2016/17 National Hunt Season Review

Excellent and worthy of a prominent place in the horse racing press, especially if it replaced a gaggle of bookies adverts. I’m minded to print it off, frame it and hang it in the local betting offices, if only to here the numpties asking, “Yeah but what’s gonna win the 1.45 seller at Cartmel?”

The passion in horseracing, sadly isn’t what it was.

Fabulous summary Velour; I enjoyed reading that this morning.

Notwithstanding the compelling story lines and the highlight performances, for me this was a season that really foregrounded fragility, on the racecourse and at home. Many Clouds was the absolute pits, closely followed by Simonsig. Might Bite at Kempton was a ‘phew’ moment, and then there have been the injuries. None of the 2016 Cheltenham champions (Annie, Sprinter, Thistlecrack and Don Cossack) made it to Cheltenham, and only one of them made it to the racecourse to race in 2016/17. Add to that Faugheen, Barter’s Hill, Triolo, Don Poli etc etc. Douvan’s injury was another blow, showing – just as with Sprinter – how disaster can be a step away. I’m just hoping that we do see him on the racecourse again and that Altior can continue from where he’s left off this season. But we all know that the clashes we want to see rarely come to be.

My other thoughts are mainly re the trainer’s championships both sides of the water, and the loading of prize money to the festivals at the back end of the season. We’ve seen the trainer’s championship go to the wire in Britain for the past two seasons now, and I presume Ireland will be the same again next year vis a vis WPM v GE? Whilst this provides a human interest story, I don’t particularly enjoy seeing horses running again and again at the back end of the season, nor do I like the practice of stacking entries to capture place prize money. At one point last week, I was thinking that everything that had four sound enough legs in Closutton must have been running. Over here, some in the industry have been calling for more of an evening-out of prize money across the season as a means to address this, and have been suggesting a proper Winter festival as the answer. Not an easy ‘fix’, given how the pre Xmas big races are distributed across a number of tracks (Cheltenham, Haydock, Newbury, Sandown, Ascot) but I would like to see some effort in this direction, not least because it would reward the proper winter ground horses.

Good write-up.