Michael Watts MRCVS
For some jobs it takes a bored man. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking boredom. For a track vet boredom means having little to do which means no misfortunate greyhound has got hurt on your watch and you have not been called upon to do the old James Herriot thing or worse still stand in for the Grim Reaper, so boredom ain’t all bad. Being under-occupied has its moments, especially when you are getting paid for your time just the same as if you were slogging your guts out. This particular evening there was not much of a crowd. Maybe this was because the rain had not taken time to come down all day or maybe because it was getting near pay day and for some the piggy bank was getting pretty empty. Maybe all hands had done their dough on the Irish Derby final the week before and were having to make do with beans on toast ever since or maybe there was something unmissable on television involving ballroom dancing or cookery. Who knows? Ours not to reason why, I am just glad enough punters turn up to keep the track open and my wee job ticking over.
Anyway there was I at the seat of custom as per usual, passing the time on a quiet night by idly turning the pages of a popular Irish greyhound trade rag. Other greyhound papers are available, as the saying goes. I was closer to the back page than the front when I happened upon an account of some recent GB.B.B. stewards’ inquiries. Now I am not going to name names here. The powers-that-be have carried out their investigations, heard all the evidence, reached their verdict and passed sentence and I know no more about any of the cases in question than anybody else with the time and inclination to read the paper. Besides, there was an element of “there-but-for-the-Grace-of-God-go-I” about all three cases. Who am I to pass judgement on somebody who took a chance I might have taken were I in his shoes, or whose dog tested positive for a banned substance more through bad luck than sharp practice? People who live in glass houses shouldn’t chuck stones around.
What interested me more was the great detail in which the cases were reported, chapter and verse of the three cases together covering a page and a half of your average tabloid size. A guy who allegedly cut one corner too many and sailed too close to the wind ended up having to pay a fine of eye-watering proportions while in two other cases where guilt or innocence seemed less clear cut no further action was taken at the last. The apparently guilty were punished while the arguably innocent walked free, restoring and reinforcing one’s faith in the basic fairness of the system, even in the case of a hardened cynic and iconoclast like yours truly. Justice had been done, and had been seen to be done, which is as it should be.
A wet day and a slow track meant thankfully that all the competitors continued to finish in one piece, affording me the leisure to dig a little deeper into my paper. Shoehorned in between a couple of items designed to drum up interest in the upcoming coursing season, I stumbled upon a reference to the disqualification of the winner of a trial stake in west Munster the previous season. That was the long and the short of it. A puppy who had won a trial stake in early December 2015 had been disqualified, for unspecified reasons, and all the dogs he had met and beaten in the stake were to be moved up one place in the record books. Now a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since last December and one can surely be forgiven for wondering what took the Irish Coursing Club so long to complete their deliberations. While it is of course vital for the credibility of the disciplinary process that those charged with implementing it take enough time to come up with the right result but justice deferred can easily become justice denied. What of the beaten finalist in that Trial Stake, who should presumably have been entitled to get a run at the National Coursing Meeting following the disqualification of the winner? Karma, Kismet, Fate or whatever you want to call it is a wonderful thing. In this case as luck would have it the dog who would later be disqualified was withdrawn from the Derby at the eleventh hour due to injury and his opponent in that trial stake was called in in his stead. Alas his moment of glory was to prove short-lived, as he was flagged out in the first round after a course of 12:48 seconds. In other circumstances however he might have missed his chance to “strut and fret his hour upon the stage” had his opponent gone to Clonmel while the case was still under discussion and a great wrong committed.
There is no mention in the article of the prizemoney being returned but the article is so brief that there is little mention of anything beyond the barest of bones. Even if the connections of the beaten finalist did eventually get the winner’s purse – and it takes all that and more to buy a pup, rear him and get him as far as the first round of a trial stake – any bets they may have had on their fellow went west on the day of the final and are beyond recall, as are those of the ordinary decent punter who backed his judgement on the field with his dough. What if the winner had been sold on the field, as not a few are, on the basis that he would probably never be worth as much again as on the day he qualified for Clonmel? The case prompts many questions, but many of them might have been answered by a prompt judgement by the Top Brass.
Pure chance seems to have saved them from red faces all round, although it might seem to those with nasty suspicious minds to be a very fortunate coincidence. Integrity in the Winter Game in the Ould Sod has progressed by leaps and bounds in just a few years. We have gone from a situation where the results of major finals were refought in the courts for years after the event to one where routine drug testing of finalists at local meetings has become universal. The pressure for change has come from the local coursing clubs, rather than from those who should be the movers and shakers in the Davis Road. Although testing at local meetings was introduced last season, the results are hard to find in the trade press or on the I.C.C. website. When your maverick columnist made so bold as to suggest they were never published at all, he has told that they are but they are not easy to find. As long as that remains the case and as long as disciplinary proceedings take twice as long as the coursing season itself, outsiders are entitled to speculate as to whether the I.C.C. has the ability or the will to take on the dinosaurs within its own ranks who constantly resist change.
Twitter: @GSUnderTheRadar
