeting. They cover nothing in midweek outside Royal Ascot. They managed to fit the Oaks in somewhere between the sets of a tennis game in France.
And don’t forget, they wanted to completely eliminate their NH programme (outside the Grand National) before the BHA intervened and Barbara Slater relented – to an extent.
Remember that Arctic Saturday in late November last year? Channel Four even turned up alongside sixty three of us at Southwell, the only horse meeting of the day. The show must go on. Why should the BBC get the October gig? It’s just not right. It doesn’t make sense either.
Second – I fear that the general public rather like interviews with Litter Pickers. You see, they can identify better with them than with intelligent professionals such as Dierdre Johnson. Sad but true…
Can’t argue with that. They could at least try though. Jimmy Lindley taught me to understand what a fit horse looks like going to post. What does Mr Persad teach us? I swear one day someone is going to chin the lad…
And there’s still no denying that racing is better treated for coverage than many other sports, even football you take purely terrestrial channels.
Not Formula One, Anthony. Every race. Four, five hours a time. Plus the mechanical thing they do the day before.
Every race.
Round. And round.
And round. And round…and round…and round…and…Agree with you, stotty. Dandy’s multiple entries have ruined the Stewards Cup for me for many years.
Corm, are you saying that owners who want a sprint handicapper in training will now send them to a Middleham/Yorkshire outfit rather than, say, Newmarket?
Pinza, I’m not having a pop. Generally, you and I see the racing world through the same lens. Up till yesterday, I desperately wanted a strong BBC presence in horse racing for one simple reason – more people watch BBC than any other channel. That’s why I’ve been critical.
Now, I think we should sever all ties with the BBC and work with Channel Four, particularly with the October gig. Risky, yes. But at least we’ll have interviews with Dierdre Johnson, for example, rather than Rishi Persad asking the Litter Picker what it means to be part of Derby Day.
Due to illness, Pinza, I planned to spend the afternoon at home watching the racing. I made a tactical decision two years ago to ditch ATR and RUK and get out and about, so the BBC and Channel Four were my companions for Derby Day.
I have to say I was pleasantly surprised with Channel Four. Since I gave them a slap a few months ago, they’ve improved a bundle on both Saturday shows.
Emma Spencer is improving faster than Dancing Rain. She’s finally getting rid of her airhead image and its obvious she’s got something to say. Her partnership with Mike Cattermole works really well too. Most importantly, I understand every word they both say.
The BBC? Now, they’re just amateurs, part-timers who dip into the sport whenever they feel like it. And you can tell.
How Channel Four, who bring the brilliant sport of horse racing to a TV audience week after week – and whose presenters, in comparison to the BBC, are experts in horse racing – didn’t get the Ascot gig in October, is a travesty that needs looking into.
An absolutely terrific Derby won fairly, by the best horse, trained by a genius, and ridden by the best energing talent world horse racing has seen since Frankie Dettori. A simple and engaging story.
Wow.
Frederick Engels
has just made two or three fancied two year olds look like pit ponies.
How good does this make
Shumoos?
Pinza, Matron, maybe I am being a bit harsh on her – purely because I expected more when the axe struck. She’s a good presenter, from a legendary racing family, who cut her teeth on outside racing broadcasts. She had clout.
Racing needed a friend in those dark days when then Head of Sport Roger Mosey was committing every spare penny of the BBC sports budget to Formula One – agreeing an astronomical price, without consultation, and knowing no other major channel (ITV, SKY) wanted it – with our sport the chief sufferer.
She could have offered criticism of the decision. She never did.
And whatever she said behind the scenes, it needed saying on screen. (Rishi Persad, too.)
Now we’re in a situation where sports such as Rugby league, tennis and athletics, and bemusing pastimes such as snooker and darts get plenty of publicly funded coverage and racing gets hardly any.
For years, I vividly remember the BBC covering the John of Gaunt meeting at Haydock. Now they don’t touch Haydock at all.
Ms Balding could have stood up for the sport. She didn’t do so. She could have made a difference.
And what about that time last season when the BBC did deign to send a spare camera somewhere for a Group One event and instead of fronting the show, Ms Balding covered something else. Tennis, I think. Again, she was unapologetic when confronted, saying that she was an all round presenter, not just a racing one.
Sorry, she’s not my favourite person.
No doubt we will get a few murmurings from Balding about the coverage but lets face it like most presenters she would cover a game of dominoes if they paid enough.
A ruthless, self-interested careerist, stilvi. I remember when everyone was up in arms about the implosion in the BBC’s racing coverage; Ms Balding not only justified it, but seemed to support the move. I’ve never taken any of her opinions on horse racing seriously since. As you say, she’d appear in the Geordie Shores hot tub if she thought it would give the Balding brand TV exposure.
