SHOCKWAVES SENT THROUGH THE SPORT

It may be still be the posh daily read for the bearded, duffle coated, fashion Trotskyists calling for revolution, most of whom are not doing too bad for themselves in a free, capitalist society, with their regular holidays to exotic far away continents, nice homes and cars, who would risk being taken away and tortured in the communist 'utopias' they sing the praises of, but it cannot be denied that The Guardian newspaper is prepared to rock the boat of officialdom, even having been the cause of concern for the security services.

While I am sure that a few inside the confines of the publication do not approve of gambling or horse racing, there can be little doubt they can boast of having the arguably the boldest writer in the business in Greg Wood.

It was not unexpected that Wood would be the first journalist from 'within' the sport to break ranks and provide an unrestrained opinion on the Fact Finding Judgement released this week from the family court case involving Sheikh Mohammed, UK flat racing's largest investor over the past four decades.

The bizarre and quite disturbing events that the court believed on the balance of probabilities had occured will now be familiar to everyone who follows the mainstream news.

From a racing viewpoint, it is no surprise that those who have a platform to air views on racing politics chose in the main to either be non-committal, or to not even touch on the subject.

In ' Luck On Sunday'  it was agreed by all those present that the Sheikh and his family had been a positive influence on the sport in the UK, and that in some way or another, everyone working within the sport had benefited from his involvement. Richard Hoiles doubted whether the BHA  would subject the Sheikh to the ' fit and proper person's test' , adding that the question was whether the member of the Dubai Royal family would now decide on his own accord to move his large scale interests out of the country.

Wood went further in his piece in The Guardian, touching on an area that seems to be taboo for those reporting from within the industry ; namely, the case of the name now never discussed, Mahmood al- Zarooni.

When al- Zarooni received his seven year ban for steriod use, the official conclusion was that he was acting in his own capacity. This finding was, in Wood's words, ' ..without any meaningful investigation of the concerted doping operation at Godolphin's Moulton Paddocks stable in Newmarket.'

The reliance racing has on Sheikh Mohammed's financial input into the sport is put into perspective by Wood when he writes that, 'no individual is bigger than racing itself - so they say, but Sheikh Mohammed comes mighty close.'

Those tuning into Attheraces for Sunday morning's ' Racing Debate' may have been hoping for at least a small amount of time to be segmented for the topic to be  discussed.  The programme is after all billed as being,' hard- hitting, honest, critical, opinionated.'

Not a single whisper was uttered on the subject. No doubt the producers would point out that as we are on the the eve of the Cheltenham Festival, then it was apt for the show to concentrate solely on the meeting but one has to doubt whether the court's findings would have been alluded to in even the quieter times in the fixture list.

Returning to 'Luck on Sunday', during which the potential logistical difficulty of moving a whole, large scale operation out of the country was raised. In truth, it is probably not the mamouth task it would appear to be. The horses in training could be dispersed to trainers already on the payroll in Ireland and France, with the stallions also transfered to their studs abroad.

Their two Newmarket based in house trainers could be moved to newly purchased bases abroad, even though teething problems could initially surface from the trainers reading and adapting to home gallops they were not familiar with.

And what of the other Maktoum family members ? Hamdan has his own modus operandi,  keeping the number of animals to a relatively limited number, with loyalty shown to the trainers on his payroll.

At points of time in the past, the likes of the once mighty Peter Walwyn, Robert Armstrong, Harry Thompson Jones, Ben Hanbury, and Clive Benstead would have to have called it a day earlier than they eventually did, without the support of Hamdan.

The potential catastrophic consequence of the whole extended family cutting ties with the sport in the UK, is separate to the issue of how the sport would have fared if they had never entered the fray all those years ago.

We often wish for the days when the jam was spread wider, with all those select owner/ breeder operations who were the patrons that formed the backbone of the big flat yards in the 1970's. The Sobel and related Weinstock families, Lord Howard de Walden, Dick Hollingsworth, Louis Freedman, Arthur Budgett, Paul Mellon and Jim Joel.

Apart from the Budgetts', all of the above named standing dishes of British flat racing were still strong when the Maktoums really started to expand their racing empire in the early 1980's. The 1982 Epsom Derby made one realise they had arrived at the top level.

Sheikh Mohammed owned the second favourite, the John Dunlop trained Jalmood. The colt disappointed but the Hamdan owned Touching Wood finished runner up to the impressive Golden Fleece and would go on to win the St Leger.

Did the aforementioned owner/breeders have relatives ready to step into their shoes who considered that the emergence of the Maktoums had changed the landscape for the worse, or were there no willing and able family members keen enough to take over at the helm?

We shall never know. But if they did decide to cut ties with the UK, how would it impact on national hunt racing, a sphere in which Sheikh Mohammed had a small but successful dabble with approximately thirty years ago, but who had sold on some stallions who have made a tremendous impact in the winter game, such as Fleminsfirth and Old Vic.

Those who ply their trade exclusively in the winter game may not feel much of a negative after current. However, they are unlikely to have cause for opening a bottle of red and partaking in ebullient singsong.

  image reproduced under CCO