We were, just for a change, in a pub garden on Saturday afternoon, drinking some delightful ales. On big screens inside the pub and even bigger screens outside, everyone present, except us, was watching the Grand National from Aintree. The colour, the roar from the crowd, the 40 strong field of powerful horses – what a spectacle! But it’s not for me.
There’s no question that people were enjoying the race. People waved their betting slips in the area and cheered as Noble Yeats cruised to victory. It is one of the most important sporting occasions of the year and it’s hugely popular. Once the race was over, TV presenters interviewed euphoric owners, trainers and jockeys about their greatest day. Apparently there was little mention of the two horses that died during or just after the race and the two who died in other races at the Aintree festival.
The dead horses had names, too, albeit stupid, typical horse racing names. Elle Est Belle dropped dead during the gruelling race, Discorama was pulled up with an injured pelvis and ‘destroyed’, as they say in the business, courtesy of a gunshot to the head. In other races, Solwara One was pulled up, injured, and destroyed, and Eclair Surf died of head injuries caused during its race. The deaths are not just an inconvenient fact, they are an inevitable consequence of horse racing where 2424 horses have died as a direct result of horse racing in the last 15 years.
I do have to say that I have never understood the appeal of horse racing, a ‘sport’ in which the main participants – the horses, surprisingly – have no idea they are involved in a race, but are bred, encouraged and whipped to achieve results, effectively forced to run much further and much quicker and to carry on jumping when they are tried and weary.
I recall many years ago, half-watching a race in the pub where the atmosphere was raucous as the horses ran the 4.25 miles over what looked to me like terrifyingly high fences, with even bigger drops on the other side. On the second circuit, the race was slightly diverted because there was a large tent just by one of the fences. A woman near me asked what it was. I answered, bluntly, “That’s so we don’t have to watch an injured horse taking a bullet to the brain.” It had little effect as the woman and the group she was with continued to cheer the surviving horses. I came to the view that either people didn’t care that beautiful horses were natural collateral damage, an essential price to be paid, so it didn’t matter and they weren’t bothered, or they put it to the back of their minds, thanks in part to the TV coverage which rarely dwells on the awkward bits where horses die sometimes agonising deaths.
I have heard some of the arguments in favour of racing, particularly jump-racing. If they didn’t race, they’d be sent to the knackers yard (what do these people think happens to race horses when their racing lives are over?) and the best one, they wouldn’t jump the fences if they didn’t want to. I confess to not having to spoken to any race horses, but my guess is that given the choice of suffering a ghastly and painful death as a result of jumping a fence that was too high or had too much of a drop on the other side or living quietly in a big field with other horses, they’d prefer the latter.
So, I don’t watch horse racing. I don’t want to dress like an even bigger twat and attend the death fest that is Cheltenham, where in 2007 the campaign to expose and record every on-course thoroughbred fatality in Britain began.
I know what it’s about: money. Nothing showed that more to be true when the Cheltenham Festival went ahead in 2020 when experts were telling the country to lock down against Covid. That Dido Harding, who was a senior figure in horse racing in general and Cheltenham in particular, went on to squander £37 billion on the government’s privately run and failed Track and Trace system for Covid, tells you all you need to know.
Horse racing will never be banned, at least not for the foreseeable future, because there is no real mood in the country to do so. Imagine the death figures from horse racing applied to football, with 2424 players dying in 5509 days, with officials erecting tents outside the penalty area to put injured players out of their misery while the game went on around them? Would people still be attending in vast numbers? At least stop the wretched Martin Tyler shouting, “And it’s live” when actually it was dead.
No. It’s okay. It’s only horses. And they shoot horses, don’t they?
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