| INDUSTRY |
Dr. Paull Khan
EMH F
THE FIRST TEN YEARS T
he European and Mediterranean Horseracing Federation is 10 years old. A mere stripling when compared to its counterpart regional federations in other parts of the globe, the Asian Racing Federation (ARF, formed in 1960) and Latin America’s yet more venerable OSAF (Organizacion Sudamericana de Fomento del Sangre Pura De Carrera – established 1958). So what has been the story of our first decade? Who better to turn to first than the ‘Father of the EMHF’, Bjorn Eklund, ex-CEO of the Swedish Jockey Club? “I think I got my thoughts about the need of European racing integration and cooperation when I visited my first International Federation of Horseracing Authorities (IFHA) conferences in the late eighties. I say ‘visited’ and that is what it really was, from my point of view. They were grand meetings and offered a lot of hospitality but not much by way of discussion or democratic interaction. Everything seemed to have been discussed and decided in advance by the big racing nations. I asked some representatives from the minor racing countries if it was always like this. The answer was ‘yes’, and they were not too happy about it. “So, together with my friend Harald Dörum from Norway, I invited some of the minor European racing nations to a meeting in Stockholm in 2000. The result of the meeting was an informal organisation called the European Racing Development Conference (ERDC). It was mostly a network organisation which met once a year. After a few years, we
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were able to arrange the meeting during the ‘Arc weekend’ in Paris, which increased the interest and more and more organisations took part. As chairman of ERDC I was invited twice to speak at the IFHA meeting by invitation of its chairman, Louis Romanet. And he was the first to suggest an integration into IFHA by setting up a European (and Mediterranean) organisation for both the big racing countries and the minor ones.” BELOW: Paull Khan, Behcet Homurlu, Bjorn Eklund, Dominique de Wenden, Brian Kavanagh and Zsolt Hegedus.