Giants of journalism, legendary trainers and a great Irish matriarch: remembering those we lost in 2024

The world of racing journalism has suffered two grievous blows in the last 12 months with the deaths of Alastair Down and Howard Wright.

Of those two Racing Post stalwarts, Alastair died on November 1 aged 68, only a week after the press room at Cheltenham was renamed in his honour.

In a preview of that ceremony his colleague Chris Cook noted that he was “a writer of such quality, so deeply in love with the game that his reports were sometimes more fun to read than the race in question had been to watch”.