SOCIALISTS KILL RACING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 95, 30 July 1910, Page 10

SOCIALISTS KILL RACING.

GREAT FRENCH STABLE TO BE DISPERSED. Paris, June 1. Considerable sensation has been caused in Paris by the news that M. Edmond Veil-Picard intends to dispose of his racing stable, which is one of the most important, if not the most important, in | Prance. M. Veil-Picar, who is a member of the Turf Committee, makes no secret of the fact that he is giving up racing because of the unhealthy state of affairs on the French Turf. In an interview to-day he said: "I am leaving the turf with a feeling of disgust for what goes on here now, and a feeling of great uneasiness for the future. It will be impossible very soon to ensure honest racing in France. The sport of kings and of noblemen has been taken over 'by the State. In the haphazard way in which Socialists do things, it is becoming a means of dishonorable speculation, and I will have no more to do with it. "In the course of the last fifteen years the Socialists have ruined French racing. Gangs of dishonest men work our races nowadays. When anything happens we of the committee know whom to blame as certainly as the police know how to lay hands on 'Apaches' after a crime. But we can do nothing because the State would find the receipts of the parimutuel dropping. "'Doping' is horribly prevalent. Jockeys are becoming cynically dishonest. Before the parimutuel ruled us we could lay hands on the swindlers and punish tJhem. Now we can do nothing. State interference with racing is ruining tliej French Turf, and it will be ruined alto- 1 gether, for there is little likelihood that the state will hand affairs back to the two great turf societies again, and it seems likely that racing will become a State monopoly (before long. Under these circumstances) I have had enough of it, and I am disposing of my horses."