Peter Thomas: Doppelgangers, pirates and tired horses - what a week!

Byline: Peter Thomas

FOR those of us who work from home, a quiet week of racing is a dangerous thing. When the Turf is in full swing, those interminable hours between sentences are tolerable, but when the action doesn't inspire, it can set you thinking, and that, as I'm sure you know, is a dangerous thing.

Fortunately, there has been a spot of fuzzy-ball action in SW19 to fend off the need for too much cerebral activity, but even so, there are still a few questions that have wormed their way in to my grey matter.

First, I would like to know if Tony McCoy and Justine Henin-Hardenne have ever been seen in the same room together.

I suspect not. Let's be honest, the pasty-faced Belgian tennis temptress is really just the champion jockey in a skirt, isn't she?

If you check the facts, I fancy you'll find that McCoy's relentless pursuit of 300 winners a season fails only because of the inconvenient geographical divide between Newton Abbot and the Roland Garros. (Broken arm, my foot - his backhand looks okay to me.)

As yet, I've failed to come up with a racing lookalike for any of the men at Wimbledon, although I reckon that if Fergal Lynch stood on Gary Bardwell's shoulders in a poorly lit room, they could pass for a small Mark Philippoussis.

Sadly, it's raining again and the tennis is on the blink, which allows the mind to wander back to the I-wouldn't-have-believed-it-if-I-hadn't-seen-it-with-my-own-eyes story in this week's papers about the RSPCA's internal vote to consider preventing racehorses from running more than once in a week.

The idea, so it seems, is for "the provision of leisure time to reduce stress", so if you see Milton Bradley at the pictures next week with half a dozen six-year-old geldings and three hundredweight of popcorn, for a screening of `Phar Lap', you'll know what's going on.

Almost seriously, though, don't the members of this lunatic fringe of a very important organisation have any understanding of priorities? If the time, effort and money that go into

tosh like this were redirected towards deserving causes, we could have all the beagles in captivity down to 30 a day, low tar before you could say Jack Russell.

As it is, we may soon be asked to consider the rights of weary racehorses, while in the next room somebody is slicing up a monkey in the interests of making a vast amount of money for a multi-national shampoo manufacturer. Still, it's nice to know dandruff is on the way out, isn't it?

And, while we're on the subject, whatever happened to Richard Gere's hamster? Oooh, it makes me mad!

And another thing. I know it's not really the point, and there seems to be a lot of people who deserve our sympathy in the Burns Bookmakers controversy, but some of the figures involved are quite bizarre.

It's a real kick in the teeth for a punter to win in honest fashion, only to be told their bookie has done a runner (which may or may not be what has happened - after all, the missing Velounias brothers may simply be enjoying a short Mediterranean cruise prior to returning home with their clients' cash), but what do you make of someone who claims to be owed pounds 16,000 by the pair, which equates to his gross annual salary?

First, I wonder just what kind of stake this chap invested to be in front to the tune of considerably more money than he takes home in a year. Did he get a six-month advance from the cashier's department and have the whole lot on an even-money shot in a Beverley maiden? Or did he just have a night's beer money on a speculative each-way Super Goliath, finishing with Turkey to win Eurovision?

And second, if he's that good a punter, why hasn't he already packed his job in?

I also liked the line in the Post yesterday in which police were said to believe that some victims "are not willing to come forward and disclose how much they are owed for personal reasons".

Personally, I've never been worried about disclosing how much money I've won. I've always been a little more concerned with trying to disguise how much I've lost. So it must come as a real culture shock to have to sit and suffer while the missus investigates the vast black hole in the family finances created by your unpaid winnings.

Fortunately, we now have a new man cutting a swathe through racing's rascals, in the shape of the chairman of the Jockey Club/BHB security review group that has just unveiled its recommendations.

The findings are all very well, but why on earth did we have to pick a bloke called Ben Gunn? Surely this is the kind of thing that brings the sport into disrepute, providing cheap shots for lazy journalists who will tell you "once a pirate, always a pirate". All we need now is for Blind Pugh to be appointed senior steward and we'll have the double up.