SPECTATOR SPORT
Doping and disillusionment
Simon Barnes
RACING has got into one of its tizzes. Once again, the subject is doping. Three jockeys and an unnamed fourth person were arrested, later released, for fixing races by giving horses drugs to make them run slowly. The Jockey Club has leapt in feet first, as ever. The three jockeys were banned `to restore public confidence in rac- ing', if not confidence in such principles as innocent till proved guilty. They are right to be in a flap. Doping does not destroy a race, or an event, or even your whole day. Doping destroys the entire fragile dream culture on which rac- ing is based. I know. I once backed a horse that was doped. I have never backed a horse since.
The year was 1982, and I had just returned to England after years in Asia. I was living in a bedsit and doing occasional shifts for, God bless 'em, Titbits. I went to the races because I loved racing. I went to look at the horse that was supposed to be the best two-year-old ever. His name was Gorytus.
His picture on the cover of Horse and Hound was that of precocious majesty. His appearance in the parade ring was a lot bet- ter than that. I know, I know — it is hard to explain a one-sided passion for a horse. But this was the most beautiful beast I have ever seen, and I was powerfully moved. There were only three other runners in the Dewhurst Stakes, the year's top race for two-year-olds. Few wanted to take on this prodigy. Naturally, Gorytus started at long odds-on. I had gone to the races with no intention of betting, but one look at this animal, and I had to have a bet. Not for gain, not really, rather as a tribute to the beauty of the horse. Stupid, I know, but it would have been almost blasphemous not to have done so. I had to respond to this beauty with a sacrifice, a risk.
So I bet £20 to win about £10: a stupid kind of mystical tribute to beauty — no, to perfection. And the horse finished last. Got at. Troubled, exhausted, rolling about from side to side as he finished that brutal gallop across Newmarket Heath.
The rumour mills started and they kept on grinding. Everyone was certain that the horse had been doped, destroyed for the profits to be made on this one race; for all the long-range bets people had struck for the colt's future races, the 2,000 Guineas, the Derby. But nothing was ever proved. Racing, basically, pretended that it had never happened.
The Gorytus case went almost at once into the file marked 'unproven'. This is the unreadable, unforgettable catalogue of murky rumours and unsolid certainties. And the more nothing happened, the more I savoured this terrible feeling of betrayal. True, this was a naive response, but betting is supposed to be naive. If you are going to be grown-up about betting, you have to accept that bookmakers always win, and that would never do.
I am not, I promise you, in a 16-year sulk about all this. I am not that kind of poor loser. It was just this terrible moment of one-sided passion. Most of us know about these terrible moments, have felt them for a ballet dancer or a singer. The passion is neither lustful nor envious, it delights only in apparent perfection. Well, please accept that horsy people feel this kind of thing for horses; horses do rum things to people.
I felt that if the business of betting could do that to such a beautiful beast, then I wanted no part of it. Gorytus never raced again, and I never bet. I have had the occa- sional wager with a friend, with big-time stakes like a bottle of Glenmorangie, but I've never taken the same delight in hazard, and I've never been to a bookmaker again. Racing is a dreamy matter — Gorytus woke me up. Racing's dream vanished, never quite to be recalled — which is the way of dreams.
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