I have to admit that I’m not as knowledgeable about horse racing as I once was, dear readers. Yes, many years ago when my disposable income was just that, I used to make the bookies tremble. Well, a couple of the lower-rent country bookies, anyway.

Living alone in my early twenties, and not blessed with the abundant and much-loved social skills I now possess, I used to spend a lot of time reading form and the like, and making withdrawals from the phone account.

So, with the experience from my youth I offer you the following advice on Hot Tips, and the sources whence they come.

Follow newspaper tips, and sleep under newspaper that night.

When someone approaches you with a sure winner, look at his suit – it’s probably one your Granddad gave to the Salvos twenty years ago; smile and back away.

Jockeys : worst judges of horseflesh in the world.

Ex-jockeys: Roy Higgins, anyone?

Trainers: pathological liars.

Owners: the last to hear anything, and they heard it from the trainer anyway.

These days, I just don’t have the time to dig through form and go to barrier trials and the like, so I can’t give you a very informed wrap-up of this year’s Spring Carnival. However a lack of knowledge or of facts has never stopped me gobbing off in the past, and I’m damned if I’ll let it do so now.

In the lead up to the Cup, everyone who knew anything was tipping that the Irish would be going home with the chocolates. For a couple of weeks it was Septimus first, Daylight second. Then the smart money was jumping over itself and trampling kiddies and old ladies to lay itself at the feet of Mad Rush.

Then the race actually happened, and we saw some of the most disgraceful riding in recent memory. Why was a horse, supposedly the best stayer in the world, allowed to bolt? And why did a bunch of these other supposedly vastly superior overseas runners, two of them its stable-mates, go with it? Despite my misgivings about their value as humans, jockeys aren’t entirely stupid or evil. These lads all raced to instructions.

And the instructions came from the trainers, Aidan O’Brien in particular, and what the berluddy hell was he thinking? You DO NOT win a two-mile race out of the barrier, your horse WILL wear out if it has to cut the air at the front for 2600 metres, and the ones behind you WILL have an easy run in your tailwind and swoop at the 200. If the ground was too hard for your horses (two pulled up lame, it turns out), then scratch the fuckers, the bookies will draw a line, and nobody’s suspicious of your motives.

When hot favourites run so badly, the stewards take a keen interest, and for good reason. They spoke to Aidan O’Brien and his three hoops after the last, and, while there isn’t enough there to charge anyone, they expressed dudgeon serious enough for him to question whether he was being accused of racing for Bart. He keeps repeating that he’d told the lads to set an even pace, but I’m afraid that just doesn’t cut it. Can’t say any more.

Now, the great thing about the Carnival is that it’s one of the few sporting events that gets shown absolutely live. Some wonderful moments emerged from this year’s coverage, and they didn’t all involve Bruce, or the seemingly endless procession of orange-skinned blondes squawking out tips based on clothes or being a laydee, although they did give us some beauties.

My favourite was as I sprawled on the couch on Cox Plate Day; a wide shot showed us the runners parading in the Mounting Yard, as a couple of be-suited CUBs punched fuck out of each other in the foreground, fascinators and champagne glasses nearby being the main damage inflicted.

For some reason we are supposed to be interested in what celebrities are doing and what their tiny tiny little brains have got to say about the next race. So we get spiky-haired tossers from Home and Away or some other televisual suet, giant Corey sunglasses protecting their scalps from UV rays, bleating about how great it all is to put on a pair of white shoes and drink for free, offering us an opinion on a horse only slightly less articulate than the horse itself could have come up with. If Bruce could just cross over to the horses, and say “One stomp for yes, two for no”, they could waste a lot less time on this drivel, and give us more ads for Crown Casino.

The celebrity chicks are marginally better, only because I’m in possession of a Y chromosome and am therefore atavistically drawn to cleavage, even if it’s a strange shade of orange, and is attached to less than an eighth of an inch of brain and a vocabulary that consists entirely of “awesome” and “like” with a rising inflection. I am yet to be convinced that picking a horse on the basis of its name (“Ethereal sounds, like, so pretty, like a cloud, like, or something”), or the silks (“I think pink and orange, like, go so well together, like, like my shoes and my, like, skin”) is of any value to anyone other than Judgement Day-obsessed bombers looking for absolute confirmation that this world has had its run and the Four Horsemen will be welcome when they show up just around dinner time.

Other major events don’t invite this kind of star-fucking, and the majority of commentators involved have had at least a passing involvement with the sport in question. When it comes to horse racing however, for some reason it’s acceptable for us to be shrieked at by pissed nineteen year old starlets whose best realistic hope for the future is a passing reference in Zoo magazine or on the news as they stagger, covered in vomit, out of the Marquee club.

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With the plunging dollar and the world economic shit storm, it’s being cried from all quarters that we can no longer afford to feed pensioners or the disabled, and that pot hole in your street that has its own gravity system won’t get repaired until 2012, and the Dear Leader’s been desperately hawking topless photos of Julia Gillard around the IMF in order to pay for fuel for the Prime Ministerial jet.

You can rest assured, though, that we’ll still find the money to send a lot of spoilt little shits to the AIS, and a whole lot more spoilt fat shits over to the Olympics to be photographed with them. Naturally, our bid for the World Cup will receive funding priority, so Chairman Kevin can send a bunch of party hacks and other assorted parasites to schmooze with FIFA.

The Socceroos are well on their way to establishing themselves as a credible unit with awesome potential, which is pretty goldarn impressive when you think about the big big football pond we swim in, however our political clout within FIFA remains, and will never get beyond us being a fat, hapless water buffalo gallumphing in the shallows with sharks.

Nevertheless, that $30 million is still there for the wasting, and let’s face it if they offered me the first class airfares I’d be there lobbying along with the rest of them: Go Kevin 2011, Go Aussie 2018, or 2022. Next stop, the moon…

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