The George Washington eulogies are excessive

By Ian Carnaby

To state the obvious, what happened at Monmouth Park on Saturday was very sad.

The racing world lost a special athlete, a gifted performer who was capable of brightening the day and sending people home happy. What more can we ask of sport? We turn up, we are entertained, we roar with delight and still talk excitedly on the way home.

We crave champions and in George Washington we nearly had one. Or we had one on certain days - the Phoenix Stakes, the 2000 Guineas, the Queen Elizabeth II. If George needed cosseting - the lesser, unsung companion in the parade ring, the special care and attention down at the start - we went along with that. If one of the placed horses had refused to enter the unsaddling enclosure after the Guineas it would have been irritating, but when George demurred it was proof of his intelligence. Why shouldn’t champions have their little quirks and foibles? Isn’t that what makes them champions? (Er, no, actually.)

I can put up with bias because I’m pretty biased myself, but some of the tributes to George Washington, quite apart from being massively over the top, pay little attention to his overall record. In all, he won six out of 13 races before his ill-fated journey to America, where he failed a year ago. Since winning the Guineas, he had triumphed once in seven outings.

George’s career record falls well short of truly great

The problem with George was that he was always doing remarkably well for someone with his troubled background, unsuccessful stud career, etc, but not quite managing to win. Sure, there were valid excuses. Yes, they did wonderfully well at Ballydoyle to get him back at all following his injury in the Irish 2,000. But none of that changes the fact that he did not win at all this year, or that his career record is a furlong adrift of the truly great mile to a mile and quarter horses we could mention from Brigadier Gerard onwards.

As I say, I can put up with the bias. I wasn’t interested in people telling me that Matt Le Tissier was lazy or overweight, I just showed them the video. But where quite a few observers have gone wrong in this instance, I think, is in the little matter of ‘intelligence’. Let’s be honest, as far as some commentators are concerned, everything the horse did was down to this generally elusive attribute within the equine world. In his raw enthusiasm, Aidan O’Brien - who knew George Washington best, after all - prepared the ground for some quite extraordinary claims. Even I found myself wishing George could speak, if only to hear him say: ‘Oh, do leave off’.

“George was a handsome, cocksure champion leading us all a merry dance. He even fooled some into thinking he had lost the full force of his powers”, wrote one prominent columnist after the sadness of the weekend.

Yup, I’d have to hold my hands up there. When a horse hasn’t won for the better part of 14 months I’m afraid I’m one of those weak-minded, fickle observers who wonder if a certain deterioration has set in. It is just possible, you know.

And in an otherwise well-crafted, sincere, impassioned piece, I’m not sure about ‘We live in a hate culture’, either. Do we? We may live in a self-interested, politically ignorant, celebrity-obsessed, soap dominated culture, but ‘hate’ is not an emotion most of us feel or even experience outside the darker areas of the internet.

We feel sorry that George Washington is no longer with us, and we feel for O’Brien, who would not have asked more of the horse than he thought he could achieve. There is no question of blame here.

But, in a sport which is all about opinions, we reserve the right to question widely-held assumptions, especially when they lean heavily on the spurious notion that an animal is somehow blessed with human characteristics, which is palpable nonsense. And we must be allowed to draw attention to the career as a whole, not just aspects of it. As far as this commentator is concerned, George Washington’s best days were rather a long while ago and he ended up with plenty to prove.