...BUT IT’S ALL GO AT KELSO
With fewer than 500 in attendance and no bookies, this was far from business as usual at Kelso
I think all racecourses, even when not racing, carry an echo of past winners
THE roll of thunder cascading down a hill in the Borders held a note of defiance. Nine sets of horses’ hooves, the desultory slap of a whip and the panting of the exhausted beast could be heard clearly from a distance. The world has seemed to stop. The 2.10 at Kelso went ahead.
Nine runners testified to the daily resilience of jump jockeys, racehorses and a beleaguered sport. The William Hill Novices’ Hurdle was contested with only a murmur from the stands, far from the raucous roars that carried winners home at Cheltenham last week.
More than 60,000 gathered each day in the Cotswolds. Kelso yesterday allowed fewer than 500 to witness a day’s racing that lacked on-course bookmakers and their faithful companion, the desperate punter.
The racecourse was as quiet as a mouse with laryngitis. Given the health measures and the security, said mouse was probably self-isolating at home in front of Racing TV. The rural expanse was thus only speckled with jockeys, the odd owner (and most owners admit they are odd) and the stable and course staff that allow a day at the races to go ahead.
A gaggle of press men looked on, in the manner of intruders at a funeral peering into an open casket.
Yet there was hope, fun and even joy. This was not just restricted to Sean Quinlan, who rode three winners. There was also a birthday celebration.
Jonathan Garratt, Kelso’s managing director, was 51 yesterday. As he surveyed the deserted course before racing, he said: ‘I had joked that this meeting was going to be a private party just for me. It’s turned out a lot more like that than I anticipated.’
He did not reveal if he had sung Happy Birthday while washing his hands but there were enough disinfectant dispensers to maintain the hygiene of the Mongol hordes on a particularly busy day of pillage. Everyone had to sign in as if entering a working men’s club.
There was no alcohol visible, outside the dispensers, but there was a powerful spirit. This was characterised by a sense of maintaining business as normal, even if it was as far from normal as possible.
The absence of bookmakers meant starting prices were set by eight off-course firms. The absence of punters meant that Kelso was also robbed of both the cries of joy of the winners and the barely heard groans of those who pay for a lifetime course in stoicism in used notes.
Kelso was yesterday a laboratory. It was the testing ground for an experiment in how to keep an industry going without the presence of the paying punter. Racing professionals gathered in the spirit of the Blitz. It is too soon to say whether this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.
Garratt (below)was ostensibly light-hearted but he is aware of the seriousness of the crisis that is approaching the sport with all the pace of Nijinsky under Lester Piggott.
He was suitably poignant about a day at the races where a cruel wind searched in vain for the confetti of losing betting slips.
‘Not having a crowd inevitably creates a different atmosphere but I like to think that all racecourses, even when they’re not racing, have an echo of the cheers of winners past,’ he said. This poetic nod to tradition and past certainty, though, seemed forlorn on a day when everything was strange and nothing was predictable.
Those who inhabit racecourses, particularly when the cavalry charges are negotiating fences, know that nothing can ever be considered certain, nothing can ever be taken for granted.
This lesson, hard earned by the punter, painfully by the jockey, has spread beyond the pretty surroundings of such as Kelso into a cruel world. Stripped of the roaring punter and the waving bookmaker, Kelso seemed both trivial yet important. The small track, marked with a 19th-century tower hosting the stewards and whitewashed buildings waiting in vain for customers, was holding the line against coronavirus in its own small way.
As live sports events become as rare as a thoroughbred unicorn, the 30-odd horses yesterday and their connections were sending a message that the race was not yet run, the battle not quite lost.
‘There will be a lot of eyes on us today from afar,’ admitted Garratt. ‘We want to try to delay the spread of coronavirus. We are trying to keep the rural economy afloat.’
Prize money last year was £1.4million at Kelso and that went directly to owners and trainers, who employ stable staff and buy food from local merchants.
Garratt added: ‘In a region like the Scottish Borders, where so many people are associated with horses, it is a vital part of the local economy.
‘If we stop racing, then people might decide not to have horses in training. If the trainers have no income, the stable staff aren’t employed and, suddenly, everyone is in a far worse position.’
Garratt would have expected 1,500 paying customers at yesterday’s meeting, plus corporate guests.
The course meeting on Saturday is bigger, normally attracting more than 3,000. ‘It will have a detrimental financial impact on us,’ he said of the crowd restriction. ‘This will have to be reflected in prize money.’
Walking around the course, it was clear that there may be another threat to racing continuing.
Medical staff are mandatory at events for obvious reasons. There are valid fears that ambulances and medics may be more gainfully employed far from the clattering of horses’ hooves.
Yet those involved in racing have to be optimistic. It is a wounding sport in terms of financial losses inflicted and physical injury sustained.
Garratt tried manfully to adhere to this unspoken credo. But he could not sustain a bright cheeriness in the face of the winds buffeting his sport and others.
‘I think we already know that there are worse days to come,’ he said.
IT is racing, so the comically absurd can exist beside the deadly earnest. The Kelso Carrot Man has provided the former for years.
This member of the course, heroically remaining anonymous, supplies a huge bag of carrots to the winning trainer of every race at the course. Sandy Thomson, the Borders trainer, was bowed under this burden after Duc de Grissay won the second race but also pocketed the more palatable sum of £3,764.
He grinned when insisting the carrots were for the horses and not destined for the pot but became more earnest when considering the plight of his industry. Thomson welcomed the announcement that racing would continue behind closed doors until the end of the month but he warned that the consequences for his brethren on the Flat could be catastrophic.
‘Strange day, strange times we
live in,’ he said. ‘Huge uncertainty everywhere.’
He pointed out that the Flat season is soon under orders, adding: ‘If racing is cancelled for them, it will be devastating for the whole Flat racing industry. We see the end product here but you don’t see the thousands of people employed getting horses to here, breeding the horses. It is a massive, massive industry and, if at all possible, hopefully, we’ll be able to keep it going until the summer.
‘There will be huge job losses. It will be catastrophic for the industry if something happens.
‘You’re going to have all these flat horses and they’re not going to be able to run. The owners are not going to want to pay for them, the trainers are not going to be able to pay their staff and the owners are going to be hugely out of pocket because they’re not going to be able to get any value on to their horse.’
Again, Thomson called on the spirit of resilience that is in the very DNA of those who train horses. ‘I feel very sorry for the people involved in Flat racing but in jump racing, it’s not going to be as big a disaster. Obviously, if we lose Aintree, Ayr and Perth, it’s a huge loss for racing in Scotland and racing in general. But jump racing will survive,’ he said.
This was not a tip. Not even a prediction. It was a promise.
RYAN MANIA has experienced one of the greatest roars in sport. He drove Auroras Encore home to win the Grand National in 2013.
Yesterday, he was more at home. The 30-year-old from Galashiels was riding a winner for Thomson, his father-in-law, and his grin might have been widened just a little by him not having to share carrot-carrying duties.
Like most jump jockeys, he is a good man to have in a crisis. ‘It’s business as usual for us. All we want to do is ride horses and earn some money,’ he said.
Mania is not blind to the dire possibilities that may come down the straight, though, and admitted: ‘I can’t imagine how it would work if it all shut down. If we lost meetings, they would not be restaged. It’s a real concern.’
This message was reinforced by Conor O’Farrell, who once rode for the Pipe stable but is now in the risky business of being a freelance in the age of coronavirus.
‘It was different riding with no crowds and no atmosphere, but it’s better that than no racing at all,’ he said.
‘You notice the crowds much more at the bigger meetings, obviously. I’ve ridden a Cheltenham Festival winner and the crowd was good that day. But the first time I rode in the Grand National, you realise what it’s like to ride in front of a big crowd.’
As he spoke, a member of the catering staff was taking his dog for a walk around the fringes of the course. Demands for food were limited on a day when the course was largely inhabited by jockeys who regard eating as a tedious habit that can be injurious to making a living and deprived of punters who would not only back a horse but eat one.
At around 5pm, the show ended to no applause. Six races had been run. Six winners declared. Yet that post-race bonhomie of the punter, laced with drink, scarred with loss and even buoyed by victory, was missing.
Kelso — and the sport, in general — are betting that closed-doors meetings can be a winner. They got a result yesterday. It would be the most intemperate of punters, though, who would bet on this form of racing going the distance.