Racing
Thin ends
Jeffrey Bernard
The best meeting in the racing calendar takes place next week at York. Best for me anyway. Most people will rate Royal Ascot as tops but Northerners and a few others still refer to Ascot as being the York of the South and not the other way around. The Great Voltigeur Stakes on Wednesday is a fascinating affair if the field doesn't cut up — with three St Leger runners, Alleged, Hot Grove and Classic Example probably battling for the first three places. They say Alleged went like a bomb in a gallop at Baldoyle last week when the 'Long Fellow' was in the saddle. He does get about, Mr ' Piggott, doesn't he?
Ireland one day, Chantilly the next and then you pick up a paper and see that he's just won the Latvian Derby or whatever. I can remember sitting outside a cafe in 'Chantilly one afternoon feeling bored and depressed and anxious about the fast dwindling expenses 7 the afternoons are horribly dead even in that lovely place—and who should walk by but Lester. I never thought that worried, taut and serious face would be a cheering sight off a horse but I nearly burst into a couple of verses of 'We'll Meet Again' a la Vera Lynn. Of course, he didn't stop to say hello. That might have cost him a glass of red wine.
He worries me, does Lester. On all sorts of counts. What worries me most about him at the moment is his choice of biographer. It's said that Dick Francis has got the job and whatever you may think of that man's racing thrillers he strikes me as being all wrong •for the job. Piggott needs and deserves a journalist of the calibre of Norman 'I'm the best lay in New York' Mailer. Even if you've never met Lester and even if you're not a racing fanatic you'll probably be aware of the fact that he's the greatest at his job of all time, a genius at it, in fact, and don't let's argue about it. But what people don't realise and you only have to eavesdrop on Turf aficionados to know it, is that they don't know just how astute and funny the man is. Yes, funny. He has a very abrasive dry wit and a brain that fires on more cylinders than you'd suspect. Most of the stories about his meanness are his own private joke and just a tiny part of the legend.
It was driving back one sweltering day from the York August meeting and giving Willie Carson a lift that Lester told his chauffeur to pull up at a garage selling ice cream. 'Get three,' he told the driver who bought three cones. Lester took them and when Carson put out his hand for one of them he said, 'They're mine. Get your own.' That sort of incident, purely an experiment to see how discomfited Carson could look, has been exaggerated so as to make Lester seem pathologically mean. He isn't. Just tight.
Anyway, Artaius, Godswalk and Turkish Treasure are being sent over to York by Vincerit O'Brien and, presumably, Piggott will ride all three and you wouldn't exactly faint if he won on all three. If anything keeps me away from one of the days at York it will be the price of the train fare. They've been at it again, British Rail, you know? I'm beginning to think they're out to get me. Last Saturday's racing at Newmarket suffered from the appalling journey there and just as I was beginning to feel better I had to face the journey back.
I did have afternoon tea though on the course with Peter Blackwell who rushes all over the place for William Hill sizing up horses and recommending prices for them in their ante-post lists. I was intrigued to know what his firm are going to do about the vacancy left by Danny Mellen's departure as their PR officer. Blackwell said that when Mellen first got the job Sam Burns had 1,800 applications for it on his desk. A couple of them from university lecturers would you believe? They can't be quite as daft as I thought. The job pays something in the region of L10,000 a year and about £100 a week expenses, so I'm told, and consists largely of going racing most days and consuming large quantities of champagne at your Ascots, Longchamps,. Curraghs and Yorks. This is a job I'd consider doing for very little.
Other jobs I wouldn't mind for a while include being a barman in the Jockey Club rooms at Newmarket — oh, what eavesdropping! — being racing manager for Norman Bunker-Hunt and or Daniel Wildenstein or being a National Hunt steward. As it is, I'm proud to be able to tell you that as of this week I have actually been elected to a committee. Unbelievable, isn't it? I'm on the Stable Lads' Committee. God knows what that entails but I'll find out any day now. Anyway, it makes me feel fearfully important and almost respectable. Could it be the thin end of a respectable wedge?
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