No winners in Noble Yeats farce - except fans of competitive form-filling

"We're all in this together" is one of those things that people feel they ought to say, even though their listeners will instinctively understand it isn't true. When hard times come, some will suffer and others will carry on as before.

Still, it is surprising to me how often people in racing find themselves pulling in different directions and then having to play the blame game when, inevitably, we don't end up where anyone wanted to go. The latest example is the vaccinations stramash that torpedoed Noble Yeats's entry for Lingfield's newish feature chase on Sunday.

Lest you imagine otherwise, this was not a case of a necessary vaccination having been missed. Noble Yeats has had his vaccination and is reported to be in the pink of health. There would have been no risk whatever in his mixing with other horses in Surrey this weekend.

The problem was that the required virtual paperwork had not been completed by the bureaucratically imposed deadline to prove that Noble Yeats had received his vaccination. Within a matter of hours, the designated buttons had been pressed. If the race closed on Wednesday rather than Tuesday, all would have been well.

Noble Yeats: would be running at Lingfield on Sunday if the entry stage had closed on Wednesday rather than TuesdayCredit: Patrick McCann

Who benefits from this? I suppose the race becomes easier to win for the remaining runners, whose connections, in fairness to them, had managed to jump through the appropriate hoops in a timely manner. But unless our aim is to bolster the sport's appeal with a bit of competitive form-filling, that is not really an outcome we should be aiming at.

Shortly after Christmas, I got a frustrated phone call from a trainer predicting that dozens of horses were about to be ruled as "not qualified" to run over the following days because of a bottleneck caused by the festive period. Thousands of horses had been getting their vaccines and this trainer's local vet's surgery had been required to deal with more than 300 in the previous week.

The tricky bit for trainers was finding time to upload the necessary information to prove each vaccination had taken place when they were light on staff. Worse, each vaccination had to be verified by the vet before close of entries, at a time when practices were closed and vets were even harder to reach than usual.

"Give us a couple of days between entry and declarations to prove the vaccination has taken place," was the trainer's plea and very reasonable it seemed to me. Literally minutes after we spoke, word came through that the BHA had sensibly agreed a fortnight's amnesty until working conditions returned to normal, so that particular moment of stress for the sport's insiders never made it into print.

But the new regime is now in force and it's not just Noble Yeats who has been thus eliminated; I hear there have been a small number of cases each day. We have installed a strict headmasterly system that punishes people for administrative oversights, even when no harm was caused, no loss was suffered and there was plenty of time to set things straight. At a time when every runner is precious, why are we opening trapdoors for some of them to fall through?

The BHA is trying to do the right thing to ward off equine influenza. They tell me of strenuous efforts made to communicate with trainers, ensuring they are aware of their obligations. They have set up a vaccination calculator to help identify the dates by which horses must be treated, as well as email alerts for trainers and vets.

But onerous requirements are still onerous, however much attention is called to them. What's missing is that shared sense of mutual endeavour, of regulators and participants working together to ensure that everything flows as smoothly as possible, that safety is observed while everyone is enabled to compete who wants to do so. Instead, we end up with more finger-pointing.

It reminds me of that time The Young Master bolted up in the Badger Ales Trophy only for officials to realise he wasn't qualified to take part. As a novice, the rules required him to have raced three times over fences, whereas he had done so twice.

It ought to have been obvious he wasn't qualified from the time he was entered five days earlier and indeed the issue was raised that week in some of the darker recesses of social media, but no piece of software pinged an automated warning to connections and no-one from Weatherbys or the BHA or Wincanton made a friendly phone call to talk it over. The rules made it the trainer's responsibility to notice the tripwire.

I could understand that if it was only the trainer who suffered. But we had one set of connections mortified with embarrassment, another who were eventually told they had won the race without any chance to celebrate, punters similarly divided and the whole sport cringing about what had gone wrong with the week's biggest race.

Get over it, Cook, that was eight years ago! Noble Yeats can run next week at Cheltenham so racing's fans aren't really losing out. Do we have to make a big fuss over every little thing that goes wrong?

That's the attitude in this game, which explains why the same kind of mistakes come up at intervals. Please find a way to rub along with each other, racing folk. 'We're in this together' might ring a bit hollow but it's a better attitude than 'every man for himself'.

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