It might be a bit like the moment when the supposedly all-powerful Wizard of Oz is revealed to be a quiet old man. At Epsom today, the curtain will be pulled aside and, for the first time, we will get to see what a steward looks like.
In an experiment organised by Racing For Change, the BBC will broadcast any stewards' inquiries that may follow the 10 races they're showing from Epsom today and tomorrow. At any other course, that would probably mean nothing very exciting, since stewards' inquiries are by no means common and 10 races can easily go by without any.
Epsom's tricky contours make it ideal for this kind of experiment, just as they make it a wholly unsuitable place to stage a championship race like the Derby. The home straight runs along the side of a hill and tired horses bump into each other in nearly every race, so the chances are excellent that we will see the first televised inquiry today or tomorrow.
It's a pity they weren't running this experiment last year, when Sariska was allowed to keep the Oaks after banging into Midday, or at Newmarket in May when Jacqueline Quest lost the 1,000 Guineas after carrying Special Duty across the track. Both of those were contentious decisions and it would have been fascinating to see the process by which they were made.
We will be lucky to get a similarly interesting case this weekend. Let's just hope we get an inquiry of some kind because this is a great opportunity to find out something about our mysterious arbiters.
Other sports require a highly visible referee or umpire on the field of play and, understandably, the fans end up knowing quite a bit about those people. In the case of football, you can even get statistics on how many cards they've dished out in the past and how many they might give out today.
Although it is customary to make jokes about the stewards having had too much port with their lunch, they are in practice treated with the kind of unquestioning deference that was accorded to landowners in the Middle Ages. Their surnames are published in the racecard but nowhere else and they are never held to account for their decisions, however odd. If there is debate in the media about a particular ruling, the names of the stewards involved are never used and we have no way of knowing whether any of them had been involved in other controversies in the past.
Their right to govern is never challenged. How can you challenge someone when you know nothing about them?
I suppose there is a limit to what we can expect from stewards because most of them are working for free – a fact that may surprise those who imagined racing to be a wealthy industry. According to the website of the British Horseracing Authority, most three-steward panels are made up of two amateurs and a stipendiary, who gets a salary from the BHA. The 'stipe' is required to maintain a familiarity with the rules and to advise the amateurs. At major meetings, the panel is advised by a second 'stipe'.
Without meaning to sound in the least sarcastic, I think we have to be very grateful to the stewards for giving up their time and making the effort to support racing. But we must still demand decisions of a certain quality because otherwise they might just as well be taken at random.
The BHA insists that the standard of stewarding these days is much higher than most people appreciate. It's hard to know if they're right, because there is so little scrutiny of those involved.
Let's hope today's experiment is the beginning of a new era of transparency and that we might finally get answers to some of the most pressing questions about stewards. Here's the five at the top of my list.
1) Who are they?
Clearly, they're the sort of people who can give up large chunks of time to work for free. That means that we are largely concerned with the landed aristocracy and anyone who regularly reads the stewards' names on a racecard will note a strong representation of lords, ladies, honourables and esquires, together with a fair sprinkling of senior military titles.
The BHA could offer me no meaningful guidance as to the demographics of their stewarding team. However, they did direct me to this page on their website where they invite applications. You too could be a steward, it seems. No necessary qualifications are stated and the application form could hardly be more straightforward.
I'm a little busy to offer myself at the moment but you may be in a more leisured situation. If so, apply! Guardian readers are almost certainly under-represented on stewarding panels around Britain and this is your chance to make a difference. I bet you'd get a great lunch out of it.
As for the stipendiary stewards, there are 16 of them, about half of whom are former professional jockeys, including Chris Rutter, Tony McGlone, Alan Dempsey and Robert Earnshaw.
2) Do they have any other interests in racing?
The answer to this is bound to be yes in many cases. Since stewards are generally rich people who enjoy spending time at the track, it should come as no surprise that many of them have been racehorse owners and have therefore quite well-developed relationships with certain trainers and jockeys.
If a conflict of interest arises, stewards are supposed to excuse themselves from involvement in the case and I have no reason to think this doesn't happen as it should. But racing is a small world and these issues arise more often than might be guessed.
Say a steward has eventually stopped using a particular trainer because he feels he was being over-charged or was being kept in the dark about his horses' ability. Does he excuse himself from every inquiry involving horses from that trainer's yard? If he suspects a jockey of once having made insufficient effort on one of his horses, should he ever allow himself to rule on a case involving that jockey?
The fact that we know almost nothing about the identity of stewards means that such questions are never canvassed. They should be, if only to prove that the sport is well governed.
If a horse is allowed to keep a race after bumping the runner-up, can we be sure that the decision was taken by three officials with open minds? Or do we whisper to each other that the senior steward owns the land on which the winning trainer is based?
3) How do they relate to jockeys?
When the press release about today's experiment was issued last week, it was accompanied by the photograph at the top of this page. It shows Martin Dwyer and Steve Drowne, two very experienced jockeys, before a panel of stewards.
Note that the suited stewards are sitting, with masses of documentation in front of them. The jockeys, meanwhile, stand empty-handed with their eyes cast on the floor, looking like a couple of naughty schoolboys hauled before the headmaster.
Any photograph can be misleading and maybe I shouldn't read too much into this one, even though it was used by racing's rulers to illustrate a story about inquiries. Perhaps the relationship between stewards and jockeys is firmly based on the respect that one modern professional has for another. It could be that the typical inquiry sounds like an episode of The West Wing, with officials and riders engaging in highly intelligent back-and-forth debate before a manifestly fair outcome is reached.
I suspect that the picture is closer to the truth than that last little fantasy. The stewards of my imagining have a patronising attitude towards jockeys that may sometimes lead to an injustice. Of course, I'm just guessing because, like you, I've never seen an inquiry in progress.
Hopefully, that is about to change.
4) How do they reach their decisions?
Here is something that we will not learn today. The Epsom experiment, alas, extends only to showing the jockeys giving their evidence to the stewards. As soon as the panel starts to deliberate, the sound will be cut off.
I'm told that the BBC's camera will remain in the room and may continue to broadcast pictures without sound. So if we see one of the stewards flipping a coin, we may still get an insight on this question.
Seb Sanders and Jamie Spencer, who shared the champion jockeys' title in 2007, both feel that the experiment is unfair. If they must endure the pressure of giving their evidence in front of a live TV audience, why can't the stewards grope their way to a fair judgement in the same circumstances, the jockeys ask.
I can understand why the BHA wants to shield its volunteer stewards from that. Given that they are completely unused to any kind of scrutiny, it would be pretty scary to attempt logical analysis while millions watched, many of them with a financial interest in the outcome.
In the long term, though, I can't think of a good reason why stewards should be protected in a way that jockeys are not. Let the BHA train their people for TV exposure. If inquiries are to be broadcast, they should be shown in full.
If all stewards were able to listen in while other panels talked through a particular judgement, that would surely lead to greater consistency, which is the main thing that racing professionals and punters want from stewards.
5) Could we ever have full-time professional stewards?
This is surely the aim for British racing but the chance of it happening must be nil until the sport reverses the current trend of rapidly declining income. The BHA tell me that they have never worked out how much it would cost to switch to all-professional stewards and there is very little impetus in that direction, given that the present system seems to work.
The best we can hope for is that the stewards achieve a professional standard while working for free. Today at Epsom, we hope to find out just how good they are.
