The sport of knaves
Michael Henderson
MY word, Paris looked wonderful last weekend. The city is not necessarily more beautiful in autumn than London, which has better parks, but it is no less beautiful either. Even the Parisians. who as we know can be a grumpy bunch, seemed to be enjoying this most evocative of seasons, and the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe — the classic horse race at Longchamp, in the Bois de Boulogne — made Sunday a very special day indeed.
Frankie Dettori won the race, for the second year running and for the third time altogether. The Anglo-Italian jockey carried Marienbarcl home after a late charge up the straight and, at 16-1, that represented good value for the punters who had backed him. Dettori was not short of support. At least 15,000 spectators — one in three present — had travelled from the UK and Ireland to enjoy one of the great days in the flat-racing calendar.
They enjoyed it all the more because the day out, and Dettori's glory, took everybody's minds off the allegations that prefaced the race, and which continue to rumble through the sport of kings. Panorama, the BBC programme, has been investigating the tributaries of racing's mighty river and, last Sunday, broadcast its allegations of wholesale corruption, which, as they say, sent 'shock waves' through this enclosed world of jockeys, trainers, owners and punters.
The Jockey Club came out of it badly, partly because, with such a fusty, crusty, Edwardian image, it makes an easy target. After all, are they not 'toffs'? To hear some people talking, the club is peopled by men who have walked straight out of a Wodehouse novel; braying buffoons from the shires who you wouldn't trust to sit on the toilet the right way.
It didn't help that Panorama did one of their number like a kipper. Jeremy Phipps, the club's head of security, was a major-general in the SAS, but those pips on his shoulder counted for little when he vouchsafed to his predecessor, one Roger Buffham, in a secretly filmed interview in licensed premises, that members of the Jockey Club were 'ignorant', and prefaced his observation with the F-word, Phipps claimed later that he was palling up to Buffham, to win his confidence, but he didn't convince many people that he was telling the unvarnished truth.
Racing and corruption go together like
• • well, Gilbert and Sullivan, or Pinky and Perky. There has always been scope in a sport driven by betting for a nod here, a wink there, a duck and a dive, a brown envelope, a lame nag and a bought jockey. But the view from within the tent is that Panorama, presented with a clear run down the straight, pulled up short. Buffham, their star witness, left the Jockey Club under a dark cloud of his own after accusations of sexual harassment, and the programme was not thought to have made its case unequivocally.
The man of the hour certainly didn't think much of it. 'I thought it was absolute rubbish,' said Dettori. 'Nothing new came out. It was five-year-old things that we all knew about. I have been all over the world, and British racing is probably the best-policed sport in the world,' And what, some Panorama viewers might ask, does that say about those who oversee racing in other countries?
Whether the sport likes it or not — and clearly it doesn't — thousands of people will now see racing in a different light. Mud, however clumsily it is slung, has a habit of sticking. There may be more to come. Panorama indicated the other day that there was enough material for another programme.
Previous page
