Racing’s colourful history
Racing’s seedier side will be revealed on Sunday when the BBC’s Panorama programme screens its expose of the sport in ‘The Corruption of Racing’.
Roger Buffham, the former head of security at the Jockey Club, claims in the programme that horseracing is “institutionally corrupt” and that “a whole generation of National Hunt jockeys had close links to organised crime”.
The final version of the show was aired today at a press preview.
Much of the programme’s contents are already well-known - documents taken by Buffham from his time at the Jockey Club are sprinkled liberally throughout.
However, the greatest shock-value and potential damage to the integrity of the Jockey Club could come from Jeremy Phipps, the man who took over from Buffham as security chief.
In a conversation of a private meeting with Buffham, which was taped by hidden microphone, Phipps tells his predecessor that the Jockey Club is lacking in “backbone”.
“It is actually the backbone that isn’t terribly strong,” he says.
“You’ve got to think about the members,” he says. “They are f***ing ignorant.
“I had David Oldrey (deputy senior steward of the Jockey Club) in my office this afternoon and I said to him ‘why the f*** have we not done anything about it before‘. We’ve just given out a couple of warnings.”
Later in the programme, Phipps is shown being confronted with a transcript of his meeting with Buffham.
Initially he denies making the comments but then, taken aside by colleague John Maxse - the Jockey Club’s public relations director - he is reminded of the context of the conversation and returns to the camera to explain that he made comments designed to put Buffham at ease.
Apart from Buffham, who appears throughout the programme, the Panorama programme has an interview with Irish former jockey Dermot Browne, who claims to have doped “about 27 horses” between August and October 1990.
Browne, 38, was working for Brian Wright, described in the programme as having links with crime.
“I got involved in August at the request of Brian Wright,” Browne says.
“It began with a horse at Goodwood. It stopped when I got arrested. That didn’t stop Brian Wright though.”
Browne also claims that jockeys were on the payroll of Wright, naming two riders who had, he claimed, received cash payments in exchange for passing on information.
“They gave them five grand or something like that,” Browne explains.
“He (one jockey) did very well out of it. I’d get phone calls from (him) or other jockeys and I’d say ‘Have you spoken to Uncle?’ That’s what everyone called him (Wright).
“They did big races, as big as the Cheltenham Festival. The bigger the race, the bigger the betting. I actually saw some of them collecting their money.”
