The only place in horse racing where speed appears not to be a valued commodity is the office of the British Horseracing Authority, where a love of languor was again in evidence on Friday. Having promised in summer to have a new anti-steroid regime in place by new year, the ruling body admitted that it was going to need a bit more time and would now aim for March.
Well, no harm done, 1 January was an artificial deadline and the delay will be worthwhile if the new rules are improved in the meantime. But this was just the latest example of the BHA taking its own sweet time to complete a task that ought to be fairly straightforward for a competent regulator.
It is six years since the Neville review stressed the need for the BHA’s investigatory process to be speeded up but the three-year ban for the owner Anthony Knott, announced last week, related to events from more than two years before. In September, I reported that the BHA was still trying to decide whether to act against the trainer Jim Best in relation to a race that took place in the summer of 2013; the matter has since been dropped.
The jockeys Martin Dwyer and Paul Mulrennan are still waiting to learn whether they will face action over allegations that they discussed betting on a race in India, six months after an alleged recording of their conversation was posted on YouTube. Graham Bradley’s application for a trainer’s licence has been pending since May 2013 and, while sympathy for him may be in desperately short supply, it is odd that this issue has yet to be wrapped up.
These are not isolated examples. The general view of the BHA’s decision-making process is that it cannot move on anything without convening a series of committees and taking time to have a proper ponder about their findings.
Good governance should not be rushed, of course, but what we have in racing is glacial governance. Action that unfolds at such a steady pace is hard to distinguish from inaction.
The BHA is now casting about for ways to get people to run their horses more often, to combat the problem of small field sizes, but, as the trainer Alan King pointed out last week, this is a crisis six years in the making. “There are 1,600 less horses and there is more racing,” he was quoted as saying. “It’s the BHA’s problem, it’s their fault.”
Even now, there is little sign of urgency to the BHA’s response on this subject and the suspicion is that the organisation is going through a transitional lull in the final days of its chief executive, Paul Bittar. Nick Rust will take over three weeks from Monday.
One may have suspicions about Rust’s bookmaking background but he must be used to conducting business at a more vigorous tempo. Hopefully, he can induce his new employers to raise more of a gallop.
When you allow problems to pile up, other important matters get overlooked. In November the BHA found no way to prevent the creation of a valuable new hurdle at Haydock that undermined two longstanding and prestigious events. It was unable to prevent the renaming of the historic Stewards’ Cup to suit a new sponsor this summer.
Somewhere behind the scenes, BHA staffers are trying to establish if the distances over which British jump races are actually run bear any relation to the official distances published in racecards. That project was made necessary in the autumn when Timeform showed that distances at Wetherby were inaccurate. A ruling body that was on top of its brief might possibly have located a tape measure some decades ago.
All things considered, it has been a year of living slothfully on High Holborn. May the new year bring a greater sense of energy and purpose to that sedated workplace.
