Life goes on – it’s just that it’s different

By Ian Carnaby

This being the week of the Musidora Stakes, my thoughts turn inevitably to the Sporting Life and its demise ten years ago. The occasion was marked by a special race at Windsor on Monday evening, with a few Fleet Street - or Fetter Lane - souls in attendance. A decade ago we met in the Venice restaurant in Great Titchfield Street; sadly, that establishment has disappeared as well. No more Mantovani in mid-afternoon.

Although I wrote for the Life, and loved it, I never believed there was room for two daily racing papers in this country. To be more precise, I never thought there was room for two if they wanted to make a profit. Nothing has happened to change my mind, with the Sportsman’s rather expensive foray tending to underline the point.

The emphasis has changed, of course. Years ago, if the main meeting on a Monday was at Pontefract, Augur’s assessment of the feature race would appear on the front page of the Life. Now, the Post tends to look forward to the next big event, or the next big meeting, even if it happens to be several days away. How could it be otherwise, when there is such a welter of moderate racing between times?

Mind you, some of the correspondence in the Post about jumps meetings on sunny days is rather wide of the mark. The only reason the current fare feels like ‘summer jumping’ is that we have this so-called climax to the orthodox season at Sandown - which was more of a climax when Whitbread were sponsoring, but never mind - only for a new campaign to start the following day. There’s no point in calling it farcical; let’s settle for ‘strange’.

But it’s not as if we didn’t have NH racing in May before, so this cannot be called summer jumping as if something new were happening. In the old days, the season went through to the Horse and Hound Gold Cup at Stratford in the early days of June, when all the talk was of the Derby. Then there was a two-month gap, with aficionados heading for two-day meetings at Market Rasen or Newton Abbot over the August Bank Holiday. If you want to go back far enough, Dick Francis was a columnist for the old Sunday Express and provided excellent information for those meetings. My mother, God rest her, was a dedicated fan.

(Actually, I nearly said that the Express, Daily and Sunday, had gone the way of the Life and the Venice, but I suppose they cling on somehow. If they’d made me editor of the daily paper, which is not a million to one when you consider my willingness to make executive decisions from the back of El Vino in Fleet Street, I could have saved them quite a lot of money. First editorial meeting, first day: ‘Good morning. No more Maddy stories unless she’s found, boys. Danny Hall back as racing editor, whatever it costs. I think that’s it. Glass of fizz?’)

If the top jump jockeys had a say in whether they should ride for the two warmest months of the year, my guess is that they would say no. But we have reached that stage where there has to be constant action, especially in the betting shops, and races have to be found for moderate horses if at all possible. Someone has to ride them, so I suppose the rank and file members of the weighing-room are grateful for opportunities throughout the year.

The trick is to avoid being overwhelmed by it all

The trick, needless to say, is to avoid being overwhelmed by it all. Recently at Haydock I found myself wondering if the ground would be firm enough for Pearl King in a valuable handicap hurdle (it wasn’t), Hoh Hoh Hoh would cry ‘enough’ after running in too many sprints in quick succession (he did) and Richard Johnson would coax a victory from Down’s Folly in a beginners’ chase (he didn’t, but not for the want of trying).

But then, what would I have done instead? It was easy enough for Hemingway, he just sat down on the terrace of the Closerie des Lilas in Paris early in the morning and wrote, then reflected on his output in the Negre de Toulouse in the evening. Or maybe it wasn’t quite so straightforward.

“On this evening I was thinking these wholesome but not original thoughts and feeling extraordinarily virtuous because I had worked well and hard on a day when I had wanted to go out to the races very badly. But at this time I could not afford to go to the races, even though there was money to be made there if you worked at it”.

Quite apart from being one of his lightest, most agreeable books, A Moveable Feast touches on Hemingway’s love of racing and makes it hard to believe that he wrote only one short story about it. Still, if we’d written My Old Man I suppose we’d be happy enough. Come to think of it, if I’d written My Old Man I doubt I’d have bothered with anything else, like the man who put the bridge over Sydney Harbour.

In the early evening, Hemingway could stroll to a kiosk and buy the Paris-Sport Complet, which would have the last result from Auteuil in it. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that has the edge on Racecall and Ceefax. And the Negre de Toulouse is still there, which means it’s outlasted the Life and the Venice, but not the Express.

Not yet, anyway.