Wait and see
Robin Oakley
J've always doubted that all publicity is good publicity but headlines about his midweek arrest along with 15 other people brought at least one dividend for champion jockey Kieren Fallon on Saturday. 'You guys gave me a good reminder that I hadn't used him for a while, trainer Mark Johnston told the press after Kieren had won the first on his front-running filly Mystical Girl.
The latest sensational reports of alleged race-fixing hadn't kept the crowds away from Kempton and the champion jockey was warmly applauded for his two victories. Whether he is innocent or bent, he remains something of an anti-Establishment folk hero to the five-pint brigade. But there was even more readiness to cheer Frankie Dettori, whose re-honed ambition is making him a formidable force in this year's jockeys' championship and who drove home a quartet of winners.
Godolphin's signing of Kerrin McEvoy as a Dettori understudy and possible successor, press comment last year that he had lost his edge and a slow start to the season for Fallon's main employer, Sir Michael Stoute, have had Frankie buzzing. He is so high on what he is doing that there must be nights when Mrs Dettori has to scrape him off the ceiling.
As for Kieren Fallon, let us wait and see what evidence is produced. At this stage, we have no charges and no court case. Investigations of racing folk in the recent past have shown the police to possess an ignorance about the racing life which rivals mine about nuclear physics.
Trainer Jamie Osborne, one of the victims of a dawn raid in the past after he had ridden a horse which turned out to have been doped and who never faced any charges as a consequence, reminded me at Kempton how most of us had until then believed an arrest to be something that happened at a comparatively late stage of an investigation. Instead, in Jamie's case and. I suspect, in the latest one, it was something carried out to give the police the right to search his premises and grab his records in case there was anything incriminating to him or anybody else in the police file. An arrest is basically a fishing permit.
Like anybody involved with racing, I have been deluged with inquiries since Fallon's arrest along with trainer Karl Burke and jockeys Darren Williams and Fergal Lynch on the lines of 'Just how crooked is British racing?'. The answer, I suspect, is rather like the one given by a celebrity quizzed about his race and faith. 'I'm not a Jew,' he said. 'I'm just Jew-ish." Yes, there are occasional instances of corruption and there is manipulation of form. I want the book thrown at any doper or any jockey who 'pulls' a horse in a race he could win. But like human athletes, horses cannot reproduce peak performance every time they race, and sorting out which is likely to be priority day is part of the fun. There are plenty of people in the racing community whom I would trust with my building-society account. rather fewer whom I would trust with my daughter, and I am comforted to find some with a lifetime's experience in the sport, like former trainer Ian Balding, who insist they have never encountered skulduggery.
The other question I am asked is whether the arrival of betting exchanges, which enable punters to lay a horse they believe will lose as well as to back a horse they believe will win, has increased the incentive to fix races. Established bookmakers have lined up to shout 'Yes' before the rest of us can open our mouths. They are right. But they are making the case for commercial reasons, having lost significant business to the exchanges. Race-fixing attempts occurred before the exchanges existed and in their defence it has to be said that companies like Betfair are making the exposure of skulduggery, a great deal easier by opening up the paper trail of betting on suspect races, something bookmakers have been notoriously reluctant to do.
Racing, however, will go on and there was no shortage of entertainment at Kempton on Saturday, especially when Clive Brittain was in the winner's enclosure with Satchem, winner of the Pentax Sirenia Stakes. 'What next?' we asked him about the Inchinor colt, one of five sent to him by. Sheikh Mohammed's son Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Al Maktoum. 'The sky's the limit,' he grinned. 'You know me, Group One Clive. He doesn't look to have a lot of scope, but he's got plenty of heart and ability so we won't worry about the scope.' The wrong side of 70, Clive looks relentlessly to the future, insisting, 'I've been rediscovered.' He added, 'When you wake up in the morning and you can still feel something in your hand, you've got to go on.' And I don't think he was referring to a prayer book. He was quick, though, to give the credit for Satchem to David Loder, who trained the colt until seven weeks ago. All Clive had to do, he said, was give the horse a little break then note he was working well enough to tackle a Group Three.
Also beaming was Godolphin trainer Saeed bin Suroor. First the gutsy Mamool, a horse so badly injured in last year's Melbourne Cup that his racing future was in doubt. came back to win another Group Three, the Pentax UK September Stakes. Then the Boys in Blue took the seven furlong two-year-old race with Storm Silk. They hope to be winning decent races with him next year and the bookmakers offered no more than 25-1 against Storm Silk starting a sequence with next year's 2,000 Guineas. It really has been Godolphin's year, with plenty yet to come.
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