Racing: The neglected duty and lost perspective

Under the microscope: Desperate need is for positive response from the sport ? before one is imposed from outside

Beauchamp Pilot won the first leg of the autumn double at Newmarket yesterday and a two-year-old filly which had been beaten nine lengths when odds-on at Salisbury last time won so impressively that she earned a quote of 16-1 for the 1,000 Guineas next May. The trainer, John Dunlop, was asked for an explanation for the poor showing at Salisbury and found himself up before the beak again to explain the improvement. Khulood, the horse in question, was taken for routine dope testing, but if anyone needed any reminding that training racehorses is an art not a science, Dunlop's bemusement provided solid evidence.

Dunlop was joined in the stewards' room by Lady Herries, whose Zonergem had been the subject of a massive gamble in the Cambridgeshire over the past week. Once available at 33-1, the four-year-old was backed down to 4-1 favourite yesterday, but ran well down the field. Victory would have cost the bookmakers a conservative £1m, but suffering a slipped disc carrying home the satchels was the only danger to their wellbeing.

The trainer suggested that the race might have come a little too soon after the horse's last one, a convincing victory at Ascot a week ago. Shame, thought the punters, no one had told them before their wallets emptied.

By evening, you would not have had to venture far to hear trenchant views about the integrity of racing. But then yesterday was no different from any other day in the calendar. Winners care nothing for the how or why; losers need little convincing that the racing world has once again picked on them for personal humiliation. The ebb and flow of racing, the half-hourly shifting of emotion, is no different from 200 years ago when racing was far more institutionally corrupt than it is now. If racing was carbolic clean, half the fun would be scrubbed out of the sport.

Yet, by tomorrow racing's image will be in the dock, placed there by the evidence of the Jockey Club's former head of security, Roger Buffham, and Dermot Browne, a jockey banned for 10 years from all racecourses, who are the chief witnesses in tonight's Panorama programme entitled with stunning force The Corruption of Racing. No question mark. Racing's instinct on these occasions is to pull down the trilby and hope the outside world goes away. But the reaction of the sport's regulators over the next fortnight will largely determine whether the Jockey Club are serious in their attempts to eradicate corruption from their ranks.

No one expects the sport to be squeaky clean, but it would be handy if the Jockey Club were seen by the public to be acting positively and, as the programme suggests, in the interests not of their own members but those of the betting and paying public. So often did Christopher Foster, the Jockey Club's chief executive, find excuses for not acting to rid the sport of unsavoury characters, the stewards would have been justified in invoking their non-trier rule.

The producers of Panorama have certainly made the most of their material. Filming in forbidden places is always liable to provoke reactions which are the documentary-makers' dream. A hand over a camera is a sure sign that the subject has something to hide. Ambushing jockeys and trainers, who are not the most sociable of beings even on their good days, is another device designed to portray the interviewer as intrepid seeker of truth and the interviewee as shifty crook. Racing gallops headlong into the trap.

This is a clever programme, but, whatever the reliability of both Buffham, who clearly has an axe to grind after being dismissed for gross misconduct by the Jockey Club, and Browne, who has been touting his accusations to anyone who cared to listen for the past decade, there are serious issues to be addressed.

Unfortunately, the Jockey Club cocked a deaf ear to the rumours and thus left themselves wide open to accusations of inertia. The danger is that the Jockey Club will be diverted by the dubious record of the informants and fail to take a long look at themselves from the wrong end of the telescope.

The reaction to the private screening of the programme was not a promising indicator of racing's future. Too much emphasis was placed on the tarnished nature of the evidence, too little on the wider implications of the accusations made in the documentary. The response betrayed the very collusion which prompted the investigation in the first place, highlighted a sport utterly unable to view itself from outside in and see what the general public might make of its system of control, a system which has for too long been based on self-protection, a nudge and a wink.

A story by one of the jump jockeys of a generation glibly condemned by the programme as corrupt illustrates the point. It is of a trainer hauled up before the stewards, one of whom was his brother – he stood down – and the other three of whom were personal friends. This is an industry where the chief crime is rocking the boat. When a prominent judge questions the effectiveness of the authorities in eradicating corruption from their doorstep, then the Jockey Club have a duty to inspect themselves with renewed vigour. Perhaps it is time for an independent authority to take over the duty of examination.

The problem is that even the whiff of corruption, in even one race, is enough to bring the whole sport into disrepute. The punting public are not the most objective thinkers in the sporting universe. Browne's claims that 27 races were fixed in 1990 smacks of fantasy. Fixing races, even with the most skilled of jockeys, is not an easy business. But the inability of the Jockey Club to act over the Man Mood case, when an odds-on favourite ridden by Graham Bradley was pulled up at Warwick, looks limp in the extreme. William Hill refused to release betting records of the race, but no sanctions were taken against the second-biggest bookmaker in the sport.

The bad news for the beleaguered authorities is that further revelations might yet be forthcoming from the Panorama team. A host of confidential documents have yet to be released. Not that the paying public seemed to care that much. A crowd of 14,895 poured on to Newmarket Heath yesterday, attracted by unseasonal sunshine and the potential for making a fast buck.

On the way home, those with money to spare were asked to contribute to two charities in memory of Rebecca Davies, a 19-year-old stable girl killed in a freak accident on the gallops late last month. This is a tough sport and the underlings are forgotten too often. Racing needs to discover its sense of perspective or someone else will be summoned to police the sport for them.