The way we view our racing has changed in a way that could not have been imagined a few decades back - not only do we not need terrestrial tv anymore, we likewise don't require to be patrons of any subscription channels as there are now so many ways of finding a way to watch any race we want, legally and live if we wish.
Often, when there is wall to wall racing and a ridiculous number of meetings we can dip in and out to watch what takes our fancy. If we are watching replays after racing then on the national hunt cards the novice hurdle and novice chases from the tracks that throw up quality future horses will be unmissable; the same applying to the juvenile events and early season three year old maidens on the level.
There was once a time when the BBC had the finest team to cover horse racing - small, select, damn serious but by God they paid the sport the respect it deserved. And Channel 4, bar the odd exception once also had a strong team with Brough Scott fronting, and a great duo on the team, the studious Timeform Jim McGrath and less intense, off the cuff John Francome, who complemented one another.
McGrath was reckoned to be the best judge of the form book at the time in a time when you had to crawl around on hands and knees with books spread out, getting mucky at the coalface as opposed to clicking away on a computer, with tasks now taking a fraction of the time they once took.
Francome had more of a lazy, intuitive approach to events but they blended well, and pleased the viewers. There is a tale of the pair staying in a hotel while working at one of the meetings covered by their channel. Francome got out of bed in the early hours of the morning to go to the kitchen and discovered McGrath in full flow study, form books spread over the floor.
Anyone can now sail through a horses form in depth, in a relatively short space of time, looking at the strength of opponents in a past performance by clicking on the recent performances of the rivals coming into a race, then going on to look how they performed after. No need to imagine how long such a task would take with the old form books - in fact it could limit the study to one or two races a day and that would take hours and hours.
It meant that those who were prepared to graft tirelessly, knew what they were looking at, and possessed the steely self discipline that the great majority of us lack, gave themselves a chance. Now that everyone can do this clicking away on the mouse or tapping away on the tablet, means that during that past couple of decades many went down the pace and racing against a bias angle, which, without sounding trying to sound schmaltzy, doesn't evoke the warmth of going through the old form books.
At the BBC, Julian Wilson was likewise one who spent hours with the form books, while John Hammer worked on the Raceform team that produced the form book, and you would see Peter O'Sullivan walk into the course before racing carrying his Raceform loose leaf and military style binoculars. Jimmy Lindley was almost a lieutenant to Wilson, ultimately professional while during the winter months Richard Pitman came across as the unassuming one, certainly when compared with his fellow team members.
Now it's a world where we find information in seconds from a phone that at one time would have took a visit to a library to find. Convenient, but dispassionate, and one that creates characters who Google during conversations and pass off what they have found as though it was knowledge long embedded in the mind. Delve deeper during a conversation and you’ll find them out.
Terrestrial TV is less of a necessity for horse racing than before when you consider it competes with hundreds of other channels, streams, Netflix, box sets, the internet and PlayStations, the exception being middle aged to elderly passing viewers who are set in their ways and understandably see no reason why they should change.
They read out a letter on ITV racing from one such couple, praising the racing coverage and how much it helps boost their spirits during the lockdowns. In reality though we all have programmes that keep us ticking over and we even adopt habits from them - drinkers who rarely touch lager suddenly drinking Amstel and Heineken to enhance the experience of their original series Van der Valk box set, regressing to having salmon paste on sandwiches because Rigsby once did so when attempting to impress posh guests, eating chilli or Reggiani cheese as they have the Columbo approval, buying The Beach Boys Live in London album as there was a poster from the concert displayed on the living room wall in the first few series of Man About The House....examples are endless.
But at the end of the day, and no matter how many letters are read out, horse racing would sadly now be lower down the pecking order than ever before in the list of ‘comfort’ programmes. And the harsh reality is there now exists a greater urgency than ever before that those who watch the sport regularly bet on it.
Amid the present chaos we forget the financial turmoil that racing in the UK was in before COVID-19 emerged. Bitter in house fighting amongst the power sharing bodies, forecasts of the sport having to downsize, owner’s, trainers and riders taking industrial action in protest at the prize money levels at the Arena owned courses.
These concerns will now have intensified many times over with any proposed resolutions to replace the present Levy system already put on the back burner. And for humble fans, why bother looking ahead to Cheltenham - it was bad enough trying to second guess the main target for an animal who may have multiple choices of events owing to the watering down of the meeting; but now we are left wondering will a situation develop where the Irish horses are prevented from travelling over, or can we even be sure that the meeting will go ahead.
There was a time when by now we’d already have pieced together how the Cheltenham fields may look. We’d also have looked at how the Grand National is shaping prior to the weights being revealed, and the Lincoln ante-post market would be strengthening up - we would probably have entered the annual Sporting Life competition where you had to predict the weights for the Doncaster curtain raiser. Further ahead, we’d have scanned the ante-post markets for the first four classics and even marvelled at how strong a hand a particular trainer had in the Derby market if he had three listed priced at 16/1, 25/1 and 40/1.
Those times have gone and won’t be returning. The sport had deteriorated but in some ways remained bearable enough to keep a reasonable sized if dwindling fanbase engaged. The outlook now is truly bleak - the only thing we can’t pinpoint is just how deep and sustained the damage will be.
image from unrecompensed.com
This track is from an album called Yeti, strong throughout, and released the month Gay Trip won the Grand National and no doubt in plenty of households during Nijinsky’s three year old campaign along with the juvenile careers of Mill Reef and Brigadier Gerard. The band Amon Duul 11 emerged from the Berlin squatting communes - sometimes they’d turn up on stage with half a dozen members, sometimes with as many as fourteen. Some songs were pure improvisations but bits and pieces have been stolen by many bands since without giving them any acknowledgement. The character on the cover was the band’s sound man Wolfgang Krischke, who two weeks after the photo used for this depiction was taken, left a friends house in sub zero conditions with the intention of making his way home, took LSD, and decided to enter a forest and make his way to a castle. His body was later discovered. He had frozen to death.
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