Geoff has been banging on at me for some weeks now to write a few words for the site, following on from the lengthy e-mails with which I have been plaguing him for the last year or so! He mentioned to me something like, "your writing talents must be harnessed", which only confirmed my worst suspicions about his clearness of mind and judgment, but here goes nonetheless. This will be an occasional feature which may consist of either one big rant or several smaller comments, and which shall always deal (broadly speaking) with racing matters if not always with the goings on at High Crossett Farm. Suffice it to say, Alan Ayckbourn, Frances Anne Bond and Scarborough’s other great men and women of letters have little about which to worry from me. If you have any points to make arising from this feature, please air them on the "Discussions" page - that’s what it’s there for - and one of us here shall try to deal with them. DON’T ask us how come Quixall is so rubbish, because that’s as boring as it is inaccurate; equally, don’t ask me why you can’t park anywhere in Scarborough any more - there’s simply no answer to that!

Jeremy Grayson

(part of the Puddleduck, Parrot and Piss-Poor Poet Partnership, or PPPPPP for short; any similarities between our acronym and the form of our horses is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed in this column are entirely personal and may not always tally with the thoughts of all concerned with High Crossett Farm and this website (especially Trigger, for whom the concept of thinking has remained sadly unrealised to date)).

If you’ve got this far into the website, you won’t have failed to notice the attention paid to the landmark recently reached by the megastar himself, Quixall Crossett. On July 22^nd, in front of Southwell’s biggest crowd for a decade, he failed to stave off defeat number 100, but made thousands of new friends all over the world and filled any number of newspaper column inches! Granted, his actual run was a bit disappointing for all connected with him; the overwatered ground in the back straight and another horse falling in front of him wouldn’t have helped, but we’d stop a long way short of offering those as excuses. Maybe he thought he’d done enough just by turning up and consenting to have his photo taken by all and sundry - astrologer Jayne predicted he was ready to do something unusual on the day, so his turning into such a prima donna might have been what she meant! Either way, he came home safe and sound, and - of course - he didn’t want for unbridled support of his adoring public.

Well… in the main. The media coverage before, during and after the race was as fair as could have been wished for, with little (if any) suggestion that Quixall is being kept in training for glory-seeking purposes or to set this or that record, irrespective of what it might actually be doing to him physically. Doubtless this website has had some part to play in that, particularly "Heartache and the Hero", which puts the horse and his worth to Ted, Joy and Geoff unambiguously, unmistakably into context. Nobody reading that piece could subsequently doubt the genuine love of the Three Crossetteers for Quixall, nor the purity of their motives for keeping him running. Nevertheless, one fact above all others sits uneasily with many supporters as well as naysayers, as some postings to our discussion board and a couple of vox pops in the media (eg Mr Morgan in the Racing Post on July 23^rd) will attest to.

Quixall Crossett is old. He’s 16 in fact, and unless anyone tells us otherwise, we believe him to be the oldest horse still in training. There are only three or four 15 year-olds still running (stablemate Monaughty Man being one of them) and probably no more than about twenty 14 year-olds. The best age to retire a jumps horse is given to be around 11 or 12, so it could be argued that Quixall has been living on borrowed time career-wise (if nothing else) for some five years now. Small wonder, then, that even some of his most devoted fans out there watch his races through their fingers, terrified that the old boy will have a heart attack on the racecourse, or suffer some nasty injury which will only serve to make Ted and Joy Caine look like the evil floggers of the incapable and antidiluvian which certain among the racing cognoscenti will always believe they must be. There is always the nagging fear in some people’s mind that, irrespective of Quixall’s obvious good health and happiness, there is something unnatural about running him or any other horse to such an age. I’m not sure what the human-to-horse-years ratio is, but if it were five to one, that would make Quixall eighty years old. How many octogenarians does one see going for three mile runs on regular occasions, to say nothing of the jumping as well?

Well, allow me to put our aging hero into some sort of context. Sixteen is indeed an above-average age for a racehorse; but whilst it may be exceptional in the here and now of the 2001-2 season, this has more to do with racing today in general, and the ways many other horses are trained and raced in particular, than with any strange behaviour on the part of Quixall Crossett’s connections. I shall elaborate.

In researching the Caine Chronology, I have been obliged to go through National Hunt and point-to-point form books and press cuttings as far back as the early 1970s (NB Ted and Joy put out their first runners in the 1975-6 season, but a couple of their horses ran for other trainers prior to that). Very early on, it became apparent that many more horses than now were kept in training to a ripe old age, often with (but seemingly in hardly any cases dependent on) some measure of success. In terms of longevity, one Paradise Beach came out top, taking part in - and completing - jumps races and points during the whole of the 1970s and a bit either side, before being retired at the age of 21. Mac Vidi ran at the very highest level in steeplechases well into his teens and was ultimately rewarded with a place finish in the 1980 Cheltenham Gold Cup at the age of 15. Most incredibly of all, perhaps, was Fred Winter’s redoubtable Sonny Somers, who chalked up two victories in competitive handicap chases in 1980 at Southwell and Lingfield, aged 18; source any copy of the Guinness Book of Records older than 1999 and you’ll find his achievement honoured in its racing pages.

The above examples represent the tip of a sizable iceberg, and the natural conclusion to be drawn from this would be that, by and large, horses lasted longer as they were not campaigned with anything like the ferocity they are nowadays. This is certainly true to a point. For example, there were definitely fewer race meetings for them to attend back then; for those of us raised on a diet of some 330-odd well-stocked days of racing a year nowadays, the fact that most winter weeks in the jumping season around that time had a day with no or only one meeting seems like something out of the Dark Ages. In addition, generally poorer course drainage and less foresight with regard to rescheduling / extra meetings meant many more cards were lost than nowadays (yes, that comment still holds true in spite of the disastrous 2000-1 campaign!).

These factors cannot explain away everything, however. What is more telling is that, Sonny Somers being a rare-ish exception, most of the really old horses in training were trained either by small-scale handlers or permit-holders. Take a look at a small sample of some of the veterans in training at the start of the 1980s; Mac Vidi was owned, bred and trained by Miss P Neal in Cornwall., Squash (14yo chaser) was trained by Miss Wint of Derbyshire, Solon March (15yo opportunity chaser) by Barbara Waring, Go Solo (ditto) by B Richmond of Lincolnshire, Skippin (15yo handicap hurdler) by H Willis of Winchester, Clavering’s Cross (16yo hunter chaser) by J Aynsley, Fitz (indestructable 17yo Welsh pointer) by permit-holder Mrs Harry… not too many racing heavyweights represented here. It is, of course, very tempting indeed to over-generalise and adhere dogmatically to a "small yards good, big yards bad" line of thought, when heaven knows there must surely have been some ropy permit trainers out there. Nevertheless, it is the bounden belief of this writer that the training by small set-ups of these horses was the singlemost contributory factor to the longevity of their careers. There would have been much in their favour - greater concentration of the trainer’s time and attention upon fewer horses, few - if any - demands on race / prizemoney targets impressed upon connections (and consequently the horses) by mercenary owners, and quite often the status of adored "family pet" afforded them.

Without blowing Ted, Joy and Geoff’s metaphorical trumpets too much, all the above criteria apply in varying degrees to Quixall Crossett and friends today. I have no intention of tarring the entire jumping fraternity with the same brush, but nevertheless wonder just how many present-day handlers still believe in such an ethos where the horse’s happiness and long life transcends all else. Would the Pipes of this world tolerate one of their inmates racking up just a quarter of QC’s number (or several years’ worth) of failures to win, even if that horse was having a really fun time racing? Does it get the personal attention of its trainer at least once a day? Most importantly, does it get a Geoff-type character reading it poetry and telling it jokes all the time?

Glance through your last twenty years’ worth of formbooks and see the numbers of old jumps horses gradually falling away. During the rest of the eighties we had the likes of Otter Way (Oliver Carter), Vulrory’s Clown (Owen Brennan), Tunzenberg (R Mitchell), Carrigeen Hill (Jeff King), Prince Carlton (Mrs Bloom), Kirkstyle (Mr Pinney), Jimmy Miff (I P Wardle), De Pluvinel (Capt Prest) and very, very few others in training at or beyond 15 years of age. The first- and last-named were especially grand campaigners; Otter Way landed the 1983 renewal of the Horse and Hound Cup aged 15, and ran on for two seasons after that, whilst De Pluvinel was still landing decent enough handicap chases at Perth when aged 17. The numbers have thinned even further since the early 1990s. McGregor the Third and Better Times Ahead, both still running now at 15, have been expertly handled first by Gordon and then Nicky Richards over the decade, but in the main - as with the 1970s and 80s - what few very old horses there have been during this period have been kept sweet and fit by smaller handlers. Rosemary Henderson’s legendary Fiddler’s Pike was the most famous recent example of this, jumping round the banks of Cheltenham’s cross-country course at 16 (three years after conquering Aintree!). Bishopdale (Steve Chadwick) and Eastern Destiny (Griffiths family) both won chases at 16. Take out the five named plus Quixall Crossett and Monaughty Man, and it’s a real struggle to think of many more; Majic Rain (numerous trainers), Who’s to Say (Dr Pritchard), Jimbalou (17yo hurdler of Mr Brazington), Abbotsham (Oliver Carter again)… anybody know of some I’ve missed?

It’s hard to know precisely how, why and when in the last few years the racing world’s attitude towards older horses began to harden, but harden it undoubtedly has and in an alarming, uneven manner. A flurry of letters to the Post during 2000 condemned the supposed pointlessness of Jimbalou’s participation in selling hurdles at 17 (all along the lines of, "Who’d buy him if he won?", thereby missing the point completely). Quixall Crossett, of course, has his own boo-men dotted around the country (hello Messrs Pygall, Turner, Niven, etc.), watching his every move with barely concealed disdain. Yet at the same time Better Time Ahead - whom we adore here, make no mistake of that - is practically sainted by certain among the press as he keeps managing to win races well into "retirement age". It is annoying for those of us associated with QC that such hypocrisy is applied with regard to two veterans both running - and run - for exactly the same reason, namely the absolute joy of it, albeit with admittedly varying degrees of success. That horses of a similar vintage are still campaigned extensively in show jumping (to which they are arguably physically less well suited on account of the sharp turning, sporadic bursts of speed and more upright jumping techniques required of them) without such vocal disapproval only compounds our frustration.

A plea, then, to all friends and foes of Quixall Crossett, Monaughty Man and other equine greybeards. Don’t worry about them, not even the slower ones among them. They all know how to look after themselves on the track and their connections certainly know how to look after them at home. Temper your obsession with their ever-advancing age; you’d probably have thought little of it twenty years ago. It’s no big deal to the horses themselves and half of them don’t know they’re as old as they are. Quixall certainly doesn’t, and neither do some of his fans (Many people who approached us at Southwell could not believe he was 16, so athletic and bonny does he look. One woman even insisted to me that the "16" on her racecard must have been a misprinted "10", and I’m not sure I did ever fully convince her otherwise). Look upon their continuing careers as triumphs for old-fashioned but gentle, humane, ultimately horse- (not profit-) oriented methods of training.

Finally, applaud the fact that The Parish Pump, Comedy Gayle and Saskia’s Hero have all landed chases this summer at the age of 14 and are training on (the last named is especially interesting, having come out of retirement three times because he prefers to race. Well done to James Hetherton - how many handlers would have allowed the horse to do that?) - QC and Monny taking them on in the years to come need not sound so far-fetched, you know…