Extremely mild winter weather continued until the last third of January, but now we have sharp night frosts, dangerous ice conditions on the roads and sidewalks, and at last some good conditions for skiing, which is a much loved sport here, in its downhill form and also cross-country. Velka Chuchle and Pardubice racecourses are converted into skiing facilities for as long as the weather conditions are suitable.

Only Vaclav Luka jnr and Josef Vana have sent horses out to race from the Czech Republic in January. Luka has sent a number of horses to Deauville, Cagnes-sur-Mer and Chantilly to run on the flat. The Luka-trained horses have done quite well, though none of them has won. There have been some places, and, for example, the two 3-y-os that he sent down to Cagnes-sur-Mer may benefit from the early-season racing experience. Josef Vana sent Italian-owned Imprezer to Pisa, and Rabbit Well has twice run at Pisa. However, Vana is understandably reluctant for his owners to continue to pay for entries in real euros, while prize money going back to 2012 is paid only in the form of promises. Now that wintry weather has arrived, it will be difficult to train and transport racehorses, and there are unlikely to be many Czech-trained runners in February. Josef Vana says that he will be looking for interesting races in France, but Luka intends to take a break.

Three Czech jockeys have done interesting things in January 2014. Eliška Kubinová is continuing to chalk up an impressive number of winners at Portland Downs, in Oregon. Milan Zatloukal rode an outsider to victory on the white turf at Arosa, in Switzerland, and is now hoping to ride a winner at the famous white turf meeting at Sankt Moritz. And on January 26^th, at Cheltenham, Jan Faltejsek had a notable win on one of his favourite horses, Knockara Beau, at 66 to 1! This was a wonderful moment for him and for all of us, not only beating Big Buck’s in his much-awaited comeback race, but also winning the race by a short head from A. P. McCoy.

On the Galopp Reporter website, Petr Malik produced statistics showing that the proportion, and also the overall number, of Czech-breds in Czech racing has dropped fairly dramatically in the past decade, and particularly in the past 5 years. He also showed that Czech-breds have continued to have limited success in higher category races. This is bad news, as Czech breeders are key members of our racing community, and a successful local breeding industry must be good for the local sport. However, there is too much breeding of moderate stallions with moderate mares, mainly with predictable results. There are a few cases of highly-rated mares being sent to highly-rated stallions, usually abroad. Even if a foal or a yearling looks good and strong, a breeder will only get a good price for it if its papers are impressive. Unfortunately, the CZ suffix in a horse’s pedigree is not regarded as prestigious.

In Galopp Reporter, Petr Malik also reports that things are looking up for trotting, which has gone through three or four very thin years. Galopp Reporter states that there could be as many as twenty trotting meetings at Prague Velka Chuchle this year, beginning in April, with considerable funding from the Capital City of Prague. It is also stated that there should be some trotting at Bravantice, the new course outside Ostrava, this year. A few months ago, an opening meeting was organized at Bravantice, but just a matter of hours before the first race, the meeting was cancelled because it was discovered that a telegraph pole in the middle of the finishing straight had not been removed. I read that a cyclist in the UK recently rode into a telegraph pole that had been left on a widened cycle track quite recently - I suppose we all need to beware of stray telegraph poles these days!

The Czech racing gala awards evening was held at Prostejov again this year on January 18th. For several years now, this event has been held in Prostejov, in central east Moravia, organized by a team around Zdenek Karlach. Orphee des Blins was voted Horse of the Season for the second successive year. I admit that I would have voted for her, but Petr Guth wrote a leader for the Czech-language pages of Dostihovy Svet arguing that the title should have gone to Meandre, a Group 1 winner on the flat in Germany. Meandre, Petr Guth claims, suffered prejudice in the voting because he has an owner from Chechnya (Ramzan Kadyrov), a trainer from Russia (Arslangirej Savujev), has never run in the Czech Republic, and was only in training here for a period of a few months. Petr has a point there. The Dostihovy Svet English pages do reckon to pay special attention to international aspects of Czech racing, and to celebrate them. Nevertheless, it would have been hard for me to prefer Meandre, which I have never seen, to Orphee des Blins, a great phenomenon in each of her four runs at Pardubice in the last 16 months.

The biggest news item of the month is that Vaclav Luka senior did not stand again to be president of the Jockey Club of the Czech Republic, a position he held for 17 years. The big question is how his replacement by Alesa Jakub, and by the group of rich owners who stood behind his election, will affect Czech racing. The answer is that I do not know. I had hoped to collect some views before the end of January for inclusion in this newsletter, but the anti-Luka camp and the pro-Luka camp have been keeping quiet. The only outspoken person has been Vaclav Luka himself.

I have translated a very revealing interview with Vaclav Luka senior by Miloslav Vlcek, which appeared on the Fitmin Turf website. The English vrsion is on http://www.dostihovy-svet.cz/en/node/3169. This interview was made a day or two before the election, and in it Luka explains the situation around his decision not to stand for re-election. He complains that a group of rich racehorse owners, and various others including anonymous writers have been attacking his leadership in an unnecessarily aggressive and confrontational manner, and he defends his own record over 17 years as president of the Jockey Club of the Czech Republic. He contrasts the chaotic situation when he took over in 1997 with the stability of Czech racing nowadays - we can now be reasonably sure what meetings will be held, where and when; prize-money and other payments are made on time. He points out how hard he has worked, and how he has held the racing community together, in particular how he has tried to support and protect the majority of small owners, breeders, trainers, riders and stable staff who can only dream of being connected with a big-race winner - hence his disappointment at the divisiveness of the attacks on his leadership. Luka says that the group that is taking over consists mainly of people who are quite new to racing, and are motivated not, as he is, by a passion for horses and for racing, but by some other personal agenda and personal ambitions.

Of course, Vaclav Luka’s view of himself is not exactly that of his opponents, who portray him as a leader who has surrounded himself with ageing yes-men, has blocked changes apart from those that he personally espouses, and has been a drag on the development of Czech racing.

What is my view? Well, the Luka era has certainly been an era of stability, at a time when there have been crises all around us. To the north, Polish racing is, we hope, now on a much better basis after a long, deep crisis in the 1990s and 2000s. To the east, there is no racing left in Vienna, and the only racing in Austria this year will be the 14 meetings planned at Ebreichsdorf, and they will be shared with trotting. To the south, Italian racing became far too reliant on state support, and has been brought down by mismanagement leading to a major financial crisis. To the west, racing in Germany is a shadow of what it was in the 1990s. Luka’s insistence on sound and cautious practices has contrasted with the situation in the neighbouring countries. Vaclav Luka seems to me to have played an important part in putting the sport on a sound basis in the early years of his presidency. However, there were some good years before the present economic crisis in the country, when there might have been an opportunity to bring more money into the sport.

Seventeen years at the head of any organization is a long time, within which the leader should have implemented his ideas, and after which it is time for new blood and new ideas. I think it was time for a change, but I regret that Vaclav Luka should have left in circumstances where he feels chased out and undervalued. He has certainly worked very hard for Czech racing.

He has said that he will continue to be an owner and a breeder of racehorses, and that he will give more time to representing the interests of the shareholders at Prague Velka Chuchle racecourse, which they purchased at the end of 2001 to avoid it being sold for non-racing purposes when it came on to the market. I hope people in Czech racing will agree to treat him as a highly respected and wise elder statesman of the sport.

And now, let the new people set about energizing Czech horseracing, introducing new ideas and finding new sources of money - but not throwing out the steadiness and the stability that Vaclav Luka brought to the sport in the Czech Republic.