This great chaser reminds me how racing retains the magic that football and cricket have long lost
Remember that classic Likely Lads episode where Bob and Terry try to avoid finding out the result of an England football match so they can watch it on television later, without knowing the score? Well, that will be me today. Except that the sport will not be the punctured pursuit of football, but the honest and inspiring endeavour that is national hunt racing.
When the King George VI Chase is run at Kempton this afternoon, I will be sitting down to lunch with an aunt in Old Coulsdon, Surrey. Old Coulsdon is not partial to horse racing, and it would be impolite to demand that the TV be turned on. So there will have to be a news blackout until early evening, when I can watch Channel 4's coverage of the race, and discover if Kauto Star, perhaps the greatest staying chaser since Arkle, can win his fifth King George.
I have always liked racing ? the spectacle, the atmosphere at the track, the conspiracy of toffs and toughs against the workaday world ? but in recent years my love has deepened as my interest in other sports has dwindled. Racing ? especially the winter branch of the sport, when the top-hatted sheikhs give way to fat blokes in sheepskin jackets and ageing women in large fur hats ? has a changelessness other sports lack. It is significant that races are called "renewals"; continuity counts.
Football I gave up on long ago. It is a sport of largely inconsequential activity illuminated by glittering moments. There are occasional beautiful games with an almost symphonic structure ? Argentina v Mexico in the 2006 World Cup, for instance ? but most matches are forgettable unless you are a tribalist. Rugby union is splendid in its way, but the rules are impenetrable and the ball hidden among the forwards for long periods. I do love the anthems, though, and the fact that at internationals in Ireland the singing lasts longer than the match. Golf and tennis are so repetitive only true aficionados will want to watch for long periods. I find that in golf the final six holes of the Open will suffice, and at Wimbledon you can time men's matches to keep coming back for the tie-breaks.
Proper cricket I like very much, but it is rapidly going out of fashion. The recent Test series between Australia and South Africa, which should have been a wonderful five-match series, was scheduled for just two games, such is the aversion to long-form cricket in the age of Twenty20. As in many sports, administrators are now more interested in money than tradition. I never liked rugby league once it switched from winter to summer in pursuit of a new fan base. Rugby league should be played on a mud heap in Wigan by fog-enshrouded fatties, not these glistening athletes with thighs the size of giant redwoods we see now. And the score should be three-all, not 38-26. It's not basketball. This is sport remade for the X Factor generation.
So I fear I have grown out of love with the sports that beguiled me in my adolescence. Only jump racing remains, and probably only because the administrators are too incompetent to know how to change it. They experiment with Atomic Kitten concerts after race meetings and bang on about the need for a new "narrative" in racing, but it never comes to anything. Thank God.
What better narrative is there than Kauto Star trying to cap a brilliant career with a fifth King George? The old star up against a new one in the shape of Long Run, who dethroned him last year. Jump racing throws up these marvellous stories, as it did last month when a largely unsung horse called Carruthers, owned by the venerable Lord Oaksey and ridden by the journeyman jockey Mattie Batchelor, beat his more illustrious rivals in the Hennessy Gold Cup. Batchelor, who has slogged around courses for years barely winning a race and earning roughly as much in his career as a top footballer earns in a week, burst into tears as he passed the finishing post, while every one of his fellow jockeys came across to hug him.
That was true sport. An expression of love, not a projection of money. Carruthers's victory was the equivalent of Hartlepool winning the Premier League. All things are still possible in racing, unlike more plutocratic sports. As for Kauto Star, of course he is as much of a superstar as any leading footballer. But you can bet that if he loses today he won't be abusing the ref, and if he wins he won't make a fool of himself in a nightclub. He will be curled up in his box, reflecting on a magnificent career, a career with legs. Now, how on earth do I set the timer on the TV recorder?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/25/kauto-star-is-the-superstar
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