MAUREEN HAGGAS SAVES HORSE RACING! BRINGS BACK THE AGE OF THE SISSY!

Some may disagree, but I believe that Maureen Haggas has done more to introduce the world of horse racing to a global mainstream audience more effectively and quicker than any marketing and promotional efforts of racing clubs, the racing media and the rather doggerel sounding ARF- the Asian Racing Federation.

When Mo, as her friends know her, opened fire with two smoking barrels about what she believed to be a race ride of a “big sissy”, she single handedly made the word “sissy” go viral.

In just a few days, sure, the horse racing fraternity were using the word to describe, for instance, a galloper’s rather timid personality, but in the mainstream world, the word had caught on and I was being besieged by strangers to explain this “sissy thing” and its origins, and if I personally knew any sissies.

Some of my best friends are sissies and many don’t even know it whereas my godfather might have been described as “peculiar” by my parents, but the truth was that he was a sissy.

Other well known sissies throughout history? Oscar Wilde, so many actors, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Robin Hood and his Merry Men- hmmmm- Sissy Spacek, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Boy George…

So, to Maureen “Mo” Haggas, the horse racing world owes her a huge debt of gratitude for opening things up to the mainstream audience and helping them realise that the sport of kings and queens is not some tightly knit old boys club and how there’s a sissy just waiting to bust out.

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