More hot air from BHA chief Julie Harrington as racing continues to shoot itself in the foot over the whip

IN hindsight, my decision to book a hot air ballooning holiday across the plains of North America looks a poor one.

On the plus side, if I’m shot out of the sky by an F-16 at least I won’t have to hear another word about the whip.

Julie Harrington made controversial comments on the whip this week

PA:Press AssociationThe whip has been a hot topic in horse racing for a number of years[/caption]

At the start of the year I planned to make a real effort to talk less about racing’s niggly industry issues.

They can often be quite heavy, dreary topics and, in truth, most people don’t give a toss.

But somebody put 50p in BHA chief Julie Harrington again this week and what she said was, for want of a better word, mental.

Harrington and her pals decided they had to make changes to the whip rules now because ‘Cheltenham is the shop window to attract new fans’.

She said: “We know the final stages of the Gold Cup will be shown on the news so this is an opportunity to make the sport look better.

“Great British Racing did research last year with people who engage with racing and people who don’t engage with racing.

“What is interesting is 35 per cent of those who don’t agree with racing said the reason they choose not to engage is because they think racing is cruel. 

“And in 18 to 24-year-olds that rises to 45 per cent. We need to do something about how we are presenting the sport to those people.”

First things first, unless Galopin Des Champs or one of his rivals wins the Gold Cup on the Eric Idle, jockeys are going to be using their whips.

Maybe she is worried viewers of the six o’clock news will begin foaming at the mouth if jockeys go a fraction over head height during the ten-second clip of finish?

Secondly, if these people that we are so desperate to impress are convinced racing is cruel, is lopping one stroke off the whip limit really the silver bullet?

You suspect the 18-24 demographic would still argue it’s cruel to make horses run around a field against one another even if the whip was outlawed completely.

When the whip laws were first overhauled in 2011 it was all to do with perception – and whip offences actually halved during that time period.

So if cracking down on use of the whip is the answer, where are all the youngsters flooding through the turnstiles? 

When last I checked, racecourse attendance figures were still absolutely grim.

And how about racing’s existing fans? Doesn’t their opinion matter? Can we really afford to turn them off in an attempt to attract new ones?

Racing chiefs are obsessed with appearances – if only they devoted the same amount of time and energy into telling the public how things actually are in reality.

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For starters: the foam-padded whip does not hurt horses, they are well-cared for and live lives of luxury in most cases and giving them a purpose, to race, is more kind than cruel.

I can’t think of another industry that would decide against a confident, front-foot defence of their sport and strong promotional campaign as the right course of action.

The whip is only an issue for a small minority of people, most of whom wouldn’t be seen dead on a racecourse.

I’ve seen enough episodes of Air Crash Investigation over the years to know that when the pilot gets tunnel vision when confronted with a problem, the plane usually hits a mountain.

The BHA are so bloody preoccupied with the whip, creating an issue where there shouldn’t be one, that they are oblivious to the burning wreckage around them.

That is the huge number of real problems facing the sport – affordability checks, the drain of our top talent abroad, prize-money, the cost of going racing etc.

They aren’t being addressed and that mountain is beginning to loom pretty large – and it concerns me that Harrington is the one in the cockpit.

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