Racing: Johnston attacks loss of the Derby's lustre

Trainer of Bandari and Fight Your Corner criticises 'crazy system' that devalues today's Epsom showpiece

Never mind the World Cup, never mind Tyson v Lewis, today is Derby day, for some folk the most meaningful day in the sporting calendar.

For the pugnacious, deliciously opinionated Mark Johnston, however, it is not even the most meaningful day in the Flat-racing calendar. Which is not to say that the North's most successful trainer would not give his right arm or even his favourite trilby to win it, and indeed he has a decent chance; his horses Bandari and Fight Your Corner are widely fancied.

But Johnston thinks that the Derby has lost its lustre. And a man who has built a two-bit yard in Middleham, North Yorkshire, into a slick operation with 90 staff and 178 boxes, all full, is clearly a man with opinions worth hearing.

"The Derby is still important but it's not what it was," he says. "The winner is no longer guaranteed a successful stud career, at least not in the £10m-plus bracket. Epsom's cry is that the Derby is all that it used to be because Galileo won last year and Sinndar the year before, but you could take the Derby out of those horses' records and you wouldn't devalue them at all."

In bright sunshine at a table in the owners' enclosure at Nottingham racecourse, Johnston – who was brought up a universe apart from Epsom Downs, in East Kilbride – warms to his theme. And cites the opinion of someone else raised well outside the racing establishment.

"Frankie Dettori has been quoted as saying that the first two home in the Derby are good, the next four are milers and the rest are hurdlers. That's an extreme way of putting it but there is some truth in it. For three-year-olds the Guineas is now the number one race in Britain, and races for older horses are perhaps more important; the Eclipse, the Champion Stakes, the King George..."

Johnston's disenchantment with the Derby stems in particular from his experience with Bandari and Fight Your Corner, who were supplemented last Saturday to the tune of £180,000 so that they could run in today's race. In a nutshell, horses can be entered for the Derby at three stages, the latest of which is a week before, which costs a whopping £90,000.

"It's a crazy system," he says. "It shows a lack of understanding on the part of those who set the conditions, in other words the racecourse. It's bad enough that the public don't understand how difficult it is to produce a horse at peak (fitness) for a race, without insiders not understanding either. After all, it's hard if you're an athlete to pace yourself, but it's much, much harder with a horse. He doesn't know it's Derby day; he can do so many daft things to himself in a week."

So how would Johnston change the system he so obviously dislikes? A wry smile.

"I'm shooting my mouth off but I don't have a simple answer. More than anything I'm asking for an admission on the part of the racetrack that the system is wrong. The entry structure is not geared to attracting the best horses, it's as simple as that.

"They say they have two objectives, to make the race the richest in Europe, and to make sure that any horse is there that deserves to be there.

"Well, I'd say they have allowed their desire to make it the richest race in Europe to override everything else.

"In any case, it's false to say it's the richest race in Europe. It's worth £1.2m of which they maintain 40 per cent, but I would argue more, is made up of the owners' money. I would challenge them to tell us exactly who pays what for the Derby. It's like buying a lottery ticket for £1 to win £5m, but you and your fellow players are putting up the cash. What other sport asks the players to put up the money?"

Johnston pauses to let me acknowledge his rhetorical question, then steams on.

"It's ridiculous to ask horses to enter as yearlings, there is no justification for that whatever. People are saying I made an error of judgement not entering them at the yearling stage in December 2000. Well, if I made an error of judgement, what does that say for the people who let me buy them in the sale ring that October for £14,500 and £40,000 respectively? They made the same error, that they didn't think they were potential Derby winners.

"No, to ask people to enter them back then is madness. Epsom claims that this system allows the small man a chance of winning, but that's rubbish. For the small owner it makes economic sense to bypass the Derby because it's not good value. It only suits those who can afford to wait and fork out huge money at the end. For huge owners, like the Maktoums, it makes economic sense to pay the £90,000, because, if they entered all their candidates at the beginning, or at the £9,000 stage in April, they would spend a lot more than £90,000."

Had Sheikh Mohammed not bought Fight Your Corner for his son five weeks ago, the horse would not be running this afternoon. The previous owner, Robert Kennedy, had decided not to pay the supplement, although he could easily afford to risk it now. It has not been revealed what Fight Your Corner was sold for, or what Sheikh Hamdan Bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Sheikh Mohammed's brother, paid for Bandari, but Johnston concedes that each is now worth a seven-figure sum.

It is by no means the first time that Johnston's perspicacity at the sales has yielded vast profits for his owners. A former veterinary surgeon, he prefers to rely on his own judgement, not on that of bloodstock agents.

And he has an impressive record. As well as paying peanuts for Bandari, he paid just £1,000 for Spirit Of Love, which went on to win the Cesarewitch.

Naturally, there have also been flops – "I paid £76,000 for a horse, I can't even remember its name now, which couldn't run out of its own way" – but the successes by far outnumber the failures.

So what distinguishes Johnston himself from the also-rans? "I have got very fixed aims, and I'm very ambitious," he says. "When I moved to Middleham at the end of '88, I did a television interview with Look North in which I said that I dreamt of training Classic winners. Some people thought that was hilarious. Well, I've wiped the smiles off their faces.

"A lot of people see me in the office six to eight hours a day and think my forte is running a business. To an extent that's true. I could probably run a chain of grocery stores, but I wouldn't do it as well. I couldn't do this job without knowing about horses.

"Also, I have knowledge of auction sales. When I was a kid, everything in our household – furniture, vehicles – was bought at auction. So I have never been fazed by auctions, nor by examining a horse. In the end it's about value for money. I do get a great thrill from buying these horses cheaply and them ending up so valuable – it's great to beat a big expensive one with a wee cheap one – but you can't do that every day.

"I would desperately love a shot at buying the big ones. My average yearling price is £30,000 but I would like it to be £200,000. You can still get value for money at the top end."

He fell in love with the sport, he explains, when his father bought a horse called Torso. Johnston, now 42, was then 14. "It was a racehorse which never won a race. But that was me hooked. I can still remember Torso's pedigree...Sir Tor, out of Celestial Body."

This plain-talking son of East Kilbride does not strike me as a man given much to sentimentality, but for a second he looks almost wistful.

After veterinary school, he adds, he tried to find work as a racing vet, but ended up in general practice. Finally, in 1986, he scraped together the money to set himself up as a trainer, with stables on the bleak Lincolnshire coast, and gallops alongside an RAF bombing range.

"If a horse got loose and ran on to the range, sirens would go off, the planes would go away, and Land Rovers would appear from everywhere to help us catch it," he recalls, with another wistful smile.

"I got my trainer's licence in February 1987, had one winner in my first season, five in the second, then 15, 27, 54 and 73. I had my first century of winners, and my first Group One winner, in 1994." And does he remember that first-ever winner? Just a bit. "Hinari Video, ridden by Bobby Elliott in the EBF Silloth Maiden Stakes at Carlisle on July 1, 1987.

"There was no Racing Channel back then, so we [he and his wife Deirdre] got home, got the result up on Teletext, and sat and watched it all night."

Despite having built such success from those humble beginnings, Johnston remains resolutely an outsider, and I think rather enjoys his reputation as a man who does not mince words. Certainly it takes very little prodding to get him to criticise the Jockey Club.

"The British Horseracing Board has to be the body which in time will take over the running of racing. The Jockey Club has had its day and has to go. It doesn't get things right very often, and when it doesn't, it's not accountable."

Has he, like Martin Pipe, been the target of one of the Jockey Club's so-called dawn raids, the dramatic, indeed melodramatic, exercises to root out trainers guilty of doping? "Not yet, although I think even the Jockey Club realise that the dawn raids are not the best way of doing it. Whatever, it's sad that it came to that based on the rantings of one man [trainer Charlie Mann, who claimed that illicit drug use was endemic]. The man's living in cloud-cuckoo land."

Which brings us to the forthcoming BBC documentary, Kenyon Confronts, in which several trainers were apparently duped into admitting that there are some dodgy practices in horse-racing. I do not expect Johnston to say that, sorry, he has no opinions on the subject. And he does not disappoint.

"That BBC programme upsets me terribly. I'm a champion of fairness. I hate bloody cheats, people who are devious and lie, and that's just what they're doing. They claim that they're caped crusaders doing it for the good of the public, doing what the police and the Jockey Club have failed to do, but the reality is that they are manufacturing the evidence."

All the same, racing is not whiter than white, I bravely venture.

"No, it's not whiter than white, but it's as white as politics, as white as football, as white as industry. We have our share of rogues and thieves, but only our share.

"And not only is doping not endemic, there is about a 1,000th of the chance of you finding drugs in one of these racehorses (he gestures to the runners in the European Breeders Fund Maiden Stakes, conveniently thundering by) than in any of these people.

"If you were to dope-test the players in a Premiership football match, virtually every one of them would fail by Jockey Club standards, because they think it's OK to take aspirin, nasal sprays, decongestants, all things we couldn't dream of using within a fortnight of racing a horse. We would not be so stupid, as [the Olympic skier] Alain Baxter was, to give one of our horses a nasal spray."

He looks at me fiercely, as if daring me to contradict him. "This sport," he says, "should be held up on the drugs front as an example to all others."

Life and Times: Mark Johnston

Born: Bellshill, Lanarkshire, 1959.

Career: Qualified as a vet at Glasgow University before taking out his first trainer's licence in 1987. Married to Deirdre, two children, Charlie and Angus.

Trains at: Kingsley House, Middleham, North Yorkshire, once the home of Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies.

Favourite racecourse: Hamilton.

He says: "Those who work in racing are paying the price for the negligence and greed of those trying to make a quick buck out of the product."

They say: "A new generation of professionals, people like Mark Johnston, regard media relations as part of a trainer's job, and are skilled at it." ­ Racing Post.

Racing record: Beat Henry Cecil's record for the fastest 1,000 Flat victories by a trainer in Britain by 90 days when Double Honour won at Hamilton in September, 2000.

Classic winners: Mister Baileys (1994 2,000 Guineas), Double Trigger (1994 St Leger Italiano). Other Group One winners: Double Trigger (1995 Ascot Gold Cup), Bijou d'Inde (1996 St James's Palace Stakes), Princely Heir (1997 Phoenix Stakes), Lend A Hand (1997 Gran Criterium).

First winner: Hinari Video at Carlisle, 1987.

First big winner: Craft Express (1989 Portland Handicap).