TINPOT JUMPING RACES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2401, 8 March 1900, Page 40

TINPOT JUMPING RACES.

In England a number of meetings held under Grand National Hunt rules are very

paltry affairs, and the Sporting Times says that an admitted evil would be done away with if three-fourths of them were wiped out. The same paper-continues as follows : Modern steepleehafing in England is, for the most part, circus work, in which the trick horse and trick rider shine over trick jumps. This is the reason why so few horses manage to go the full length of the Grand National course. The variety of ground over which they have tc 1 travel, and the jumps they have to make, beat them. It is the rarest thing in the world nowadays to see a horse jump out of a ploughed field over a natural fence, and it is rarer still to ?ee the striding- but weedy thoroughbred boggling over a ridge or furrow on which the hunter often revels. Everything under the Grand National rules is artificial. The stakes are artificial, the country is artificial, the jumps are artificial, and so are the jockeys' fees, it is laughable to read of steeplechases of the advertised value of £4-0, but really worth little more than £30, and the jockey's fee for whining fixed at £10. Why preserve a farce like that when it is well known that for 10s or 20s you can get a very, good jockey, and many of them aie not paid more than that? The fact of the matter is that the Grand National Hunt Committee ape too much the jockey club, not realising that they have behind them only a poverty-stricken and very attenuated pporl, whereas with fiat racing there are " million*in it." For a time the Grand National ilunt Committee seemed to be gohi£ from bad to worse, with naedy adventurers who "go racing " for what they can get for it, holding the rehi3 ; but that, we are glad to see, has now been arrested.