The good old Derby Days
Simon Barnes
WHATEVER happened to the Derby? It was once one of the biggest days of the sporting year. It worked for a good couple of centuries. It was a festival day, a day of ritual licence, an orchestrated carouse, a joyful mass truancy, a celebration of being alive. Now it's just a horse race.
And not a particularly great horse race, at that. It's worth winning, all right, and it is always won by a bloody good horse, but a Derby winner no longer makes racing people go weak at the knees.
I played truant myself once, and went to one of the last Derby Days that were still Derby Days, in 1978. First Wednesday in June, a train to Tattenham Corner that stopped like a dog at every telegraph pole, and a great feeling of belonging, of joining a festival.
You paid nothing; you just arrived and milled about on Epsom Downs, admiring the endless lines of bookies, debating whether or not to have the botulism burger or the health-hazard pork pie, and drinking beer from a plastic glass; waiting, anticipating, buzzing.
The fairground music oompahed, the Big Wheel spun and the gypsies foretold fame and name from their caravans. The open topped buses pulled up with a merry noise, and more and more people arrived.
The race was just hats, That was more or less all I saw, all anyone saw. A just about comprehensible Tannoy called out names and informed us of Hawaiian Sound's attempt to make all as we gazed transfixed at the magic carpet of hats, I knew the colour of the hat I was supposed to be looking for, but I don't recall picking it up, or the horse's name; just the patchwork quilt of hats sweeping round the long horseshoe of Epsom Downs and cavalry-charging downhill, and then the crescendo in that last cruel rise of 50 yards.
I was part of the legend, part of the annual remaking of the legend. Shirley Heights came walloping through on the inside to collar Hawaiian Sound. My chosen horse was nowhere: perfect day. I lived abroad after that, and followed the race breathlessly on the World Service: mighty Troy: Henbit winning despite breaking a bone in his foot; the impossible perfection of Shergar. I eventually returned to these shores and, naturally, went back to the Derby, a seedy travesty of what I had yearned for from across the oceans.
Something had been lost, not in the observer but in the event itself. It had ceased to be a free festival. It had lost its pre-eminence as the race for once-a-year punters; the Grand National had taken over, The race shifted to Saturday. In 1996, it was timed to squeeze into half-time of an England football match, which says it all, There are a thousand theories for the Derby's decline and fall, and the management of the course is not to be blamed. They still produce a terrific race.
The magic has gone not from the race but from the racegoers. It has lost its identity as a folk festival, a feast of cockney truancy. It has lost its aura of naughtiness. The problem is not in sport but in culture. It's not that the Derby is no longer good enough, it's that people no longer want it. It's just a horse race, albeit a rather good one. I like horse races myself. I'll be there.
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