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Have I missed something here? What is so special about Friday 10 May to justify 7 race meetings including 4 evening ones!
This is more than most Bank Holidays and nearly every Saturday. If Chester was as before (Tue,Wed,Thu) Ascot’s good card could have been in the afternoon and why do we keep having NH meetings (Market Rasen – there were 3 yesterday) when the flat season is getting in full swing?
I feel sorry for betting office staff working on a Friday evening, jockeys travelling to 2 meetings on the worst day of the week to be on the roads and stable staff working for god knows how many hours.
I know I’m an old traditionalist in some ways but I fear that an overload of racing will dull people’s enthusiasm rather than fire it.
Peter
I agree with your comment about the amount of meetings. I don’t see why there should be any more than 6 (3 afternoon and 3 evening ) at the absolute tops on a weekday. I’d be interested to know what the bidding process was for this date, particularly as it’s thrown up 4 evening meetings. I wonder if one of those is a course self funded meeting? For all that, there’s presuambly a demand and I would imagine the evening meetings would all expect decent attendances.
Must take you to task re National Hunt meetimgs though. The traditional NH season runs until the Stratford finale first Saturday of June so there have always been jump meetings at this time of year. There’s a good case for a break in the jump season, but there’s always been jump racing in May and long may it remain so.
Rob
Rob,
Thanks for your comments. I agree that there should be a maximum of 6 meetings and I might even go as far as 2 evening ones in May. I know that it is still light until about 9.00 pm, but I went to Doncaster last Saturday and by about 7.30 it wasn’t really enjoyable to be standing outside. With very few exceptions recently I can’t imagine many evening meetings have been held in good racegoing weather (mind that could have been said for most of 2012!).
The early starts ie 5.10/5.15 suit no racegoers really. If you’re working you can’t easily get there and if you’re on holiday the timing means that you can’t do much before or after the meeting.
I appreciate your comments about NH racing, but I feel it could perhaps scale back a little. I notice that Haydock has it’s good mixed meeting tomorrow and there is another meeting at Hexham. That would mean only 1 day without jump racing since the new season started on 28 April.
Peter
I was going to post something about this yesterday. It is odd planning, must be havoc for stables and staff etc.
Looking further ahead, there is no flat racing on Sunday just 3 jumps fixtures. Monday there is 3 turf, 1 aw and 1 jumps and the on Tuesday and Wednesday there is a jumps to flat ratio of 3-2 and a 3-3 ratio on Thursday before Friday reveals we are in fact in a flat turf season.
One thing I don’t see the need for in the turf season is aw racing. There is not so much aw racing this month but only on Wednesday we had two aw meetings yet end up with 6 flat meetings on a Friday.
I am not against summer jumping, I have no appetite for it personally, but, as with most of the other fixtures the BHA bundle their way around organising it could be better dispersed.
We are quite lucky up here that the Scottish courses work together to provide a reasonably balanced programme. I know from chatting to an officail at Kelso that they try to co-ordinate with other jumps courses locally regarding race planning. It says a lot about the way racing is run though that thye invited the BHA to one of their planning meetings but the BHA declined.
Ayr
provides a steady fixture list keeping jumps from November to April and flat from May to October. A coupel more pre-Christmas jumps fixtures would be nice though.
Hamilton
operate from May to September and many of their dates are well established. Today’s fixture is well established since they dropped their early season dates.
Kelso
operate October to May and this works well. They watered this week and hints at the reason why they avoid summer jumping.
Musselburgh
are able to provide good ground in winter so they ‘jump’ from November to February and increasingly successfully in recent years. Flat goes from March to late October with a well balanced fixture list.
Some aren’t keen on summer ju8mping but it works well at
Perth
. They could in theory operate April/May then August/September, but the weather up here suits the summer programme. Most years you wouldn’t want to race at Perth before April or from October onwards because of teh weather.
Excuse the flag-waving but I think the local scene has a decent balance. Only a couple of clashes during the season and that can be down to local holidays.
Rob
And another thing Rob is you often get two or three consecutive days racing at the various Scottish courses making it worthwhile for us Southerners to venture up for a few days.
Just counted up the number of non-runners today at the 7 meetings. 43 in total. Strangely this is one less than the number of runners in all the races tonight at Hamilton!!
Please let’s put more emphasis on quality than quantity of racing!!
As an aside I didn’t like the sight of Jamie Spencer breaking his neck to weigh in after the 3.15 at Chester so that he could dash off to Ascot. He pulled the horse up really quickly and I can see safety issues arising from his obvious haste.
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