The Channel Four Book of Racing [antikvár]

PREFACESome years ago a friend of mine with at least one PhD decided that she would like to enlarge her education with a day at the races, so I took her to a National Hunt meeting at Newbury. On the way to the paddock for the first race she perused the racecard and asked me what '11 10' meant in a column of numbers against a horse's name. 'That's his weight,' I answered, but my friend was still perplexed. 'Sean,' she asked, 'how can a horse weigh 11 stone 10 pounds.''Not everyone with a genuine interest in horse racing is quite as famihar with the niceties of the sport as they might wish to be, and the aim of The Channel Four Book of Racing is to supply some basic information about the namre of horse racing in Britain - its strucmre, rules, procedures and personalities - both for those with very httle knowledge of it and for others who regularly enjoy racing through television or the occasional day at the races and are seeking more enjoyment through a greater appreciation of what is going on. Racing -as Brough Scott stresses in his introduction - is fun: and the more you know about it, the more fun you will find.The book includes chapters on form and on betting, for these are integral parts of the sport, but it can provide no magical formula for flawless interpretation of form or a way to beat the bookies. Yet the appeal of racing goes far beyond the attempt to find winners, and just as the Channel Four transmission aims to convey an overall picture of the Turf, so the book, as a companion to that coverage, intends to provide a general introduction to the many aspects of this fascinating world - to the racehorse and its breeding, to administration and control, to the racecourse and to the ovmers, trainers, jockeys, officials and others who people it, to the excitement and hngering memories of the race itself. The book cannot tell you everything you might want to know, yet we hope tiiat it will give you at least a flavour of the extraordinary sport of racing.The Channel Four Book of Racing was first pubhshed in hardback in October 1989, and is now offered in paperback in a thoroughly revised and updated form. The overall structure of the book and much of the original text have been preserved, though the details of rules, procedures and personalities have been amended where appropriate, so that the book is as accurate as we can make it at the end of July 1990. This has meant altering where necessary the names of some of the major races to take account of changes in sponsorship, but as in the earlier edition it has proved impractical to signal every change of a race's name over the years: the major races at Channel Four courses listed on pages 45-55 have been given their 1990 names as far as is possible, and into that section has been introduced Uttoxeter, a course which will be covered by Channel Four for the first time in 1991.But change has not been introduced for its own sake, and the text has not been arbitrarily tampered with where the original example serves to illustrate a general point. Thus the glorious figure of Nashwan, who strode through the pages of the first edition as he strode through the summer of 1989, still looms large.