Racing Diary

Stand up, if you love racing, stand up . . . fewer and fewer opportunities remain to stand and watch football, these days. The Premier League offers no such nostalgic vantage points for fans. At least Kempton Park offers terrace views for next month's popular and prestigious Boxing Day King George VI Chase, which always attracts a big holiday crowd. For this year, the track's management have improved evacuation procedures after the coded bomb scare and mid-afternoon abandonment of the meeting that followed last December. Only one worry, though. The man in charge next month is . . . Mr Julian Thick.

There's really easy money to be made out of next month's King George VI Chase. It's simple. Profiles of the previous winners suggest that it's just a case of backing a horse who is male, no older than 12 or younger than five, at shorter odds than 25-1, and with a name beginning with any letter other than e, i, j, k, q, u, v, x, y and z.
On recent runnings, it's also about 50-50 that the winner will be grey. See More Business, 10, male, the current ante post favourite and with a good alphabetical profile (all three names, that is) fits the description, though the gelding, last year's winner, isn't exactly grey. More bay. But then neither are his major rivals grey, so fill your boots.

When there's a gap, Richard Johnson is quick to take it. In his 'exclusive' Racing Post column on Saturdays, the jockey warmly thanked the Daily Telegraph for the pair of cuff links the paper awarded him for finishing top rider at Cheltenham's three-day Open Meeting this month.
Johnson might also have mentioned that the Telegraph did him another good turn in signing up Tony McCoy as the paper's own 'view from the saddle'. This meant an empty space in . . . the Racing Post where McCoy's thoughts had appeared every weekend throughout last season. Give Johnson and inch and he'll take a page.

The highlight of the Cartier's Awards night was a Millennium Award to the Queen, which was presented in private and days before the great gathered to dip their noses in the Bond Street jewellers' trough. The award season's next hurdle is the Horserace Writers' Association lunch, though controversy clouds the event as far as this paper's concerned.
Standard Sports' Lydia Hislop, on whose tips we become rich, narrowly missed out on a Journalist of the Year nomination, with voters irrationally preferring the strangely-named Doug Moscrop in the regional paper category. We're pressing for a hand count.

Football managers dread a vote of confidence from the chairman. For jockeys, their fate is to be dammed with faint praise. This time, Jim Culloty was on the receiving end. Last season, Culloty was jocked off riding Edredon Bleu. Instead, Tony McCoy rode the gelding to win the Queen Mother Champion Chase at Cheltenham and then Culloty rode Edredon Bleu in McCoy's absence.
"When, and if, Tony McCoy is available, he will probably have the mount" said trainer Henrietta Knight of the season ahead. A real morale booster, that, but in the last 10 years, the number of senior jumps jockeys riding in Britain has fallen by 50 per cent from 373 in 1990 to 184 in 1999. The best of those who risk their lives over fences and hurdles are Irish, just like Culloty. As in football's Premier League, the foreign legion rules.

Unlike their overpaid footballing counterparts, jockeys don't waste time dwelling on whether it is cruciate ligaments or the Achilles tendon that is giving them trouble. So long as all the bones are intact, they'll be there, in the saddle. The only long term aim is to 'get out in one piece'.