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Surf and Turf: St Moritz so appetising I could almost taste the cheese

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Surf and Turf James Milton

 By James Milton 8:28AM 16 FEB 2016 

BROADLY speaking, internet users can be divided into two groups. There are those who are curious about the nuts and bolts of technology, who want to find out what makes the internet tick and enjoy an interactive online experience.

And there are others who are content to marvel in ignorance at what they regard as a 21st-century brand of black magic.

I’m firmly in the second camp, as I was reminded this week when a member of our IT team took remote control of my laptop in order to heal some minor computing ailment.

As the cursor moved swiftly and efficiently around the screen without my guiding hand on the mouse, I gazed dumbfounded like one of Bruegel’s peasants being introduced to Lady Gaga. “What sorcery is this?” I murmured softly.

So my internet habits mainly revolve around looking at things – words, pictures and, if I’m feeling especially adventurous, videos.

And if you like looking at things, then you’ll simply adore the official website of White Turf 2016, the racing festival in St Moritz (whiteturf.ch).

The Swiss town, which presumably took its name from the sensational fondue restaurant on Wardour Street, has been staging wintry racing since the early days of the 20th century.

The website’s enthusiastically written history section sets the scene: “Anyone who talks of the very beginnings of horseracing on snow in St Moritz invariably uses such words as daring, intrepidity and pluck.

“Totally and utterly foolhardy they were, those thirteen men who, on 1 March 1906, convened, together with their horses, at the Postplatz in St Moritz and battled out a race to Champfer and back.”

This year’s festival was scheduled to start last Sunday but it was cancelled due to mild weather. The ice on the lake was the required 60cm thick for last Sunday’s card with Flat, hurdles and trotting races as well as skijoring, in which skiers are pulled along by the horses.

The website features a lavish gallery of photographs from previous White Turf events – images that make you want to settle down in front of a log fire with a large mug of gluhwein and a vat of melted cheese.

There are some thrilling action shots featuring jockeys wearing full-face ski-masks to protect them from the cold white kickback and the apres-racing pictures are even more enticing.

Last year’s prize-giving committee included a couple of women with startlingly vertiginous hairstyles moulded into the shape of a horse’s head and neck.

Other pictures support my pet theory that horsey people the world over look strangely alike: the men with their schoolboyish hair and lean, lined dowager’s faces and the women squinting severely into the middle-distance as if always on the verge of reprimanding an errant Irish setter.

And if the frozen lake, ski-masks and novelty hairstyles weren’t tempting enough, there’s also a table groaning under the weight of Gruyere, Emmental and a dozen other cheesy treats. The sooner the internet develops a taste-o-vision tool the better.

Taste may not be the first word that springs to mind when you think of YouTube, but there’s no denying it’s still one of the daddies of the internet. Its success is based on a bite-sized vision of the world but at times a little more coherence would be welcome.

Search for ‘horse racing’ on YouTube and the top videos include Racing UK’s highlights of the 2014 Grand National, ‘Horse Racing Thrills and Spills 2012′ and ‘Funny Horse Racing Bloopers’ compilations, a documentary on ‘Racing’s Dirty Secrets’, a Peta undercover investigation and a clip from a Japanese computer game captioned: “The horse has a fart rocket booster!!!”

The YouTube channel entitled Horse Racing has almost 15,000 subscribers and offers a patchy selection of race highlights from the USA along with the inevitable Secretariat documentary.

The autoplay function, which cues up videos related to the one you’re watching, struggles to get to grips with race titles so the 2001 Suburban Stakes at Belmont Park leads on to a guide to replacing the rear brake pads on a Chevrolet Suburban. Handy.

Wouldn’t it be great, though, if somebody had the time, money and inclination to compile a definitive archive of racing videos? I’d like to see a sober, well-organised history of the sport featuring all the great races, documentaries, interviews as well as footage of every best dressed lady competition Derek Thompson has ever compered.

Sadly, YouTube isn’t the platform for such an ambitious and academically rigorous project. It’s more likely to air 30-second videos of minor celebrities paying tribute to equine heroes of yesteryear in a series entitled Vlogging a Dead Horse.

I sometimes wonder whether the internet is just one big cheese nightmare.

 

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