Monday Decision For British Racing

[Wandering Eyes]

The British Horseracing Authority will make a decision on Monday about when racing will resume amidst the equine influenza scare that began last week. Wednesday was pinpointed as the earliest possible date when the situation came to light last week, and veterinarians and trainers are continuing to work with the Animal Health Trust in testing racehorses.

“I can tell you that in the last three days the Animal Health Trust has done as many flu swabs as they would do in a year,” The BHA’s director of equine health and welfare, David Sykes, told Racing TV’s Luck On Sunday programme. “They are working until 9 p.m. at night and working through Saturday and Sunday; they’ve done a great job. I would say we are looking at around 1500 [unconfirmed] samples have been carried out and all are negative so far.

“In any infectious disease process the hardest decision is the very first one,” Sykes said. “You can’t go back if you make a mistake. If we’d said it was fine and had runners go to 15 other meetings that would have been very hard to control.”

A prioritisation plan for testing is being adopted, which is based on the proximity of horses to a positive test, or to a yard returning a positive test. Swabs will continue to be collected and tested from other horses, but some are being fast-tracked.

“It’s not my decision to make [when racing resumes]; it’s one for the veterinary committee so it wouldn’t be right for me to say,” Sykes said. “If everything came back negative today we’d be looking to move forward and start racing but we need to be confident we don’t undo all the good work by saying ‘let’s go racing’ if we’re not fully confident we’ve got everything covered. There could be a stage where we resume racing but some stables could still be in lockdown. That will be a decision for the veterinary committee. That may be painful for some but it could be a decision that is right for the industry.”

Among those affected by the shutdown of racing is jockeys’ valet Chris Maude.

“It’s obviously not great because I have five full-time employees,” the former jockey said. “I’ve been saying it’s a bit like bad weather–when you are off five or six days you do catch up. All those horses that were going to run then run somewhere else, but any longer than a week and we’ll be in serious trouble. I’m paying wages out, but I’m getting nothing in.

“You always expect a few days of bad weather at this time of year, but if it gets beyond a week it’s not physically possible for the British Horseracing Authority to put on all the extra meetings.

“We’re all in the same boat, but it seems like the initial panic has died down and, like everyone else, we’re hoping that all the tests continue to come back clear and we’ll be back by Wednesday or Thursday or at least by the weekend.”

Jockeys’ agent Chris Broad said, “There are lots of people affected, not many jump jockeys have a retainer so it will soon start affecting them. It does no good people like me speculating when we think we might get going again, I’m not a foot solider doing the tests. If it’s just a week, then we’ve all got the chance to recharge our batteries–every cloud has a silver lining–but we’ve soon got bored in a couple of days. Lots of people are worse off than me. Look at the transport companies, they’ve got staff to pay but they aren’t turning any wheels over.”

Former champion jumps trainer Michael Pipe said he thought it unlikely that racing would resume on Wednesday. Pipe told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Sportsweek, “I think it might be difficult for Wednesday, it might be doubtful, it depends how they progress on the tests. I’m hopeful it might be on by the end of the week, but that’s hope more than anything.

“Of course, Cheltenham is coming up, a very important meeting. We all hope it will be contained by then of course, but there’s lots of racing and planning to be done before Cheltenham. The welfare of the horses is most important, that’s certainly got to come first.

“You can see what a big industry it is now. Of course we’re worried about everything, all the punters, everyone concerned. We’re certainly missing the racing. It’s a good job we’ve got the rugby to follow.”

 

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