Racing and politics - two rarely seen bedfellows

General / The Assistant / 17 February 2008 / Leave a Comment

The Assistant muses on the sport's less than noble stance to some thorny issues

Hands up... How many of you had heard of a badminton player called Richard Vaughan before this week? How many of you still haven't heard of him?

For those whose only idea of current affairs is hearing about the latest jockey-caught-with-trainer's-wife-rumour, Vaughan is an Olympic hopeful who has signed up to Team Darfur: a group of athletes who feel that 2008 Olympic hosts, China, have questions to answer about their role in Sudan.

No doubt Beijing can easily shrug off the protestations of a group of nobody athletes, but they will find it more difficult to deal with the bigger news of Steven Spielberg's resignation from his role as artistic advisor, after he was attacked by Mia Farrow in the Wall Street Journal, for a role in what she has dubbed the "genocide Olympics".

The whole debate - film directors and badminton players alike - has got me thinking. Intentionally or otherwise, sport has frequently been the catalyst for politic debate. Athletes at the Berlin Olympics, cricketers and rugby players in South Africa, sprinters clenching their fists on podiums and boxers dodging the draft: they've all forced sportswriters to step outside their usual remit and talk politics.

But when has racing ever got political?

Racing's reaction to the China question is a good case in point. It is no secret that various racing and betting interests have been keen to court the Chinese Government so that if, and when, racing and betting is liberalised in the country, they will be drawn well to exploit the world's biggest market.

So when YP Cheng, a Hong Kong-based toy manufacturer, pumped a reported $100m into a new training and racing complex in Beijing, trainers and bloodstock agents from various racing jurisdictions were keen to help him spend his money. In October 2005, the enterprise ceased, with a reported 600 racehorses culled in the process, and yet at no point did anyone from racing seem to raise an objection. Not to the culling, and not even on the wider question of why countless individuals from racing were doing business with a country with such an abhorrent human rights record.

Indeed, the Racing Post seemed only interested in widely reporting the escapades of Nigel Smith, an English trainer who had answered an advert to go and ply his trade in Beijing. The highlight of this coverage was a double-page spread, written by Smith and published in June 2007, which gave the impression that China's biggest problem was how to deal with pissed English trainers, and not the question of Tibet, or the reported 6,000 judicial executions carried out in China each year.

Perhaps those in racing take the view debated in an episode of the West Wing, that: "free trade is essential for human rights." That it is only by engaging people in a dialogue, fortified by economic ties, that social progression occurs. And if, in the process, you make some money to boot, then at least it's better than someone else making the money.

Or perhaps they feel that as a negotiating tactic, public embarrassment - the kind meted out by Farrow, Spielberg and shuttle-cock whiz kid Vaughan - acts as an inhibitor to dialogue, not a stimulant.

Or perhaps they feel it's not the place of those involved in sport to utilise their tenuous fame to talk about issues of which they know little, especially when there's a chance it could be construed as nothing more that an act of self-publicity.

As the cantankerous State Department official in the West Wing explains, it's all a little more nuanced than: "free trade is essential for human rights."

But racing has not always been quiet in political debate. During deliberations on the future of hunting with hounds in this country, racing was a powerful voice, and next week I'll talk about why this was an example of where sport and politics shouldn't mix.