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Just a couple of examples from the past few weeks and months from Group 1’s of the BHA losing their minds rather than giving an honest assessment of what happened.
Juddmonte International – 5yo gelding Birr Castle ridden completely inefficiently to set it up for Ombudsman given a performance figure of 120. Even ignoring how the horse was ridden he’s never been a 120 horse in his life.
Nunthorpe – Ain’t Nobody becoming a 112 horse for the application of cheekpieces having been rated 99 going in…. lol.
Sussex Stakes – Qirat can’t win a handicap off 99 but he’s now rated 115.
They’ve got vested interests in keeping these races as Group 1’s by the way. The Nunthorpe in particular must be in serious danger of getting a downgrade its been terrible for years. The Juddmonte they just want it to be the highest rated race in the world again…. it won’t be, the governing body that overseas this globally will laugh at their assessment of Birr Castle.
Wouldn’t be so bad if they dropped them just as quickly as they raise them but they tend to find every excuse in the book to justify not dropping a horse even after a number of runs below the inflated rating given to them let alone one.
I highly doubt either Qirat or Birr Castle will ever run to their new ratings simply because of the extraordinary circumstances (likely never to be repeated) surrounding that one run that got them the hike in the first place.
Qirat has already shown in a sub standard G1 City of York that he can’t live up to that 115 rating, it is fortunate that he won that Sussex Stakes because he is going to find it even harder to win off 115 when in reality he is probably around a 100 rated horse at best.
Birr Castle in 21 lifetime starts has won only three times (one was a maiden race and the other two were at Listed level with his last actual win being on 27 October 2023) he does have two 3rd placed efforts in G2 races and one in a G3 race.
His 3rd placed effort at York earned him almost £142k which is almost 2½ times his total winnings to date – a 120 horse he is clearly not and outside of dropping back to Listed level he isn’t going to be winning any Group races off of 120.
Perhaps they will now just simply send him wherever Ombudsman goes to be his official pacemaker and hope he can pick up some decent place money.
Birr Castle doesn’t have a UK handicap mark, nor does he have a handicap mark of 120 that would apply to rating the Juddmonte as a Group 1.
Since he’s trained in France, his mark there is the one that matters. And the French handicapper has raised him from 49.5 kgs to 50.5, equal to a rise from 109 to 111 on our scale.
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