“So, a lovely moment here…” begins Matt Chapman, making his first mistake. Chapman is a big personality in horse racing – slick of hair and foghorn of voice, he’s a fixture on Sky Racing and does the intrepid reporter bit for ITV during the big festivals. In racing circles, he divides opinion – some people can’t stand him, some merely hate the ground he walks on.
As it happens, this column has had a soft spot for him for many years, ever since the time he suggested live on air that he might be in the running to be godfather to AP McCoy’s first child. “I’d rather have f***ing Pete Doherty looking after it,” was McCoy’s response. Now, some people might take offence at being overlooked in the babysitting stakes in favour of a heroin-addict rock star, but Chapman took it all in good fun.
So he’s all right by me, Matt Chapman. But he’s still entirely wrong here. Because the lovely moment he’s talking about (a) hasn’t happened yet and (b) looks like a hastily thrown-together hostage video in the making and (c) could come with countless more appropriate descriptors than ‘lovely’.
‘Frosty’ might be one. ‘Inauthentic’ might be another. In fact, if you really want to get into it, ‘forced’ or ‘insincere’ or ‘completely and utterly false in a way that will fool absolutely nobody on earth, literally not one single person’ – that’s probably closer to the mark.
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Because yes, of course, the moment Chapman is pre-emptively investing with Camp David vibes is the handshake between Irish trainer/jockey Declan Queally and English jockey/toff Nico de Boinville on Thursday at Cheltenham. Around 24 hours earlier, they had been at loggerheads while jockeying for position down at the start of the first race and subsequently cut the back off each other when Chapman had interviewed them as they returned to the weighing room.
Not alone that, but Queally had lodged an official complaint to the British Horseracing Authority (BHA). The Dungarvan man had accused De Boinville of “repeated racial abuse”. Which immediately elevated the whole thing from an on-field tiff between competing sportsmen to something else entirely. The BHA have launched an investigation, which is expected to take a few weeks to reach a conclusion.
In the meantime, though, we were presented with the aforementioned lovely moment. Chapman is poised outside the entrance to the lobby outside the weighing room at Cheltenham. Immediately, it becomes clear that this is the wrong spot for this interaction to take place. As any first-year film student will tell you, it’s never a good idea to shoot something in a doorway, particularly when it involves a camera moving from a bright outside to a darker inside. It makes a complete mess of the light.
But since the weighing room at Cheltenham is restricted to jockeys and valets and stewards – basically anybody but reporters – Chapman is forced to do his Peace In Our Time bit while leaning across a threshold, with his cameraman behind him. It means that for the first couple of seconds, it’s actually hard to make Queally out because he’s wearing a dark coat against a dark background and the camera hasn’t adjusted to the lights. Meanwhile, De Boinville is standing in his silks, with a face on him that suggests he’d rather be cleaning a toilet with his toothbrush.
“Declan Queally and Nico de Boinville are together,” Chapman gurgles on, gamely. “Reunited. A shake of the hands. And hopefully, everything that happened yesterday, lads, can be put to bed?”
“Yeah, all sorted,” says Queally. “Just a heat-of-the-moment battle and all is forgiven and best of luck to Nico in the future.”
Important to move on, Nico?
“Very much so. And I appreciate Declan and wish him the best. And a big thanks to Davy Russell for sorting this out.”
At which point, it becomes obvious for the first time that former jockey Russell has been standing to the side of the two warring factions all the while. The camera pans back and he literally emerges from the shadows, the peacemaker unveiled. Youghal’s answer to Cyrus Vance puts his head down and slopes off without a backward glance, presumably to catch the next plane to the Middle East.
So, a lot to unpack here. Talk to them on the quiet and any jockey will tell you that rows like these aren’t unusual by any means. Jumps racing is a ferocious sport and danger is always in the air – if you don’t fight your own corner, nobody is going to fight it for you. As McCoy and Ruby Walsh both pointed out when it happened, Queally didn’t do anything down at the start that he wasn’t entitled to and that any other jockey wouldn’t have done as well.
Disagreements happen. Sometimes that leads to a fella being pinned up against a wall and sometimes it’s just a chirping match that’s over as quick as it started. But because they hold the four walls of the weighing room to be sacrosanct, none of it ever really makes it out into the wider world.
It would have been in this spirit that Russell knocked Queally and De Boinville’s heads together. Have your row, lads. Say what ye have to say. Just don’t be doing it out in public. It would have seemed like the most natural thing in the world for him to get Chapman involved and to capture it all for the ITV cameras, no matter how silly and contrived the whole thing looked.
The problem, though, is the “racial” element, which is going to hang in the air until the investigation is completed. In that sense, it felt odd for Queally to submit to the handshake for the cameras, regardless of the kiss-and-make-up conventions of the weighing room. Either he feels aggrieved at whatever De Boinville said to him or he doesn’t.
Presumably the English jockey will tell any investigation he has no case to answer – sure, didn’t the guy shake my hand the next day and tell ITV all was forgiven? And if there is a case to answer, what exactly is it?
We don’t know what De Boinville, said but assuming it was something along the lines of calling Queally “an Irish [insert your own favourite epithet]”, does that really amount to racism? If the BHA find it to be so, doesn’t that open up an enormous can of worms, in racing and beyond?
After a week of messy starts, this one could yet have a messy end.
