At the age of 79 he is enjoying arguably the best season of his career with wins in the English and Irish Guineas and at Royal Ascot.
But Racehorse trainer Jim Bolgers stock has dipped with news emerging that he will not appear before an Oireachtas Committee meeting to outline allegations he made last year in an interview with the Irish Field, and which he repeated with a little twist of drama recently in a Sunday Independent interview with journalist Paul Kimmage.
He said at the time that he felt there was a serious problem in Irish horseracing and that he knew the identity of trainers that were doping horses but that nothing was being done.
Paul Kimmage admitted that he had tried a number of times to interview Bolger before he agreed to do so this summer.
Having been one of the key players in outing Lance Armstrong, Kimmage will forever be associated and referenced when it comes to stories of doping so the accusations were clearly going to be of interest to him.
It was the central theme of the interview and the question of naming names was raised in the first few questions. Bolger’s published reply was that “I’m not that big a fool! I don’t travel to Dublin very often, but I don’t want to be going up every day for three weeks to the High Court.”
The twist came when Kimmage teed up the parallels with cycling and Bolger set the headline by saying that “Racing will have a Lance Armstrong.”
And so the accusation, from a man with a huge reputation in the sport stands without evidence, and without a willingness to go on the record with either any proof or indeed any names.
Besmirched
In so doing he has brought the sport into disrepute and besmirched the name of all of his colleagues.
The only trainer’s name he mentions is his own and that he is vehemently opposed to any form of doping.
The Chair of the Agriculture Committee is Jackie Cahill, TD for Tipperary at the heart of Ireland’s global strength in the sport of horseracing and breeding.
He will doubtless have had it suggested that the allegations were dangerous and irresponsible, unless or until some evidence was brought forward.
The High Court reference made by Bolger was relevant in that unless he had evidence it would be reckless also to throw out names. The law is there not to protect the guilty by putting up a shield of silence but to protect the innocent who can be destroyed by allegations that are not backed up by fact.
Having been invited to appear before the Committee, alongside representatives from Horse Racing Ireland and the Irish Horserace Regulatory Board next week, Bolger has now turned it down on legal advice.
The last person in a sporting context who chose to stay silent was John Delaney as the storm over his stewardship of Irish soccer raged. That did not end well for his reputation.
Jim Bolger is 79 years old and clearly a man of strong views, forged by a lifetime in the sport.
Doping Culture?
If he is right and there is a doping culture in Irish racing then it needs to be uncovered and rooted out. Those responsible for doing so within the sport will still appear next week to outline the advances that have been made in regulation, testing and compliance.
Those who want to believe they are right will see it as an opportunity to swat aside the allegations. But it is almost certain that the man who has made them will refuse to comment but equally refuse to retract.
And so the shadow will remain.
Thinking about the way you and those around you live their lives and conduct their business is an important way of sustaining and continually checking our collective moral compass. Talking about it within your community is a way of testing what is right. Talking about it in the Sunday Independent but doing so without proof and turning down an appearance to back up claims in a protected but important environment of our democratic institutions does not reflect well.
Pages were filled, papers and subscriptions were sold, journalists burnished their reputation as upholders of what is right and true.
But no names were named, no guilty parties brought to justice.
The only real impact is an unsubstantiated smear on many good people working in the sport, a diminished reputation for a man who opened up because he genuinely believes what he says to be true but cannot back it up with evidence which those who investigate these matters say does not exist.
A firmly held belief can be respected but it does not make it real. If it were the case, then the world would have been created 6,000 years ago in a moment of creation by God, something the short time leader of the Democratic Unionist party believed to be true but might have difficulty himself in proving in front of an Oireachtas Committee.
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