MARTIN PIPE cut an unhappy figure at Exeter on Sunday and, while it was easy to put his demeanour down to an increasingly hopeless attempt to cling on to the trainers’ title, he was actually vexed by far more than that.
Pipe does not often reveal his inner thoughts on racing, or life in general. Right now, his outlook on the latter will be dominated by the worrying condition of Lucy Bridges, long-time girlfriend of his son David and still hospitalised two weeks after suffering head injuries in a point-to-point fall.
Set against such family crisis, the everyday aggravations of racing fade into triviality, but Pipe is finding no consolation in either the form of his horses or the state of his sport. Say what you will about the man — and some still snipe enviously and distrustfully — but he is a thinking trainer, and a proud one.
Presently, he is training winners at little better than half the strike-rate of his nemesis, Paul Nicholls, and he is feeling the comparisons keenly. “Owners all seem to want young trainers now,” he said. “The same thing happened to Fred Winter and W. A. Stephenson but I can’t understand why. You wouldn’t pick a doctor just because he’s young, would you?” He is also irritated by the effect of recently introduced regulations that dictate maximum field sizes for each meeting on the strict basis of one horse per racecourse stable box. Like a number of other trainers, Philip Hobbs vocally among them, Pipe considers the rule has been brought in without proper thought.
Events at Exeter, where 23 horses were denied a run, brought this frustration to a head. “Owners will not stay in the sport if they can’t run their horses,” Pipe said. “And smaller fields mean a drop in betting turnover, so everyone is losing. They say it is a security issue, yet what is wrong with fencing off the stable area so that runners can be unloaded direct from lorries? And if it is a hygiene issue, then why do all horses still have to use the same dope box?” Pipe has proved, over a generation and more, that his thinking is clearer and more innovative than that of almost anyone in racing. His views should never be ignored.