4 horse limit in handicaps

I think for me the visuals are wrong for starters and that’s a minor issue which probably doesn’t affect most of us who know our horses and what they look like. But for a race like the National which is huge to the industry, I know you get once a year punters choosing horses because they like a certain set of silks or whatever, and we shouldn’t knock that, its part of what makes the race unique, the visuals probably are quite important.

Regards running on merits, I don’t think you have the same concerns you have there as you do on the flat whereby a certain horse is quite important to a yard as a stallion and it cannot lose, we all saw the questionable ride on Adelaide River in the Irish Derby and it is what it is. Hopefully that doesn’t ever filter into the NH scene. It shouldn’t do but if an owners had a big bet on one of the runners then who knows

They didn’t propose these changes when Pipe ran 10 in a National back in the day, (he also had multiple other years where he ran five or more) so I think it was a bit more of a cynical move to have brought up the point in the first place as there are really only two trainers that the rule would have directly affected and oh they just happen to both be Irish trainers and are the leading trainers at most of the Festivals (Cheltenham in particular)……surely a mere coincidence no doubt.

If you have a horse qualified to run in a handicap and he doesn’t get balloted out if the race is oversubscribed then so what if they happen to be trained by the same trainer, you can’t bring in a rule due to the evidence of one handicap race in another racing jurisdiction that only targets a very specific person(s).

Again it is a perception driven argument for a change that the evidence doesn’t actually support – it would be very interesting to see the response the BHA got back from their stakeholders on the question (fat chance of that)….I would hazzard a guess that it was an overwhelming Foxtrot Oscar to those proposed plans.