Given its primetime Friday night slot on mainstream ITV, racing’s hopes that Champions: Full Gallop, its behind-the-scenes documentary on the sport, will bring a whole new audience to it, is at least viable.
In the maternity ward of sports documentaries that should be enough oxygen to ensure, at the very least, this will not be a stillbirth.
Friday night’s first in the series centres on last year’s King George VI Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day when a terrific story fell into the programme maker’s lap: six runners (this was the one time a small field was actually useful) allowing them to cover pretty much each runner and rider’s back-story apart from Allaho (if the camera crew had run over a black cat on the way to Kempton on Boxing day, Allaho would, surely, have won instead of finishing third).
And, of course, an almost unfeasible result; £800 horse Hewick, trained in Carlow by star of the show Shark Hanlon, winning from an almost impossible position, 10 lengths behind with a circuit to run, not much closer at the second last where, if you remember, all the drama takes place.
The leader Shishkin crosses his legs, unships Nico de Boinville and all but wipes out the defending champion Bravemansgame as, simultaneously, Hewick – there is one shot of them at the start which shows just how small he is compared to his rivals in height and width let alone the price tag – starts to fly.
Michael Caulfield, the sports psychologist, once said that if football managers could engender the camaraderie of the weighing room, life would be easy for them.
While jockeys might all be great mates it is certainly edited to make it look, at the start of the King George, that five of the jockeys could make the race a little more winnable from their point of view if Shishkin refused to start again as he had done on his previous run.
De Boinville clearly had a plan to get him going and the others, while not overtly unhelpful, were not exactly helpful either. It is the nearest we come to needle in episode one. In my experience jockeys usually go out of their way to be helpful in such a situation.
But the racing outsider could be led to think De Boinville, probably Britain’s finest big race jump jockey of the current crop, is actually not very good and spends most of his life on his backside.
Though most of the weighing room shots of him are standing around in Constitution Hill’s silks – he had just or was just about to win the Christmas Hurdle – the unbeaten and then-Champion Hurdler is not mentioned and nearly all the shots of the jockey are of him on his arse being kicked around by hooves. Maybe the director is wary of presenting the viewer with more names and races than necessary.
De Boinville is quite amusing, however, when going through a list of his breakages, pausing as if he has finished and suddenly remembering that he also broke his arm, not something most people would forget and there is no shortage of black humour, an essential tool for survival in one of the toughest sports.
The new series has been heavily backed by Flutter, the umbrella group for bookmakers Paddy Power and Betfair, who clearly have an interest in this having a positive effect on the sport so it should, perhaps, not be a surprise that it comes across as a racing promo. It is also a tad too much ITV Racing or, how ITV Racing would dearly like to cover the sport if it had the time and wherewithal. A few voices other than the channel’s regulars might have helped.
You could also accuse the makers of over-santisation. There is no mention of the accident in his stable that would later claim the life of Shishkin, arguably the first programme’s main equine character. And given Bryony Frost’s high profile case against a male colleague for bullying and intimidation, the fact that she is left in her changing room while her five male colleagues are all getting mounted for one of the biggest jump races outside Cheltenham could be seen as problematic.
Being late into the paddock because someone forgot to call you out immediately puts you on the back foot but it is glossed over and joked about in the programme. She could justifiably have been very annoyed about that.
If this all sounds a bit negative then my one caveat is that this programme is, clearly, not aimed at me or people heavily involved in the sport, it’s for those who dip in and out and people who do not know the sport. Even so, that’s my next six Friday nights sorted and I hope as much as the next person that this provides racing with a timely boost.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 3 months with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
