Racing was as cruel as it was beautiful long before Elliott

BETFAIR were first out the gate, ending their sponsorship of Gordon Elliott, because the picture of him sitting on a dead horse was “completely at odds with the values of the Betfair brand”.

“You could look at those words for a long time and find no peace,” I tweeted. It got 1,300 likes. People have learned to laugh at the “values” of corporations, especially betting corporations.

In other recent racing news, the UN High Commission for Human Rights is to investigate the safety and whereabouts of Princess Latifa, who has not been seen in public for almost two years — she is the daughter of the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who owns the prestigious Kildangan Stud in Co Kildare.

And I’d mention the six-month suspension of a trainer due to a horse of his being pulled up at Tramore and failing a test for a sedative, but we mightn’t exactly be comparing like with like there — except to note that this was another controversy involving members of the racing and betting communities. And that they may be finding it hard right now, to navigate the comparative rights and wrongs of these issues using that ancient moral compass of theirs.

All they know for sure, is that they keep drawing attention to themselves in the wrong way, that such matters which they would prefer to keep ‘in-house’ are now being thrown open to the judgment of the multitudes — who have declared the Elliott scandal the most egregious of these, last week at least.

Yes there is badness in enabling a gambling addiction, or drugging a live horse, or whatever the hell is happening in Dubai — but somehow Elliott’s transgression looked worse than all of these, because disrespect for the dead in any circumstances is still taboo.

Here was disrespect veering towards mockery, and it was in our faces, all there, in one shot.

Yet it’s all so random, the winners and the losers in this moral lottery — the same sort of lottery which in another world threw up a loser like David Drumm, who must still be wondering how he was one of the few giants of the Irish banking sector to go to jail.

Now Gordon Elliott, on top of all his other troubles, must feel a bit like the Drummer — mystified, that in a business as cruel as it is beautiful, he alone should lose so much.

Because he got caught sitting on a dead horse — what were the odds? Could even Betfair, summoning all the values of its brand, calculate how unlikely it was for all of those misadventures to come together and to end up with Elliott looking like the winner of the Supreme Eejit Hurdle?

Sadly, Twitter cares even less about the random nature of moral exposure than we do in the real world. On social media, the cruellest game of all, they devour whatever is in front of them without pausing to contemplate the labyrinthine nature of the moral maze.

Personally I’d forgive him of course, if I had any moral standing in the matter, which I don’t, really. I have loved the racing game since I was small boy and my father would bring me to meetings. Indeed the main ambition I had was that some day I’d have a job that would pay enough to buy a car, in which I could drive myself to race meetings.

I’d be one of the few who’d still watch the racing even if I hadn’t a

‘You don’t hear punters complaining much about ‘overuse of the whip’’

bet — for the spectacle and the memories. One of the clearest memories is that conflict between the beauty and the cruelty, the fact that for all its greatness, there is something incurably dark about horse racing.

Perhaps this was part of the attraction, the ‘strokes’ that seemed routine, the desperately angry men who would abuse a jockey returning to the parade ring because they felt (perhaps rightly) that he had ‘stopped’ the horse.

And yes, many of the people who work in stables have to love the horses — because there could be no reason other than love for them to be there on such poor wages and conditions.

We have always been aware of this at some level, yet we’ve accepted these old hierarchies of the game, because it’s somebody else’s problem.

That picture of Gordon Elliott may seem singularly ugly, but we also carry the knowledge that we were happy to indulge ourselves in the Grand National long before they made Becher’s Brook less dangerous.

What right have we to condemn the ugliness that is usually hidden, when we’ve been able to live with the carnage at Aintree and a lot of other tracks, for our sport?

Nor will you hear punters complaining much about ‘overuse of the whip’. It’s the underuse that makes them angry.

The cruelty has been ‘priced in’, as Betfair might put it. Unlike them, we should not be so quick to judge Gordon Elliott, who brought us some of the beauty, too.