Gordon Elliott has shown that horse racing isn’t a love affair between man and animal
If you happened to tune in to the Today programme midway through the sport section on Tuesday, the atmosphere was anguished and baffling. “His world is crumbling in front of him right now,” said David Jennings, deputy Irish editor of the Racing Post. “He is a broken man.” In the space between hearing these powerful words and discovering the subject, one’s imagination could go anywhere – a life-changing injury, the untimely loss of a loved one. In fact, they were talking about Gordon Elliott, the Irish horse trainer and three-time Grand National winner, of whom a picture went viral at the weekend.
In the picture, Elliott is sat on a horse, holding a phone with one hand and making a sideways victory sign with the other. The problem is the horse is plainly dead, and it’s not a pretty death, the poor creature’s gaping mouth and glassy eyes seeming to tell the story of a loyalty so intense that it went beyond its heart’s endurance to satisfy the demands of a training run. According to Jennings, Elliott now feared the worst, which would be the removal of his licence and the loss of his business, the jobs of 80 staff gone beside his own. “We cannot defend this,” Jennings continued. “You can’t defend it, I can’t defend it, Gordon can’t defend it. This cannot be defended.” And yet, Jennings went on to talk about the two sides there were to every story, seemingly at pains to imply that the picture wasn’t what it seemed.
It was, even once you’d figured out what was going on, peculiarly heated. The world of horse racing is well known to be pretty brutal: horses often die during the races themselves, in full sight of an audience. The League Against Cruel Sports counted 40 deaths at the three-day Grand National meet between 2000 and 2013, and Animal Aid listed 39 dead horses at the Cheltenham meet over that time period.
Animal rights groups aside, most people accept these deaths as the collateral damage of a noble sport, but the terms of that acceptance are quite subtle: it is based on the understanding that nobody cares more about the horses or feels these losses more keenly than insiders: trainers, owners, riders, grooms. The tragedy, where it occurs, is theirs, and it’s not for the bystander to question whether it was necessary or humane. Hence the incalculable damage of the photo: if it’s normal for a trainer to pose on a corpse like an idiot playboy on a big game hunt, then it follows that they actually don’t care, and all bets are (literally) off.
Money and metaphor loom large over that delicate contract. A friend who was for many years the racing correspondent for a current affairs
channel told me of conversation he had at a stud farm, where he asked whether the mares actually enjoyed it. They looked at him as you would an idiot: of course horses enjoy sex. It’s a biological imperative. Otherwise there wouldn’t be horses. He replied: “It’s just that I have noticed that you’re tying her legs up and putting a bag over her head. Lovemaking doesn’t usually involve so much tethering and hoodwearing.”
This is where the raw numbers come in: the overarching importance of nobody kicking anybody else in the testicles is to the tune of millions. Galileo, who has been the most valuable stud in the world for more than a decade, is worth £180m. As perilous as it is to be a low-unit-value animal of interest to human markets – a battery chicken’s life is hardly enviable – horses have a unique resource curse, where their net worth is simply so high that any of their regular equine interests are inevitably subordinated to it (Galileo is often described as “rich”, rather than expensive – it’s just too much money to contemplate as a price tag on a living thing, easier to conceive of him with a bank account, buying fancy leatherette tack.)
But, in reality, a horse doesn’t have much use for money, so the picture relies on an intensely loving relationship between owners, trainers and horses, without which it curdles into a kind of perverse exploitation. From Black Beauty to Boxer in Animal Farm, horses have long stood in metaphorically for the innocent, questing, trusting worker ground under the wheels of the market. The symbolism is more specific than a critique of capitalism: the horse tends to be the emblem of commodification, that unique and unnatural cruelty of putting a price tag on a living thing.
Elliott should have the benefit of the doubt – he could have been deeply upset and just behaved in a strange way. People do wild things when they’ve had a shock. But on reflection, it is unsurprising that we would be scandalised by this picture: we have a huge amount of our own self-worth, as a species, wrapped up in how we respect and treat other species, and the horse racing world poses a constant challenge to this.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
quired? Shankly wanted a goalscorer who could play alongside Roger Hunt, someone with the intelligence to adapt to the system he envisaged with twin strikers, rather than as a focal point supported by wingers in advance of a pair of inside-forwards, as had been traditional. Clough would have been ideal, had even played in a two alongside Alan Peacock at Boro. Then Shankly saw a line in a Scottish paper: Motherwell had made Ian St John available for transfer.
St John was six when his father, a steelworker, died. He was one of six children who had been brought up by his mother. He had worked at the Colville steelworks and shown aptitude as a boxer. He would turn 23 that summer but had already scored 80 league goals and was already a Scotland international. He had scored a hat-trick against Hibs in 150 seconds.
He was tough, aggressive, clever, bristling with energy and had an eye for goal. He was perfect.
Shankly persuaded two directors the club had to sign him, even though it meant a club record fee of £37,500. That day they drove to Motherwell in a Rolls-Royce belonging to one of the directors to watch St John in a game against Hamilton.
They completed the deal shortly after midnight, before Newcastle, who also wanted him, had time to act.
The centre-half Ron Yeats joined from Dundee United that summer. Landing the pair of them, Shankly said, was the turning point. Liverpool were promoted the following season, won the league in 1964 and the FA Cup in 1965, St John scoring the extra-time winner in the final against Leeds.
He was the perfect foil for Hunt, but he was also something more. He was brash and irreverent, full of ideas. When he introduced red shorts to replace the traditional white before a European Cup game against Anderlecht in 1964, it was St John who suggested going the whole hog and wearing red socks as well. For the sociologist John Williams in his book Red Men, “St John symbolised the arrival of the 1960s at Anfield”.
For a time, music and football came together in a culture of heady selfconfidence, seen most obviously in the mass singing of Beatles songs on the Kop, as recorded by the BBC’s Panorama cameras in 1964. But the first terrace song came a little earlier and simply replaced the words “Let’s Go” in the Routers’ hit with “St John”.
He won another league title in 1966and played in Liverpool’s defeat by Borussia Dortmund in the final of that year’s Cup Winners’ Cup. But time eats at all teams. Shankly was slow to rejuvenate his first great side, whose longevity is made clear when juxtaposed with the progression of the Beatles, who had soundtracked Liverpool’s first season back in the top flight. In six years, John Lennon had gone from the innocent greetings-card lyrics of She Loves You to Cold Turkey, a harrowing reflection on heroin withdrawal: St John was still playing up front with Hunt.
The 60s could not last for ever. After a run of three draws, St John was dropped for the first time, left on the bench for a game at Newcastle, a decision he found out about only when Jackie Milburn, to whom he was chatting in a corridor, was handed a team sheet. Shankly, for all his tough exterior, hadn’t been able to tell him to his face.
A few weeks later, when St John complained that the turkey the club had given him for Christmas was on the scrawny side, the club secretary, Bill Barlow, told him the plump ones were for first-teamers. His time at Anfield was nearly done. Few ends in football are glorious; hardly anyone gets the farewell they deserve.
St John’s gifts as a broadcaster, on television and radio, gave him a second act after an unconvincing dabble in management at Motherwell and Portsmouth. But more than anything, he was a great centre-forward and an integral part of Liverpool in the 60s.