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As has already been said – they won’t exactly give us the keys to the vault will they?
Incidentally, my piss poor Bet365 account doesn’t even publish weights on their racing card, unless I’m missing something. But that would also mean I’d have to go looking for it somewhere else other than on the card! This means I have to have ATR on another tab which is pathetic. What
other
reason would they have to keep such important information?
If I’m wrong and it is infact locked away somewhere on another page, ignore me!
"Why on earth don’t they install a pair of fecking scales there?"
Glenn, you have created a picture in my mind of a horse standing on one pan of the scales and some jobsworths loading the weights on to the other pan………thanks!
Colin
Yet another instance of the most pertinent piece of information being witheld from the vast majority of punters. As a result questions are raised of a race’s integrity and doubtless a few more punters walk away from the sport.
I’d say they would provide the most important piece of the jigsaw for horses that hadn’t raced for three years. How much heavier was Noble Request than on his last run at Kempton? Presumably lots – would you want to back him if you knew this?
A progressive hurdler with a good strike rate from a yard that tends to have its charges fit and ready first time out. That it was overweight after a long layoff but was allowed to run suggests Hobbs has had trouble getting the horse fit again at home and resorted to the best fitness regime of all – running it in a race.Had the horse been weighed and this information made public it is likely the horse would have been a market drifter rather than a moderately punted 4/1 third fav (touched 5/1).
Didn’t see the race, but did RUK show any paddock shots and did Dave Yates do his job by trundling off paddock-side and relaying what he saw to the viewer? If not why not? Had Fremantle, Neesom or Pitterson been on duty I’m confident they would have.
Silvoir – weigh the horses please
RUK – paddock shots pleaseThey have walk through scales at certain racecourse – ie. the jockey has to walk through them and weigh-in in order to get to the weighing room. Is it really that hard to have something similar at the course for horses and then publish it on a big screen?
Can see problems with the weights of horses being taken days before the race since any extra work is likely to result in the horse being lighter and it would still be open to exploitation.
There’s also the problem that punters will start complaining if for instance a horse is 30KG’s heavier than it’s last run and went on to win (benefit’s of exercise and growth etc).
That said horses weights vary greatly – remember hearing Aidan O’Brien talk about this and commenting that his 2yo sprinter at the time Russian Blue was quite a bit heavier than some of his 3yo fillies. All horses are individuals and the data would be useless unless you know how to interprete it.
…and it would never be foolproofLike timefigures, sectionals, draw bias, headgear, tongue-ties, going preferences blah-blah you need both a thickish wad of historical data and hands-on experience of manipulating it before unequivocal(ish) conclusions can be drawn.
For me the idea of working with weights would present a challenge I’d relish: venturing into the unknown does tend to get the juices flowing.
Drone wrote:
Had the horse been weighed and this information made public it is likely the horse would have been a market drifter rather than a moderately punted 4/1 third fav (touched 5/1).
But for this information to be any use to punters, they would need to know the horse’s weight when it last raced in 2006! Does Philip Hobbs weigh his horses? I don’t know.
Regardless of how the animal looked, or who the trainer was, it would surely be a huge risk to back any horse first-time back after a 3-year layoff.
Hence the emphasis in my previous post on the necessity of compiling a database before objective conclusions can be drawnIf the BHA began the routine weighing of all horses tomorrow the data is unlikely to be of much use until a year-tomorrow
Oh come on, the horse hadn’t run for over 1000 days, if you backed it you’ve got rocks in your head.
If you were Hobbs, would you tell the jock to win at all costs? Course you wouldn’t ,you would say let him enjoy himself and bring him home in one piece. Does a horse always run at it’s correct trip/ground etc.? it’s up to the punter to work it out.
The BHA’s "cost analysis" of weighing horses seems to have been predicated on the idea that you would need permanent weighing equipment at each and every course, rather than a much smaller number of mobile units. It would be like having several sets of stalls and a stalls team at each and every racecourse.
Either someone was being very stupid or someone thought the rest of us were very stupid. It is difficult to tell which.
I was at Kempton too and Noble Request was carrying shedloads of condition; in fact I’d go so far as to say he was fat.
Correct. Glenn, Phil, and company may wish to check yesterday’s
Post
– mine’s already gone into the recycler – but I’m 99.9% certain Mr Hobbs mentioned (probably in the race preview interviews) that Noble Request was going into the race fatter than ideal. Nobody’s really been put away here if so.
I’d take the view that a mid-October class 2 at Kempton whilst a bit burly constituted a more realistic comeback race for Noble Request than thrusting him straight back into the tougher waters of something like the Christmas Hurdle even comparatively match-fit. There are few hiding places, gentle reintroductions, call them what you will, for returning horses of championship / near-championship class once the main chunk of the season hoves into view.
Note also that Noble Request was raced in more or less the same manner as he was when second in the 2006 Christmas Hurdle on his last run – held up in a share of last, tried to improve position from three out. His previous eight races before that run saw him held up and produced in the straight as well.
gc
Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
a dire card for Kempton,
On this much we agree, and having attracted a five-day entry of just 102 runners including a fair number of horses requiring good to soft or worse, it was a dismal turnout numerically that looked likely from some remove.
How apposite that the sun should have been setting over Sunbury during the 2009 incarnation of the Charisma Gold Cup. Still an open-ceiling contest under that record label’s patronage 10 years ago, and still a respectable enough 0-145 when Gunter McBride won an exchange-sponsored version of it five years ago, its denigration to a 0-115 shuffled apologetically to the end of the card has been a sad sight to behold.
gc
Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
Oh come on, the horse hadn’t run for over 1000 days, if you backed it you’ve got rocks in your head.
The victory of Ahmedy for John Quinn at Wolverhampton a fortnight ago after an absence of around 980 days, plus those of several similarly-absent Nigel Twiston-Davies returnees over the years, underlines the problem in writing off Noble Request on days-since-last-run terms alone.
Noble Request was opposable more on the portents of the trainer on the morning of the race, plus his condition immediately prior to the race.
That said, it’d doubtless be of interest to TRFfers if someone here with Raceform Interactive (or similar) could spare a few minutes to see if the performance of horses from trainer X after an absence of Y days can be reported out, and to share the results of which trainers are best and least able to ready one after an absence. Any takers?
gc
Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
How apposite that the sun should have been setting over Sunbury during the 2009 incarnation of the Charisma Gold Cup. Still an open-ceiling contest under that record label’s patronage 10 years ago, and still a respectable enough 0-145 when Gunter McBride won an exchange-sponsored version of it five years ago, its denigration to a 0-115 shuffled apologetically to the end of the card has been a sad sight to behold.
They got away with it, no moreI agree with most of what has been written on the subject and the only thing to add is that for those having seen the horse – who was undoubtedly a long way from full fitness he is surely a horse to follow for next time.
He did make mistakes and looked rusty however, between 3 & 4 out he was still travelling ok and looked like closing on the leaders. It was at this point that R. Johnson realised he was emptying quickly and went easy on him.
It is important to realise different trainers have different ways of training and if the trainers name had been N. Twiston-Davies or T. Vaughan he may have been worth a second look but given P. Hobbs tends to look more to the future along with the like of V. Williams and H. Knight he was never a bet.
Those present have a better chance given that they can get up close on course but given the live tv footage now available and the online betting markets available I’m afraid there are no excuses.
Bring on his next outing!!!!!!!!
They got away with it at Kempton (just!) as the skies were clear; had it been a cloudy and gloomy day it would have been kamikaze to run a 3 mile chase in such conditions. Sadly though, neither Kempton (nor Kelso, nor Plumpton today, nor the hundreds of other tracks that do so) nor the BHA seem to think that matters!
The weighing of horses is a grey area. It is nowhere near as cut and dried as some seem to think. So what if Noble Request had been weighed, and his weight published yesterday? As has been pointed out, that information would only be of use to those who not only knew his weight on he previous run [3 years ago] but those who are familiar with the weight patterns of said horse and those who can accurately factor in the amount of growing, maturing and filling out that the horse has done in the three years he was last seen in public.
You see, surprise as it may be to some, horses grow and their shape differs, as they age. So if, say, 530kg is a horse’s ideal weight at aged 2, it will be completely different as that season progresses and the horse strengthens, grows and matures, then different again at 3, then 4 years old. The same applies with jumpers; some horses don’t mature fully until they are 8 or 9 years of age, so it is not unreasonable to expect that in the period between being 5 years old and being 8 years old, Noble Request has probably put on some weight anyway. So even if he had been fully fit, it is still likely that he would be significantly heavier than when he last appeared in 2006, aged 5.
You also wouldn’t have to know much about horses at all, nor look particularly close up, to see how much condition he was carrying yesterday.
Oh come on, the horse hadn’t run for over 1000 days, if you backed it you’ve got rocks in your head.
The victory of Ahmedy for John Quinn at Wolverhampton a fortnight ago after an absence of around 980 days, plus those of several similarly-absent Nigel Twiston-Davies returnees over the years, underlines the problem in writing off Noble Request on days-since-last-run terms alone.
gc
If you follow racing you know that a "Twisty" horse will be ready first time after an absence (except for the creature i backed at Chepstow last week) but otherwise you take a big
gamble
on their fitness and whether they’ve retained their ability.
You see, surprise as it may be to some, horses grow and their shape differs, as they age.
I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that anyone who considers these things at all seriously recognises that a horse’s optimum body weight is a dynamic concept. A bit like a horse’s ability is a dynamic concept (Sea The Stars was a better athlete as a 3-y-o than 2-y-o etc). Indeed, the two may often be connected.
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