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Briefly entertained by the suggestion he may once have operated on the wrong side of the law, the BHA's new director of equine health and welfare, James Given, confesses: "I'm afraid I never was much of a poacher. I had maybe a couple of issues with the stewards in my 22 years as a trainer, but I never had a positive drugs test, which I'm pretty proud of."
However, lest he be accused of having an over-eager agenda to catch his former colleagues red-handed, making off with a plump rabbit or two from racing's lordly estate, Given adds quickly: "But I wouldn't say I've become a gamekeeper either."
He may have 'crossed the floor' when taking this role just over six months ago, but the man who sent out 580 winners from his base at Willoughton in Lincolnshire is not about to turn the existential struggle for racing's future into a political wrangle. There is too much at stake for that, he'll tell you, and the way forward is less conflict and more of the kind of accord that he asserts has been sorely lacking in recent times.
"The immediate concern is that the relationship between the regulator and the regulated has become pretty toxic in recent years and I can speak from personal experience.
"From the days 20 years ago, under the benign dictatorship of the Jockey Club, we adopted a more modern approach where different people came and went who didn't understand how the British psyche works. We're not a statutory regulator, we're a self-governing body, but people came in from other jurisdictions where there was a master-servant relationship in which they had control over absolutely everything trainers did, and people got fed up with that.
"We needed to find a balance between being supine and being dominant. Of course there has to be a policeman to look after the rules, otherwise it becomes the wild west, but in this country there has to be a collaborative approach."
If ever there were a man built to instil this spirit of collaboration, it's the 54-year-old former vet, who first dipped his toe into racing as assistant to Mark Johnston before winning a scholarship to study training methods in Dubai and then setting up his own operation at Wolverhampton racecourse. He's seen many and varied methods of law enforcement and understands the needs of domestic trainers perhaps better than most.
"I'd been regulated by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, the Jockey Club, the BHB and the BHA, and while there have been different characters and different ethoses, the best kind of regulation is where you have the 'line in the sand', and the regulator stands on the same side of that line as the regulated, rather than standing on the other side of the line and waiting for people to cross it so they can be punished.
"Yes, we want a transparently honest sport, but most people don't want to break the rules, so let's work together to create it. In some ways it's a choice between the East German Stasi border guard and the village bobby and in Britain the village bobby usually works best. That could make me sound very naive, but I think a more collaborative approach gives us the chance to drive racing forward successfully, which we need to.
James Given at home with his dogs in a rare moment of relaxation
James Given at home with his dogs in a rare moment of relaxation
Edward Whitaker
"You're never going to be popular in this role and we're not going to be sitting round the campfire singing songs together, but we need an approach that gives the trainers confidence that even if they're not going to get everything they want, the things that make their lives difficult are going to be addressed."
It's the positive agenda of a man who had enjoyed success around the world with his horses before racing's economics began to shift against him and many other smaller players. Many of his finest hours came in the company of Hugs Dancer, the 2002 Ebor and 2003 Chester Cup winner who went on to perform with credit in the Caulfield and Melbourne Cups, but there were also Cambridgeshire winner I Cried For You and Group scorers Jessica's Dream, Wunders Dream, Summitville, Trick Or Treat, Lady Gloria, Indian Days and Dandino, before the tide turned.
Given was already a trustee of the British Racing School, and a committed, unpaid member of the BHA's ethics committee and Horse Welfare Board, so when the director's role opened up last autumn, following the departure of David Sykes, he was well placed to put his name in the hat, even if he wasn't sure he was quite what the BHA was looking for.
"They'd taken on racing professionals as starters and 'stipes' before," he explains, "but I wasn't sure they were ready for a horseman to be coming in at a pretty senior level, so it's a new chapter in many ways, but more of an evolution for me than a change out of the blue.
"Life as a trainer had become a lot harder. I hadn't had a good horse in quite a lot of years and I was no longer the bright young thing, and it's true what I was told, that the most closely guarded secret in training is that you don't have to do it.
"Training is relentless and you so rarely get to step away from it, to look at it with proper perspective. Early in my career I had the ultimate low when a girl that worked for me was killed on the gallops, and that reminded you that the rest of it was just horses running slower than other horses, but I had fewer and fewer horses and there are always new challenges out there."
All of which is not to say that the transition – maybe not from poacher to gamekeeper, but certainly from inside the goldfish bowl to outside it – has been without its emotional wrenches, but Given's mood is a positive one.
Given greets Wunders Dream after success in the Flying Childers at Doncaster in 2002
Given greets Wunders Dream after success in the Flying Childers at Doncaster in 2002
Edward Whitaker
"When the weather was so bad at the start of the year, I didn't mind looking out at it from behind glass," he explains from a home that once resonated with the clip-clop of hooves next door, "but when I went to Cheltenham and Aintree, watching the horses trot up at the festivals, I realised I missed that contact with them.
"I miss the euphoria of having a winner. I'll always miss that competitive edge racing gives you when things are going well, when the days are long, the sun is out and the horses are looking wonderful, but as a trainer you have to deal with a lot of lows to get to the occasional highs."
Not that he is expecting the role of policing equine health and welfare to be a walk in the park. High-profile drugs cases in the US and the furore over Melbourne Cup deaths in Australia have brought into sharp relief the problems the sport faces worldwide, and the British government's recent statement of intent to hold racing to account over its horse safety record is a sure sign that public opinion is increasingly not to be ignored, but Given is very much a modernist in this area, keen to bring the sport into line with broader expectations of behaviour.
"Even five years ago, racing just happened in its own little village," he reflects, "but the concept of the social licence has grown and we have to be accountable.
"Of course there are some people in racing who hold the view that we shouldn't be going out of our way to explain or justify ourselves to society as a whole, but I believe that if you take that approach, society eventually will decide that you don't have the liberty to do what you do.
"Two hundred years ago, little boys were sent up chimneys and we thought that was acceptable, but society continually redraws its lines, and while we hope it isn't going to be a redrawing of lines until everything becomes beige and we do nothing, we have to keep demonstrating that we're an integral part of society as a sport, an employer, a contributor to the Exchequer and a way of bettering people's lives through exposing them to animals."
It's a serious can of worms for a new man to open up in his first few months in the job, and the divisions in the sport won't go away quickly, but Given's direction is a clear one, moving towards the mainstream, hopefully without conceding ground to extremism.
"At one end of the spectrum there will always be people who want to abolish horseracing, abolish eating meat and keeping dogs as pets," he says. "From our position on the spectrum, we're always trying to improve, but we're happy that using animals in sport is a morally and ethically acceptable thing to do.
"Then there's a whole bunch of people who most of the time don't know and don't care, but when it came to the Gordon Elliott pictures, you found that a lot of the people in this country actually did care and we had to show them we're a responsible body and a responsible sport that takes the job of looking after these animals, even after their death, very seriously.
Good times: James Given is all smiles after landing the 2003 Chester Cup with Hugs Dancer
Good times: James Given is all smiles after landing the 2003 Chester Cup with Hugs Dancer
Edward Whitaker
"We've had to put racing on the front foot on welfare, driving through improvements and opening up our doors to show people what we're doing – as trainers will during National Racehorse Week this autumn – to prove that we do care."
That initiative will move another step or two closer to fruition when lessons learned at the spring festivals are implemented across the board, as Given explains.
"We're taking some of the best practice of Cheltenham and Aintree, the pre-race examinations, and rolling them out across summer jump racing, to assess horses for soundness and listen to their hearts," he says.
"At Cheltenham we found two horses with heart murmurs that their trainers quite understandably had no knowledge of. One was subsequently passed fit to race and the other was put on the easy list for us to look at again after a bit of rest, having been prevented from competing and putting his heart under maximum pressure. It wasn't about trying to catch trainers out, it was about working with trainers to pick up things they may not have been aware of, to reduce the incidence of injuries and accidents.
"That's the kind of thing I see as integral to my role at the BHA, and we've just finished a recruitment process for the Welfare Board, which means we'll soon be appointing three very exciting people to help drive its projects forward. It will show we mean business."
Given's approach, the continuation of the BHA's Life Well Lived strategy, will take a data-led path, analysing the minutiae – "where horses fall, what happens between 30-day foal registration and entering a licensed premises, what happens to a horse once it retires from racing, things that people may have opinions on and may know a little about, but we want the whole picture, in order to enhance safety and reduce risk while maintaining the essence of the sport".
Given leads in Dandino and Paul Mulrennan after the Jockey Club Stakes at Newmarket in 2011
Given leads in Dandino and Paul Mulrennan after the Jockey Club Stakes at Newmarket in 2011
Mark Cranham
Maintaining, also, his own ethical values, as he explains: "I don't feel I have to compromise or make a deal with myself in this job. Nothing in life is black and white and there are always things you want to do better, but I couldn't compromise myself if I felt there were things in the sport that were unacceptable.
"The thing is, there are always advances and new developments. I had a meeting last week with someone who has new technology looking at bone density in horses, and if that technology could be put to use for the benefit of the national herd rather than for commercial gain, that would be an achievement.
"I didn't know that meeting was coming and you never know where the next big step forward will come from, but all these things will work better if we work together."
"I'm a happy guy."
However, lest he be accused of having an over-eager agenda to catch his former colleagues red-handed, making off with a plump rabbit or two from racing's lordly estate, Given adds quickly: "But I wouldn't say I've become a gamekeeper either."
He may have 'crossed the floor' when taking this role just over six months ago, but the man who sent out 580 winners from his base at Willoughton in Lincolnshire is not about to turn the existential struggle for racing's future into a political wrangle. There is too much at stake for that, he'll tell you, and the way forward is less conflict and more of the kind of accord that he asserts has been sorely lacking in recent times.
"The immediate concern is that the relationship between the regulator and the regulated has become pretty toxic in recent years and I can speak from personal experience.
"From the days 20 years ago, under the benign dictatorship of the Jockey Club, we adopted a more modern approach where different people came and went who didn't understand how the British psyche works. We're not a statutory regulator, we're a self-governing body, but people came in from other jurisdictions where there was a master-servant relationship in which they had control over absolutely everything trainers did, and people got fed up with that.
"We needed to find a balance between being supine and being dominant. Of course there has to be a policeman to look after the rules, otherwise it becomes the wild west, but in this country there has to be a collaborative approach."
If ever there were a man built to instil this spirit of collaboration, it's the 54-year-old former vet, who first dipped his toe into racing as assistant to Mark Johnston before winning a scholarship to study training methods in Dubai and then setting up his own operation at Wolverhampton racecourse. He's seen many and varied methods of law enforcement and understands the needs of domestic trainers perhaps better than most.
"I'd been regulated by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, the Jockey Club, the BHB and the BHA, and while there have been different characters and different ethoses, the best kind of regulation is where you have the 'line in the sand', and the regulator stands on the same side of that line as the regulated, rather than standing on the other side of the line and waiting for people to cross it so they can be punished.
"Yes, we want a transparently honest sport, but most people don't want to break the rules, so let's work together to create it. In some ways it's a choice between the East German Stasi border guard and the village bobby and in Britain the village bobby usually works best. That could make me sound very naive, but I think a more collaborative approach gives us the chance to drive racing forward successfully, which we need to.
James Given at home with his dogs in a rare moment of relaxation
James Given at home with his dogs in a rare moment of relaxation
Edward Whitaker
"You're never going to be popular in this role and we're not going to be sitting round the campfire singing songs together, but we need an approach that gives the trainers confidence that even if they're not going to get everything they want, the things that make their lives difficult are going to be addressed."
It's the positive agenda of a man who had enjoyed success around the world with his horses before racing's economics began to shift against him and many other smaller players. Many of his finest hours came in the company of Hugs Dancer, the 2002 Ebor and 2003 Chester Cup winner who went on to perform with credit in the Caulfield and Melbourne Cups, but there were also Cambridgeshire winner I Cried For You and Group scorers Jessica's Dream, Wunders Dream, Summitville, Trick Or Treat, Lady Gloria, Indian Days and Dandino, before the tide turned.
Given was already a trustee of the British Racing School, and a committed, unpaid member of the BHA's ethics committee and Horse Welfare Board, so when the director's role opened up last autumn, following the departure of David Sykes, he was well placed to put his name in the hat, even if he wasn't sure he was quite what the BHA was looking for.
"They'd taken on racing professionals as starters and 'stipes' before," he explains, "but I wasn't sure they were ready for a horseman to be coming in at a pretty senior level, so it's a new chapter in many ways, but more of an evolution for me than a change out of the blue.
"Life as a trainer had become a lot harder. I hadn't had a good horse in quite a lot of years and I was no longer the bright young thing, and it's true what I was told, that the most closely guarded secret in training is that you don't have to do it.
"Training is relentless and you so rarely get to step away from it, to look at it with proper perspective. Early in my career I had the ultimate low when a girl that worked for me was killed on the gallops, and that reminded you that the rest of it was just horses running slower than other horses, but I had fewer and fewer horses and there are always new challenges out there."
All of which is not to say that the transition – maybe not from poacher to gamekeeper, but certainly from inside the goldfish bowl to outside it – has been without its emotional wrenches, but Given's mood is a positive one.
Given greets Wunders Dream after success in the Flying Childers at Doncaster in 2002
Given greets Wunders Dream after success in the Flying Childers at Doncaster in 2002
Edward Whitaker
"When the weather was so bad at the start of the year, I didn't mind looking out at it from behind glass," he explains from a home that once resonated with the clip-clop of hooves next door, "but when I went to Cheltenham and Aintree, watching the horses trot up at the festivals, I realised I missed that contact with them.
"I miss the euphoria of having a winner. I'll always miss that competitive edge racing gives you when things are going well, when the days are long, the sun is out and the horses are looking wonderful, but as a trainer you have to deal with a lot of lows to get to the occasional highs."
Not that he is expecting the role of policing equine health and welfare to be a walk in the park. High-profile drugs cases in the US and the furore over Melbourne Cup deaths in Australia have brought into sharp relief the problems the sport faces worldwide, and the British government's recent statement of intent to hold racing to account over its horse safety record is a sure sign that public opinion is increasingly not to be ignored, but Given is very much a modernist in this area, keen to bring the sport into line with broader expectations of behaviour.
"Even five years ago, racing just happened in its own little village," he reflects, "but the concept of the social licence has grown and we have to be accountable.
"Of course there are some people in racing who hold the view that we shouldn't be going out of our way to explain or justify ourselves to society as a whole, but I believe that if you take that approach, society eventually will decide that you don't have the liberty to do what you do.
"Two hundred years ago, little boys were sent up chimneys and we thought that was acceptable, but society continually redraws its lines, and while we hope it isn't going to be a redrawing of lines until everything becomes beige and we do nothing, we have to keep demonstrating that we're an integral part of society as a sport, an employer, a contributor to the Exchequer and a way of bettering people's lives through exposing them to animals."
It's a serious can of worms for a new man to open up in his first few months in the job, and the divisions in the sport won't go away quickly, but Given's direction is a clear one, moving towards the mainstream, hopefully without conceding ground to extremism.
"At one end of the spectrum there will always be people who want to abolish horseracing, abolish eating meat and keeping dogs as pets," he says. "From our position on the spectrum, we're always trying to improve, but we're happy that using animals in sport is a morally and ethically acceptable thing to do.
"Then there's a whole bunch of people who most of the time don't know and don't care, but when it came to the Gordon Elliott pictures, you found that a lot of the people in this country actually did care and we had to show them we're a responsible body and a responsible sport that takes the job of looking after these animals, even after their death, very seriously.
Good times: James Given is all smiles after landing the 2003 Chester Cup with Hugs Dancer
Good times: James Given is all smiles after landing the 2003 Chester Cup with Hugs Dancer
Edward Whitaker
"We've had to put racing on the front foot on welfare, driving through improvements and opening up our doors to show people what we're doing – as trainers will during National Racehorse Week this autumn – to prove that we do care."
That initiative will move another step or two closer to fruition when lessons learned at the spring festivals are implemented across the board, as Given explains.
"We're taking some of the best practice of Cheltenham and Aintree, the pre-race examinations, and rolling them out across summer jump racing, to assess horses for soundness and listen to their hearts," he says.
"At Cheltenham we found two horses with heart murmurs that their trainers quite understandably had no knowledge of. One was subsequently passed fit to race and the other was put on the easy list for us to look at again after a bit of rest, having been prevented from competing and putting his heart under maximum pressure. It wasn't about trying to catch trainers out, it was about working with trainers to pick up things they may not have been aware of, to reduce the incidence of injuries and accidents.
"That's the kind of thing I see as integral to my role at the BHA, and we've just finished a recruitment process for the Welfare Board, which means we'll soon be appointing three very exciting people to help drive its projects forward. It will show we mean business."
Given's approach, the continuation of the BHA's Life Well Lived strategy, will take a data-led path, analysing the minutiae – "where horses fall, what happens between 30-day foal registration and entering a licensed premises, what happens to a horse once it retires from racing, things that people may have opinions on and may know a little about, but we want the whole picture, in order to enhance safety and reduce risk while maintaining the essence of the sport".
Given leads in Dandino and Paul Mulrennan after the Jockey Club Stakes at Newmarket in 2011
Given leads in Dandino and Paul Mulrennan after the Jockey Club Stakes at Newmarket in 2011
Mark Cranham
Maintaining, also, his own ethical values, as he explains: "I don't feel I have to compromise or make a deal with myself in this job. Nothing in life is black and white and there are always things you want to do better, but I couldn't compromise myself if I felt there were things in the sport that were unacceptable.
"The thing is, there are always advances and new developments. I had a meeting last week with someone who has new technology looking at bone density in horses, and if that technology could be put to use for the benefit of the national herd rather than for commercial gain, that would be an achievement.
"I didn't know that meeting was coming and you never know where the next big step forward will come from, but all these things will work better if we work together."
"I'm a happy guy."
jinnyj
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2004
- Messages
- 4,697
Thanks. Makes for interesting reading and hopefully he will make a difference. After having a phone call with him a few weeks ago about that 17yo horse that collapsed died at a point to point, I think he clearly is up against a lot of “well we have always done things like this” attitude still. But at least he understands that a newer profile courtesy of social media is an area which is not going to go away and the Racing Industry needs to wise up to it and address any issues before they become damaging.
Desert Orchid
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Messages
- 25,727
Anyone that can throw a word like "supine" effortlessly into a conversation deserves some latitude...
jinnyj
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2004
- Messages
- 4,697
Follow on from this (possibly I posted the initial write up elsewhere?)
Any Point to Pointer over the age of 15 must now have a veterinary certificate confirming it is in good condition and can race. It’s a start at least but I personally would like a cut off age of 15. I wonder how many vets will actually refuse to do them in case it backfires.
Any Point to Pointer over the age of 15 must now have a veterinary certificate confirming it is in good condition and can race. It’s a start at least but I personally would like a cut off age of 15. I wonder how many vets will actually refuse to do them in case it backfires.
G-G
Senior Jockey
How long does that certificate last? Just thinking could be fine day they see a horse, 3 months later..... I know you can't police all of the things all of the time, but would that be for a season, with checks after a horse runs? Appreciate that could be logistically and economical unworkable.
jinnyj
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2004
- Messages
- 4,697
I think before it has its first run of the season and then is covered for the remainder. Not it’s definitely not ideal but at least they are starting to take notice of me! I imagine they will give the horse a heart examination primarily. That at least might pick up any current defects. And as I said I do wonder how many vets are going to be cautious of passing an old horse simply because as you say...three months later. Vets are notoriously keen on failing vettings if it means they could be sued for failing to pick something up. It will be interesting to see. But as I said, it’s a start and I will keep rattling their cages over it.