It’s a curious dichotomy how Irish racing ends 2024 in a position of unprecedented achievement while at the same time facing into the New Year with insecurity bubbling just underneath the surface.
Perhaps the most tangible expression of Irish accomplishment comes from Britain. Aidan O’Brien is champion flat trainer there for a seventh time. But Willie Mullins broke new ground by topping the cross-channel jumps trainer lists. It’s the first time in 70 years an Irishman has done that. It makes for a remarkable expression of overall Irish racing excellence.
Mullins’s epochal season saw him smash through the once scarcely imaginable mark of 100 Cheltenham Festival winners. When he added April’s Aintree Grand National to the previous month’s Gold Cup and Champion Hurdle, he completed jump racing’s unofficial ‘Triple Crown’.
That level of achievement was recognised by his receipt of RTÉ’s manager of the Year award last Sunday. O’Brien won the same award in 2017. This time Mullins edged out luminaries such as the Ireland rugby coach Andy Farrell and the charismatic Shelbourne boss Damien Duff.
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Mullins was his usual smooth self in accepting the gong, diverting praise to the team he has built up over decades. But even in those triumphant circumstances, there was a suggestion of a sport ill at ease with itself.
“You always feel that racing mightn’t be the most popular sport at these sport stars awards, so it’s great to see racing getting a look in as well,” Mullins said afterwards.
It was a curious point to make. Rachael Blackmore won RTÉ’s Sports Person of the Year in 2021. AP McCoy got the same in 2013. It’s rare a racing figure isn’t nominated for it. Paul Townend was a nominee this time. Racing’s sense of entitlement is formidable, but even in an essentially trivial popularity contest it can hardly claim to being short-changed.
Reading too much into a throwaway remark might be misguided. But it smacks of a certain twitchiness within the old game when it comes to outside perception, particularly the scrutiny it has come under in recent years.
Awards help the showroom image Horse Racing Ireland in particular likes to portray. Uncomfortable peeps under the sport’s bonnet are another matter, and there have been too many of those for comfort in 2024, something perhaps behind Mullins’s defensiveness.
Most damaging of all has been the RTÉ Investigates examination of the Shannonside abattoir and the traffic of unwanted thoroughbreds through it. Racing’s wastage rate has always been an uncomfortable topic usually parked to the side. This was a reminder of the grim flipside to the sales brochure.
It is a fundamental threat to racing’s social contract and yet in the wake of the RTÉ programme, what happens to horses after they stop racing has been met with little more than trite noises from HRI. Looking the other way and hoping for the best on such an existential and emotive subject is a ticking reputational time bomb and that ticking is only going to get louder.
Heading it off with meaningful action should be an urgent priority. But there is abundant evidence of how racing’s default position is to hunker down and hope it all goes away when the sport comes under an uncomfortable spotlight . When it doesn’t, as with doping allegations that eventually reached Oireachtas committee level, eventually being forced into reactive mode means the reputational battle is largely lost already.
George H Bush’s ‘vision thing’ doesn’t seem to come into any reckoning about heading off problems at the pass.
Once again in 2024, the sport’s administration and regulation failed to convince. A report on how the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board raided a charity fund for €350,000 to pay staff in 2022 raised as many questions as it answered, hardly the exercise in transparency promised by those charged with keeping everyone else on the straight and narrow.
HRI, for its part, couldn’t even get a largely cosmetic exercise in fencing off 60 races from the top four National Hunt trainers across the line. In the face of political heat to generate some sort of level playing field for publicly subsidised prize money it cowed to pressure from Mullins & Co.
HRI can argue how a general election campaign helped the major political parties reaffirm their commitment to the Horse & Greyhound Fund. But the outlook is worryingly uncertain from the media rights revenue stream that’s the other big pillar underpinning racing’s finances.
Having tied its bottom-line inextricably to cross-channel betting, the rapid decline in turnover there is a stark problem only likely to get worse and is accompanied by the reputational cost of being perceived as little more than the other side of the gambling coin.
Looking at Irish racing’s structure it’s not hard to make parallels with how economic metrics in Ireland theoretically suggest a thriving first-rate society that’s at odds with the reality on the ground of third-tier infrastructural deficiencies.
On a range of vital issues, it faces a struggle to systemically catch up. That should be viewed in terms of investment and not cost. Instead, it looks like things are simply being stored until storage isn’t an option any more. By which time persuading the wider world will be just harder.
SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND
Four raiders will try to secure a first Irish success in the final Grade One before Christmas in tomorrow’s Long Walk Hurdle at Ascot. Hiddenvalley Lake could prove best of them but still not cope with the leading home hope STRONG LEADER (2.25).
Dysart Enos will be a popular fancy for tomorrow’s Ladbrokes Hurdle although KABRAI DU MATHAN (3.35) is unbeaten in three career starts and time could show a 131 mark to be generous.
