Usain Bolt (photo: Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil)
So the ‘big news’ for the past week was the announcement that Usain Bolt has been booked for the 2018 Met.
I’m not knocking it (I know, right?). He is a big deal and it might be fun. The big question for me is exactly what and how he will be contributing to the day itself. – racing is not an easy sport to wrap your head around, so one imagines he’s unlikely to be quizzed on his selections. Also, as he is obviously being paid to attend, it’s unlikely that he will be back again in 2019, so what legacy will he be leaving? In other words, how will he be building up the day and the sport and leaving it better than it was, or from a more mercenary perspective, what kind of ROI can we expect?
Heroes
I understand that using a celebrity is a short-cut to attract more people to an event, but then one has to ask the inevitable question that once you have the crowd assembled, what next? How do we capitalise on that by leaving some kind of hopefully positive impression and try to get them back another day? What are we doing to ensure they have something to come back for?
And this got me thinking. Mr Bolt is undoubtedly a sporting phenomenon and he is a hero in his chosen sport, but he was made so by excelling in his own industry and then expanded into the general consciousness. So when we are drowning in excellence, why does racing prefer to borrow from other sports, rather than create and build our own heroes? Why do we not celebrate our stars and use them to build the cachet in our sport, rather than borrowing from ‘neighbours’?
Buying In
On the very rare occasion that I can be dragged to something that doesn’t involve a horse, my reason for going is to observe and absorb the culture around the event I am attending. Any football fan will tell you there’s nothing like going to watch a Premiership game live. Why? Because you get to see the best of what’s on offer and you get to experience it in the company of knowledgeable fans. I buy a football ticket because I am interested in seeing football and I want to watch it with other football fans. Not for the food, or the beer or whoever else might be in the crowd.
Football goes out of its way to market their players and coaches. Every move they make gets analysed and dissected and fans will discuss, ponder and debate endlessly. They form an emotional attachment to players, sometimes very strong ones. And while there are certainly big name celebrities who do attend football matches, I’ve never seen a game advertised on the strength of the fact that a certain person would be in the crowd. The sport is expected to stand on its own merits and attract those celebrities as a result of being good at what it is.
Sometimes it’s worth feeding the trolls
I like to think that racing is reasonably good at being what it should be, which is a vehicle for the Thoroughbred. There’s always room for improvement, but by and large, we are actually a pretty interesting sport. I have to thank a racing detractor on Facebook for what became a rather prickly argument over race day equipment on Arrogate, which evolved into the inevitable broader debate on the usual subject of why racing is perceived to be so terrible. While I generally try and steer clear of arguments on social media, I couldn’t help myself on this occasion, and while I may not have swung any opinions in our favour, it proved a useful exercise in terms forcing me to examine and appreciate – even if only for myself – just how interesting a sport it is.
Defending Racing
The argument was reasonably predictable for the ‘racing is dreadful because it’s all about the money and the horses suffer’ angle. Of course, as I have argued before, right here on these very pages, racing is actually about the horse. Man, in his meddlesome way, decided that he liked the idea of racing one horse against another to see which one was the best. That last part is important. It was – and still is – a pursuit of the best. So man went ahead and created a breed for that specific goal, the Thoroughbred that we know and love. And the race course is our testing ground. We study and use the results from the race track to take back to the breeding shed and produce the next generation – hopefully better than the last.
Yes, money comes into it, but money is a reward for endeavour. And it is a pretty necessary reward because racing does not come cheap, but not always for the reasons people seem to think. If one steps back a little, one has to marvel at how the sport has evolved. It has taken hundreds of years to develop a pretty intricate and robust selection process (the pattern race system), an infrastructure of rules and standards, pioneered testing procedures and trained and appointed people to police them. All that costs money, so we have created the betting medium around it to help keep the whole thing on the road. Which is really pretty complex as well as pretty clever, when you think about it. While the ‘antis’ might not like racing very much, we have at least developed a construct that protects and secures the long-term future of the Thoroughbred, which I think is something to be pretty proud of (and is also more than most other breeds can say).
There were some other arguments that our horses are not well trained enough (as in, not well-mannered enough, according to some), and again, it was useful to have to explain that not only do we race reasonably young horses (and anyone who can produce a 2 or 3yo whose behaviour can be guaranteed in any situation, is my hero), but also for the fact that we measure our horses by pretty specific standards. Sure, manners are a nice to have and they do make life a lot easier, but in terms of our selection process for choosing which individuals to breed from next, they are largely irrelevant. Our criteria is pretty specific and it is performance based. I’m perhaps in danger of sounding obnoxious about the Thoroughbred and racing industry now, but it’s not so much a case of trying to say we are better than anyone else, than a matter of trying to explain how we are different so that people can appreciate what we do and why we do it – which has clearly got lost in translation somewhere along the line.
Plus (and this is just a personal point of principle), in South Africa at least, the Thoroughbred comprises one tenth of our national population of equids. That is a tiny slice, so all those folks who love to brandish the ‘irresponsible breeding’ argument, can just take a seat.
Here’s One We Made Earlier
While all that was sitting at the back of my mind, I caught up with Jeff Lloyd and his amazing wife Nicola, firstly to make a bit of fuss of Jeff for having such a fantastic last season as well as having a ride in the inaugural Everest. During our exchange, Nicola mentioned that she was the granddaughter of the late, great Charlie Barends and as he was somewhat before my time and I have seen very limited information on him anywhere, I asked her whether she’d be interested in chatting about him with a view to telling the Charlie Barends story. She said yes. It is still a bit of a work in progress, but I hope to have it ready in the not too distant future and it’s a cracker.
Alongside Tiger Wright, Charlie, or Bobby as he was known to his family, dominated SA racing for almost 30 years. It turns out that Charlie’s widow, Joy, is still alive aged 97 and now living in Australia. Not only that, but she is well enough to be able to help me with a few questions. Joy was a ballroom dancing teacher and the two met when Charlie joined her class for dance lessons. They ran away to Joburg to get married because her parents didn’t approve. We thrashed through the family tree and Nicola explained that Charlie and Joy had a daughter named Kerry, who would go on to marry July winning jockey-turned-trainer Aubrey Roberts. They in turn had three children, Tiffany, Nicola and Ryan. Tiffany married Glyn Schofield and Nicola married Jeff Lloyd. Tiffany and Glyn’s son Chad is now carving his own riding career and Jeff and Nicola’s eldest son Jaden is planning to join the SA Jockey Academy next year. Isn’t that incredible? And no-one who has ever had any dealings with Nicola can fail to fall in love with her – she is seriously that lovely, even over email, and I just thought ‘wow, what an incredible story’ (and this is just the highlights reel) and what awesome people. And then I got to wondering why, with Jeff’s incredible achievements and all this wonderful history, aren’t we booking Jeff, or Glyn or Chad as our guest of honour and marketing the heck out of them?
Or even, to take the focus off people for a second, the horses.
Pocket Power – still a legend
One of my favourite things on the big days is to ask ‘Joe Public’ if they are betting and if so, what they like for the main race. To this day, people will look a little vague and then ask whether Pocket Power is running again. While it’s a little amusing, it’s interesting from the perspective that we obviously did something right for the public to still make the association with Pocket Power this far down the line. That’s something we should build on while we still can. We’ve just had only the second ever Winter Series winner after Pocket (hint hint), it’s pretty easy to join the dots.
We have so much wonderfulness. We should be shouting, ‘This is what we do. These are our people. This is what makes us special.’
Measured against that, Mr Bolt has some pretty large shoes to fill.
