It is worth reading the pieces in today’s Guardian and Telegraph in which Nic Coward gives his view about his tenure at the BHA.
I have often said to people that Nic reminds me a great deal of Tony Blair in many ways, not least of which is his single-minded pursuit of a goal once he has weighed up the facts as he sees them and decided upon a given course; and for better or worse, he confirms that view in my mind in these articles. I read them both with two thoughts in mind.
The first was how wonderful it must be to have that level of self-assurance. I can’t say I look back on my last four years, or indeed any stretch of four years of my life, with quite the same confidence in my own success.
The second – perhaps unsurprisingly given our different takes on the focus of the last few years – was that it brought to mind the time when one of racing’s (now fully united) CEOs told me how Churchillian Nic was. He was referring, cheekily, to his rhetoric; but it seems he could have meant other ways too. Recall Winston’s House of Commons speech of January 23, 1948, which I suspect you will remember in its shorter, misquoted form.
The full line was this:
“For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history.”
Surely these two pieces were published a day early? They look amazingly like April Fools jokes, and it should be quite clear to anyone observing Nic Coward’s tenure at the BHA that he achieved absolutely nothing at all. He wasted nearly five years that British racing didn’t have to waste.
Last word on lovable Nic: he received his least desired leaving present – an RCA badge for life. Since he was rarely seen on a racecourse, never engaged with the sport and left it in a worse (abysmal) state than he found it, racing’s former chief executive is unlikely to be breaking the habits of a lifetime by showing his face on a regular basis. Thus he will avoid the risk (slight) of bumping into Harry Findlay again. Their double act at Doncaster where the posturing punter Findlay harangued the hapless Coward, was one of the few bright spots of last year’s racing calendar. Good riddance.