Crimea, 1854

It’s a tough call. Whether to kiss goodbye to jumps racing altogether or do a patch-up job to stem the inevitable tide of public opinion for an indeterminate length of time.

Given the calamitous events of last Saturday’s racing, there couldn’t have been a worse week than last week for steph g’s petititon to be up on my blog, Flemington looked more like the Crimea in 1854 than a racetrack.

Sympathy for racing doesn’t hold much sway amongst the wider public. People like us, within racing, must look at ourselves through the eyes of people on the outside to understand what they think of this activity. Is it unreasonable for outsiders - and there are more of them than there are of us - to interpret racing as a bunch of rich and/or desperate people exploiting horses for gain?

Don’t be seduced into thinking the darling young things on the Champagne Lawn at Randwick represent the force of public opinion. “But”, you counter, “we love our horses”. So why do we whip their asses mercilessly in pursuit of prizemoney, drug them to the eyeballs in some places, breed them with no bone or stamina, run them beyond their endurance and shrug our shoulders at the fatality rate?

“Well, in any sport there’s a drop-out rate.”

Sure, like in cockfighting.

“People die running marathons, mountain-climbing, sky diving, in the surf and in car racing”

Sure, but they have a choice whether to compete or not.

I’ve never ridden a jumper – all I’ve ridden in the last 30 years is the bus and the train. I bred one, once, which the late Queen Mother raced. But I think they’ve stuffed jumps racing in Victoria.

Those yellow toothbrushes are a joke. What respect does a horse show for an obstacle like that? Once it’s been over a couple it thinks it only has to skip through them to land safely on the other side. So horses barely slow down. Toothbrushes don’t encourage proficient jumping. Horses are higher up the intelligence scale than that. Because the obstacles require a minimum of negotiation the races become glorified flat races, with casualties.

I couldn’t care less if they knocked jumping on the head tomorrow if that’s the diet we’re going to be fed. What’s more, I think the public has every right and reason to be up in arms about it.

Jumps races should be geared around stamina, not speed, and place a premium on jumping. The obstacles should require respect. Horses need to be taught to jump, not hop, and they need deep conditioning for the task. The Hunt used to be the basis of good jumps racing. Not every played-out flat horse is a jumps contender. If we can't get it right then we should give it away. Call it progress.

The Ken Brownes and Jock Singers of this world would be turning in their graves.