Charles Byrnes isn’t some hero – Karloss investigation is a reminder racing should not celebrate people like him

ALL Boris had to do was ruffle up his hair, mumble in a stupid voice and people would eat out of the palm of his hand.

It didn’t matter how often he looked down the TV camera and told us the sky was green and that pigs could fly, a large portion of the population were head over heels for the ex-PM.

Charles Byrnes has been in hot water in Ireland this weekGetty

And when he was caught out lying, time and time again, they would chuckle and say, ‘oh, Boris, he’s such a character, isn’t he?’.

The glorification of these sorts of people makes me want to bring back up my Saturday morning bacon sarnie. 

Boris was mugging all of us off on the regular, but a lot of you refused to see it. Just like Irish trainer Charles Byrnes.

Lovable rogues? More like loathsome scrotes. 

The Cheltenham Festival winner has been hauled in front of the beak more times than I’ve had hot dinners.

Let’s be frank, whenever Byrnes pulls off one of his ‘coups’, he is essentially sticking two fingers up to every single punter out there.

Yet when his horses, who might appear out of form, get backed off the boards on their way to victory, people roll their eyes and chime: “Ho, ho, ho, what a cheeky rascal.”

He was at it again this week at Downpatrick – four of his runners were punted and three of them won under his son, Philip, with only 7-4 jolly I Am Spider Man letting down the acca.

But he potentially finds himself in hot water with Irish racing chiefs for a totally different reason, involving another incident on the same Bank Holiday Monday card.

You see, he was supposed to have a fifth runner at the meeting – Karloss – which just so happened to be travelling in a separate box to the yard’s other horses.

On the way to the track, Byrnes says the horse ‘slipped’ in the trailer and became distressed, so he decided not to run, instead asking Karloss’ owner to tow the horse away.

Coincidentally, the horse was withdrawn from the same race as the gambled-on Anyway, which was backed into even-money from 28-1 and won pulling a cart for little-known trainer Ken Budd. 

And in another coincidence, turns out Byrnes knows the five-year-old Anyway pretty well, having owned him until recently when he sold him to his new connections.

Rumours of an ‘empty horsebox’ – that Karloss never even left Byrnes’ yard in County Limerick – and that the veteran trainer was the real ‘mastermind’ behind the gamble have since been rife. 

Byrnes denies any involvement in the gamble and says the Karloss rumours are rubbish.

Ironically, Byrnes has called on Downpatrick to release CCTV footage to prove that Karloss was actually there in body, not just spirit.

This just two years after all Irish racecourses were forced to install security cameras in their stable yards as a direct result of the infamous nobbling case involving his horse, Viking Hoard, at Tramore in 2018.

Byrnes was banned for six months after a near three-year investigation into that saga and his conduct described as ‘seriously negligent’ by officials.

As far as I’m aware, no video evidence of Karloss being on site at Downpatrick has surfaced yet.

The whole situation stinks to high heaven, yet the softly-spoken Byrnes is treated like some sort of hero by so many racing fans.

Maybe, once upon a time, there was something romantic about coups and skulduggery, but those days are long gone in my view.

We got rid of Boris, now we need to get rid of this shady culture in racing, sooner rather than later.

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