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Police are investigating an individual who calls himself “the Acid Man” following a series of threatening phone calls to horse racing trainers last week.
Richard Fahey, who trained Spirit Dancer to win the £500,000 Bahrain International Trophy last Friday, is one of 11 trainers to have reported the man. Other trainers, including Nicky Henderson, Gary Moore and Charlie Fellowes, have received calls from the same individual.
“We do get an awful lot of abuse,” said Fahey. “Generally it’s after something’s been beaten, but this was stone cold out of the blue. I hadn’t had any runners, which is why I reported it to my local police.
“He said, ‘they call me the Acid Man because I tap people on the shoulder and throw acid in their faces’. I told him he wasn’t a very nice person. I understand the Essex police are looking into it.
“I had one of these before which went on for months, telling me what he’d do to the kids and things. The police traced that to Australia, ironically, and when it became clear the caller wasn’t the full shilling I didn’t pursue it any further. I actually felt sorry for him.
“I used to keep a folder of all the emails because if I ever wrote my memoirs I was going to include a few, but it was full up after a year so I gave up. It’s not as bad as it used to be and you’d half expect it after a beaten favourite, but not out of the blue like that.”
Abuse either through phone calls, emails or social media content are an almost daily occurrence for trainers and jockeys, usually from disgruntled punters, but when Fahey got last week’s call out of the blue he reported it to his local police in North Yorkshire. The case is in the hands of the Essex police, as the first call was received while a trainer was racing at Chelmsford.
At the end of October, the National Trainers’ Federation set up a hotline for reporting abuse, coordinated by Sean Memory. The former police superintendent has pulled together a report, including voice recordings, which has been passed to the police.
Paul Johnson, chief executive of the National Trainers Federation, said: “It was jump trainers and Flat trainers with a geographical spread. The only thing we noticed was a tight alphabetical spread between F and M and most of them got the calls last Friday.
“When we set up the reporting process we were expecting personal abuse, but not an aggressive set of phone calls like this. By handing it to the police the message is very clear; we will not put up with it.”