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France Galop elections highlight all that is wrong with French racing

La Casaque Noire is distinctly unimpressed with the voting process to elect the leaders of the sport across the Channel

Recently France Galop held their four-yearly elections. The workings and reasons for these elections are a near total mystery, except to a select few. And the way they are policed and run compares more with the current Russian regime than something that would be taken for granted, in say, a UK general election - the whole campaign was riddled with scandal forcing France Galop to issue several official communiqués concerning the irregular activities of more than one party.

The worst offence committed was the illegal mass sending of SMS messages to most of the eligible voters via an "acquired" database of mobile phone numbers.

The integrity of the system was not helped when shortly into the campaign, one influential candidate, Patrick Fellous, jumped ship from the Actionnaires du Galop and formed his own party. He managed to get elected under a manifesto that offered a whole range of disastrous "new" ideas. The most ridiculous of these was yet another subsidy in the form of cheap/free loans from France Galop to enable the already wealthy landowning breeders to buy better stallions.

Campaigning degenerated into a series of personal attacks which made the current US presidential candidate race look squeaky clean by comparison.

The voting procedure itself was a nightmare, with regional elections taking place alongside the national. Instructions concerned a series of coloured envelopes in which to put different coloured ballot papers. Pink, blue and beige papers to go into white or coloured envelopes. Tick several candidates from the same party but don't mix and match.

However, the real killer was the necessity to attach a personalised bar code sticker onto each envelope, under penalty of having your vote binned if omitted. I thought that was totally unacceptable, as voting should surely be strictly anonymous.

It seems that the whole procedure was just too much for most, as the total votes numbered a pathetic 2000, or thereabouts.

The results themselves make interesting reading - not for those who got elected (and who really cares?) but for the amount of spoiled papers. Surely if you got this far you're not going to intentionally submit an invalid slip. But the number of void bulletins was horrendous.
In one of the regional elections, 15 of just 322 ballots were deemed "null". That's a whopping 5%.
Analysis of the results show that it's pretty much "as you were", so presumably that means no change, or as I see it, no progress.

In any case, I can honestly say in all my years of involvement with French racing I don't think any of the elected parties or committees have done anything other than for themselves.

Indeed, my reading of the idea behind the elections would be to provide an air of democracy over an institution that is more of a dictatorship. Louis Romanet was "appointed" Director General of France Galop in 1986, succeeding his father, and is the fourth person in his family, over three generations since 1907, to be in charge of the governing body of racing.

One doesn't need to look too hard to find the real power behind France Galop - and it certainly isn't from any democratically elected source.