Racing: Prize-money squabbles will be slow to disappear

New year forecast: what to expect in the next 12 months

You really should not try to predict the future in horseracing unless you want to make the big bookmaking chains even more corpulent, but there is at least one certainty for 2003. That is that the British Horseracing Board and the nation's racecourses will continue to squabble over prize-money.

The BHB indeed may never recover from its disastrous plan to levy swingeing increases on the cost of reproducing racecards in newspapers. It's called free advertising, stupids. There are hard times ahead also for Attheraces, who have put plenty of money into racing but have yet to see much squirting back. They will learn next year that the interactive betting on their lunchtime programme is not the route to riches they have confidently predicted.

Alan Byrne, the former Racing Post editor, will be approached to become Godolphin's chief racing executive in Dubai, while Sheikh Mohammed's team will again be thwarted in their quest for Derby success.

By the middle of April we should already know the identity of the Blue Riband victor. The last three Epsom winners have appeared in the Ballysax Stakes at Leopardstown and then the Derrinstown Stud Derby Trial back at the same course. The likeliest lads at this stage for the Irish races are Brian Boru, like this year's Derby winner, High Chaparral, a son of Sadler's Wells who won the Racing Post Trophy as a two-year-old, and Alamshar, who beat Brian Boru at the Curragh in October.

Prediction: Brian Boru to win the Derby.