Lord Windemere wins the Gold Cup at the 2014 Cheltenham Festival
Something that never fails to surprise about Cheltenham, even the four-day, 27-race marathon that has replaced the gentler Festival of the past, is its ability to dominate all thoughts for many months beforehand and then fly past in a blur.
So much happens in such a short space of time that it is difficult to take it all in, so it was a helpful aspect of the 2014 Festival that each of the four feature events was immediately memorable in its own way.
Champion Chase
Sire De Grugy’s success for Gary and Jamie Moore in the Champion Chase was an unqualified delight, a moment to enjoy and cherish as the rest of the weighing room formed a guard of honour for a colleague celebrating his first win at the meeting.
The Gold Cup was a race of high drama, both on the track and off, thanks to a 15-minute stewards’ inquiry to decide whether Lord Windermere’s short-head defeat of On His Own should be reversed. Opinions on cases like these tend to be deeply held, fairly unshakable and informed too by the never-ending debate over whether Britain gives winners too much of the doubt.
A personal view is that there was clearly a case to consider but that the stewards were right to decide they could not be sure Lord Windermere improved his placing. The fact that “result stands” was a pretty solid 1-3 favourite on Betfair throughout the deliberations also suggests that many punters have an appreciation of how the rules work and the degree of certainty required to disqualify, though this is an issue which will always provoke fierce debate.
World Hurdle
More Of That wins the World Hurdle at the 2014 Cheltenham 2014
The World Hurdle was a fine race too with a worthy winner in More Of That, but also the final start for Big Buck’s, perhaps the finest staying hurdler the Festival has seen. The 11-year-old, whose 18-race winning streak is a record that may stand for decades, took a final turn around the parade ring before heading into retirement, fit and healthy.
Our Conor will never do the same and his fatal fall in the early stages of the Champion Hurdle cast a shadow over the race and the opening day. It also prompted Ruby Walsh to observe, prompted too by the news that Jason Maguire had had part of his liver removed following a fall the previous day, that “it’s sad but horses are animals, outside your back door. Humans are humans. They are inside your back door. You can replace a horse. You can’t replace a human being. That’s my feeling on it.”
Twisted
Walsh’s comments were twisted into a story by animal rights activists who claimed he was callous and this was gratefully swallowed by dozens of mainstream news reporters.
The first few hundred words of the Daily Mail’s report the following day could have been dictated word for word by an Animal Aid spokesperson, though the paper did at least acknowledge that the group’s philosophy is based on animal rights and not animal welfare. Others failed to consider or comprehend even that very basic point.
The overwhelming majority of Mail readers – and I suspect the great majority of Guardian readers too – would be dismayed to wake up in the kind of world that Animal Aid would like to see, in which no animal is used for anything at all.
But it is not going to happen, for as long as Britain is a democracy at least, so groups such as this one use the welfare agenda as cover to gain what exposure they can and keep the funding coming in.
Statistics
As the BHA pointed out last week, the overall fatality rate in racing is 0.2% per runner, down from 0.3 in the space of a few years, although this is itself a little misleading in the context, as the authority’s figures also show that jump racing –with four fatalities per 1,000 runners – has significantly more casualties than the Flat (0.6 per 1,000 runners). Realistically, it is hard to believe that it will ever get much closer to zero.
But Animal Aid would not be satisfied with a fatality rate of 0.000001% per 1,000 runners, because the group is opposed to all racing on principle. It would prefer the thoroughbred breed to die out than be used for the purpose for which it was developed in the first place.
Attacks by animal rights groups will continue for as long as people send them money but in a sense this simply reflects the increasing popularity and significance of the Festival in particular. The bigger the target, the more promise it holds as an annual vehicle for fundraising.
It does not mean that Ruby Walsh – who along with Daryl Jacob and Bryan Cooper suffered a season-ending injury at the meeting – is callous or dismissive about the risks to the horses. He was just pointing out that the people matter too.
