SPECTATOR SPORT
Racing for love
Simon Barnes
RACING OFTEN calls itself an industry rather than a sport. Perhaps so, but it is a pretty rum one. For a start, it is the only industry I know which is totally dedicated to providing money for another industry the book-making industry. Racing, at a piv- otal point in its history, was too grand to sully its fingers with sordid trade, and so it must exist without controlling its betting money, and it is the betting money that turns the industrial wheels.
The sport or industry depends entirely on subsidy, and the owners are always picked out as the principal subsidisers. There are also the sponsors and the bookmakers, who pay a levy into the industry. The point is that owners are in it for one thing: love. Can an industry be run entirely on love? It costs at least £10,000 a year to have a racehorse in training. The sheikhs have hun- dreds of them all over the world, others pay the dues of their love by being members of a syndicate, and they count themselves lucky if the damn thing ever gets to a racecourse. But love is not about satisfaction. Love is only about love — such things as satisfaction, gratification and even pleasure are bonuses. Love envelops the whole demented edi- fice of racing. The Glorious Goodwood fes- tival of the past week is one more tribute to the enduring love that dominates the busi- ness; a love that is often corrupted, pervert- ed, jealous, ruinous, obsessive, self-aggran- dising, self-punishing, depraved, unhealthy, all-consuming, absurd, ridiculous, mad but love can be all those things, separately, serially, simultaneously. Neither racing nor love has very much to do with rationality.
Those who analyse the industry are aware of these things, aware that the business is founded on the rock of the owner's irrational love of glory, horses, chances, disappoint- ment, whatever. But they tend to miss the point that the industry is also subsidised at the bottom end. The stable lads are, just as much as the owners, subsidising racing. They, just as much as the owners, are in it for love.
Their love is a difficult way of life. The hours are killing and the pay is small. The work is highly dangerous: half a ton of overfed, neurotic, brainless two-year-old is not always amenable to polite negotiation. Working conditions are hard: the military tra- ditions of the game make for a rigid and often uncomfortable hierarchy. The life is halfway between appalling and so enviable, you won- der why everybody doesn't do it. Hard, bright mornings, hard, bright, wild horses, and twice a week the sudden vicious gallops. The care, the secret shared knowledge, and, as ever, the quest for victory and the thrill of the punt.
No need to romanticise them. Racing yards have their share of skivers, drinkers, out-of-control gamblers, nutters and bores. Lads are, to a man, to a woman, grumblers, just like everybody else in every other indus- try. Most of them are also thoroughly decent sorts, most of them are ridiculously brave, and most of them can ride like Cossacks.
No need to feel sorry for them, for they get a better deal than the owners on the whole. The owners only get the prize- money and the glory. The lads get the hors- es and, on those rare and glorious moments when the beast passes the post in front of all the others, they have a greater right than the owner to say, 'Look, my horse won.' Like the owners, they know that the busi- ness and their involvement in it are colossal folly. Unlike the owners, they give not their money, but their time: days, weeks, months, years, lives. Who was it that said non-obses- sive love is like alcohol-free lager?
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