I visited Aintree last year – well, I had a brief stop-off waiting for a train to Liverpool. Across the road from the station is a certain sporting temple most people associate with a specific annual event. The racecourse has been there for almost 200 years, which goes to show how horseracing predates most popular sports in this country, the majority of which were codified and turned professional much later, during the Victorian period. As with the sole occasion in which I attended a football match at the old Wembley stadium around 40 years ago, whenever setting eyes upon a venue one has been aware of via TV coverage all of one’s life, it’s hard not to be a tad awestruck for a moment. Seeing Aintree Racecourse merely from the outside was enough to summon up all those childhood memories of watching Red Rum’s trio of Grand National victories; catch the wind a certain way and no doubt it’d be possible to hear the rapid fire of Peter O’Sullevan’s breathless commentary again, a style which performance poet John Cooper Clarke once admitted to be an influence on his own machine gun delivery.
For those who don’t follow horseracing religiously, the Grand National is probably the only race they watch all year. Choosing a horse to cheer on and maybe even placing a bet is all part of the experience, especially if it’s something entered into just once every twelve months; for such part-timers, there’s a fun element absent from the dedicated online gambler and betting shop drop-out, whose entire future fortunes hinge upon desperately trying to predict the outcome of daily race meetings that have no impact whatsoever on the casual Grand National viewer. As one of this nation’s so-called ‘Crown Jewel’ sporting occasions ring-fenced for continuous coverage on terrestrial television, the Grand National holds something of a special place in the TV calendar, even if – as with many sports – the stakes surrounding such a high-profile spectacle can often prove fatal to its participants.
A bone broken by a severe tackle can curtail the career of a professional footballer overnight; a head injury to a rugby player or boxer can lead to brain damage; a Formula One driver’s raison d’être is to drive at the kind of speeds that considerably increase the possibility of crashing his vehicle and ending his life. Everyone who selects these sports as a profession knows the potential pitfalls before they start, but they go for it anyway, because they’re prepared to take the risk and figure it probably won’t happen to them. A jockey is equally conscious of the particular risks he faces should something go wrong, yet he decides to opt for horseracing as a career regardless; but can the same be said of the horse he rides? A horse doesn’t weigh up the pros and cons of racing and then decide whether or not to do it for a living; of course none of these factors apply to an animal. How can they? Every decision is naturally made for them by human trainers and human owners; they are the ones who assess all the risks that their horse faces. And, as loose horses whose riders have been unsaddled during races demonstrate, once they’ve been trained to run alongside other horses on a racecourse it’s impossible for them to resist the urge, jockey or no.
Racehorses are amongst some of the most pampered animals on the planet – and yes, I include toy dogs carried in the handbags of vacuous starlets and cats whose owners organise their daily routines to suit their feline overlord. Compared to sad old nags condemned to chew grass in empty fields, racehorses are spoiled and privileged A-list celebrities residing in luxurious surroundings, with their every whim attended to by stable-boys, trainers, owners and vets; recipients of the highest standards of animal welfare, they enjoy the finest of diets and get more exercise a day than most people manage in a month. Yes, many are simply viewed as financial investments and cash cows, but in order for them to attain such status they have to receive the kind of TLC that would be the envy of any other animal were they able to have a chat in the manner of a poorly-paid employee discovering how much more a work colleague is earning. Nobody involved in horseracing neglects or mistreats their horses if they want them to win races; they know they have to look after them – and they do. Unfortunately where racehorses are concerned, no amount of exemplary care and attention can insure against accident and injury in the sporting arena.
When a horse is injured during a race and has to be put down, all of the people whose lives are dedicated to ensuring their horse has a long and successful career are devastated. Two horses sadly lost their lives at Aintree on Saturday, following on from another death during the three-day racing festival; alas, as with the risks confronting the participants in the other sports previously mentioned, these things do sometimes happen. The argument of the animal rights activists who disrupted this year’s Grand National is that the horse – unlike the human – has no choice; the horse goes into a potentially dangerous environment utterly oblivious and is being sacrificed to feed the greed of man, whether owner or punter. Horseracing is not a blood sport, but the activist insists there is blood on the hands of all who promote and perpetuate it.
Protests at flagship race meetings – especially the higher-risk steeplechase events – are no new thing; but recent innovations utilised by protestors whose cause tends to be that of climate change appear to have become commonplace tactics, whatever the issue. Aintree Racecourse is a vast area of land that presents police with a considerable challenge when every inch of it needs to be combed to keep out unwelcome visitors, and it was inevitable on Saturday that a small handful breached the barriers and attempted to glue themselves to one of the fences on the race’s route. The protestors did somewhat make the police’s job easier by advertising their intentions in advance when they gleefully accepted ‘the oxygen of publicity’ generously offered them by the MSM in the build-up to the race; and it also helped that they all wore the same distinctive pink uniforms that stood out against the otherwise emerald backdrop. 118 arrests were made throughout the day as protests also took place on the M57, where adhesives were once again employed to ensure activists stuck to the carriageway.
However much the protestors enjoyed themselves at Aintree and relished the anticipated martyr’s money-shot of being cuffed by scuffers, the kind of stunts staged on Saturday are essentially counterproductive in terms of recruiting newcomers to the cause, testing the patience of even those who might actually be sympathetic to that cause; and it has to be said that the overwhelming impression given that anyone who refers to themselves as an ‘activist’ in the loudest voice seems to always be an annoyingly posh and privileged prig doesn’t help either; it just gets people’s backs up. Moreover, the fact that the 15-minute delay to the race’s start due to the protestors running onto the course meant the horses were kept walking round in circles under a blazing sun, causing them unnecessary distress when they were primed to be under starter’s orders, rather contradicted the protestors’ message. Is it really about the welfare of the animals involved or is it really about attention-seeking narcissists with too much time on their privately-educated hands?
Between them, the Jockey Club and the British Horseracing Authority have made great strides in improving the safety for horses at racecourses over the past few years, particularly at Aintree, where some of the more fearsome fences have been modified and reduced in height as well as ditches narrowed and parts of the course widened to enable horses to bypass the fences if they don’t feel like jumping them; on-course veterinary facilities have also greatly improved. Short of axing the event altogether, it’s hard to know what else can be done to appease critics whilst continuing to please those for whom the Grand National is the world’s greatest steeplechase and one of this country’s premier sporting occasions. It seems it will continue to provoke passions on either side of the argument with not even a photo finish on hand to decide the winner.
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For those not in the know, the BBC Singers are the UK’s sole professional chamber choir; perhaps lack of competition has enabled this ensemble to remain a revered fixture of the country’s Classical furniture for the best part of a century, but it also means people take notice when such unique BBC employees feel the brunt of their employer’s diminishing commitment to the highbrow. A couple of years ago, it was announced that the BBC Concert Orchestra would be dispatched to the wilds of the provinces as yet another token gesture in the ongoing (and increasingly tedious) operation to make the Beeb less ‘London-centric’; but this week an even more dispiriting sign of these BBC times came with the announcement that the BBC Singers are to be disbanded before the start of this year’s Proms, just a year before reaching their landmark 100th birthday; another penny-pinching body blow to the declining morale of these unsung old retainers was the announcement that salaries for members of the English BBC orchestras will be slashed by 20%.
For a generation, Dickie Davies was the face of sport on television, whilst for more than one generation John Motson was the voice of one specific sport on the same medium; that both should pass away within a week of each other is one of those timely coincidences that often occur and make my job easier. A rather heartless admission, true, but the number of times a paucity for inspiration re a Winegum post is salvaged at the eleventh hour by the death of a famous face is remarkable; even the recent post covering the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon was eased by the passing of Raquel Welch being announced as I was writing it. On the eve of taking a week’s break and busy cursing Wee Nicola for intruding upon my preparations, hearing a celluloid sex symbol of old had shuffled off this mortal coil meant a post I hadn’t intended to write could be completed with a tad more haste than if I’d had to delve even further into the Krankie career to pad it out. So, yet again the Grim Reaper came to my rescue. And, as the march of time proceeds on its relentless pace, the collective childhood furniture is reshuffled once more and continues to become more threadbare as another pair bites the dust.
One strange tradition that never fails to deliver is that of a year entering its final days and the Grim Reaper embarking upon a frenzied period of visiting famous names; for Death, the climax of the twelve-month calendar usually consists of breakneck house-to-house calls as though he’s required to fulfil a specific celebrity quota before 31 December and always leaves it till the last minute. Indeed, he left it so late this year that he ended up calling on two exemplary figures in their chosen fields on the same day, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Brazilian football legend Pelé. The latter’s battle with cancer had been publicised and his hospitalisation routinely referenced during the recent World Cup, when Lionel Messi became the latest player to wear the crown that the man born Edson Arantes do Nacimento had copyrighted from the age of 17; in contrast with an anticipated passing that had felt inevitable for several weeks, news that Vivienne Westwood has also died came as more of a surprise, with few beyond her inner circle aware she was fatally ill. Born within six months of each other, one was a king and one was a dame, and both left an indelible mark on 20th century pop culture that will long outlast their mortal remains.
Considering the nature of events over the past two or three years, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves in a time when the World Cup Final is staged seven days before Christmas Day; the topsy-turvy, upside-down nature of where we are now expects nothing less – ditto the fact that (against all odds) a tournament rightly mired in controversy from the off climaxes with a match that ends up being one of the most edge-of-the-seat contests anyone can ever remember, one that also confirms a 35-year-old is officially acknowledged as the planet’s finest footballer. After all, the natural order was shown the door when this dismal decade was no more than a couple of months old, and ever since then we appear to have been living through a strange age when anything that had previously been logically written-off as fringe lunacy now goes – an era in which double-speak, thought-crime and 2+2=5 are the new normal; and questioning this trend is verboten in polite society. Not that Lionel Messi will be complaining; he’s finally got his hands on the one trophy that has always eluded him in a professional career that began as far back as his league debut for Barcelona in 2004. A lot of the talk over the past month has been focused on ending that career on a high, but there are a small handful of precedents should he care to dip into the history books.
Alas poor Mick – the former Southampton centre forward named Channon was one of the few permanent fixtures of the unstable era in English international football that constituted the sad decline and fall of Sir Alf Ramsey as well as the inconsistent tenure of Don Revie. Mick Channon made his England debut in 1972 and played his final game for his country in 1977. At a time when England were incapable of finding a settled side and rarely played the same line-up two games running, Channon’s name was one of the few automatic choices on the team-sheet, and he collected a total of 46 caps, scoring 21 goals over five years. Yet he remains the most-capped Englishman never to have played in a World Cup or European Championships tournament, for he was prominent amongst a generation of great English footballers that also included the likes of Tony Currie, Gerry Francis, Roy McFarland and Malcolm Macdonald – men who unfortunately missed out on the kind of international competition today’s players take for granted because they were playing at the wrong time.
Like a stubborn dad repeatedly making a pig’s ear of repairing something in the house, determined not to lose face by calling in a professional tradesman, the knee-taking footballers cannot countenance entirely dropping the habit. Even though the virtue-signalling futility of it has seen the ritual reduced to specific showcase matches rather than a pre-match ceremony before every game, its presence remains. Then again, the FA are too full of their own noble narcissism to accept such a vacuous gesture is a safe pose compared to making a real stand against genuine injustices by, say, refusing to participate in the upcoming World Cup in the human rights haven that is Qatar. Similarly, rentagob Woke football pundit Gary Neville, notoriously swift to seize upon any imagined discrimination within the game, clearly sees no contradiction in accepting lucrative offers from the totalitarian Middle Eastern autocracy that has built stadia via slave labour – which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the hypocritical morality of a sport too eager to maintain the affluence to which it has become accustomed to put conscience before avarice.
Sure, it’s not the end of the world; but it’s the end of something. The BBC’s decision to drop the classified football results from the long-running ‘Sports Report’ sounds like one of those crass decisions made by a new controller of the station in question (5 Live) who’s keen to make his mark and shake things up a bit. It’s a familiar pattern on BBC radio, like when the Radio 4 UK Theme was axed back in 2006. Commissioned in 1978 to open the station every morning after the handover from the World Service, the medley of traditional English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish melodies heralded the dawn of the day’s broadcasting and quickly became as much of a wireless institution as the theme tune to ‘The Archers’ or the sound of ‘Sailing By’ announcing the arrival of the Shipping Forecast. The man who wielded the axe for the UK Theme was the then-controller of Radio 4, Mark Damazer; many were suspicious this was an action motivated by embarrassment within the ivory corridors of Broadcasting House that such a popular piece of music didn’t reflect the way the BBC likes to think of the nation, though Damazer claimed what he described as ‘a pacy news briefing’ was what listeners wanted first thing on a morning. Well, perhaps it was what the BBC overlords felt they ought to want first thing on a morning. After all, they know what’s best for us.
Media types who weren’t even there have spent several months now banging on about how Britain is going ‘back to the 70s’ simply because they assume today’s perilous economic climate is somehow comparable to that of a decade they only know through endlessly recycled clichés of candlelit households, picket lines, and pavements piled high with rubbish. Ironically, however, whilst the hysterical heads on our news channels were promoting the cost-of-living crisis as the embodiment of this narrative, the summer’s premier sporting contest came close to experiencing a moment genuinely reminiscent of a 70s incident that almost caused its cancellation 49 years ago. Like Wimbledon 2022, Wimbledon 1973 saw a British man reach the semi-final of the singles’ tournament, yet the achievements of both Cameron Norrie and Roger Taylor were overshadowed by events off-court.
Viewing a recent documentary series on Muhammad Ali via the BBC iPlayer, I was reminded how boxing bouts were once central to the lives of even those for whom a sporting event is usually a TV schedule-disrupting irritant. Ali’s appeal transcended the hardcore pugilistic following, as the huge ratings his fights attracted proved; his trilogy of battles with Joe Frazier between 1971 and 1975 and the 1974 ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ with George Foreman were grandstand occasions that the majority of the globe tuned in to watch; Ali’s irresistible force of personality undoubtedly did more than any other boxer to make boxing one of the world’s most popular spectator sports, and arguably saved it from extinction when many American States were contemplating banning it from their borders on the grounds of the brutality that his balletic grace helped redefine. Since his heyday, however, the sport has largely retreated back from the frontline of terrestrial television prime-time, kidnapped by the pay-per-view marketplace and removed from the free-to-air arena; the average person today would probably struggle to name a current world champion, let alone whichever woman holds the equivalent female titles.
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