- This topic has 8 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 10 months, 2 weeks ago by
.
- Posts
I don’t have a bet for this race as such but what on earth is going on with it this year? We’ve got 11 runners and given the situation with the weights for the race (its a conditions race not a handicap) and their respective handicap marks, 5 of the 11 have virtually 0% chance of winning, one of the horses is rated in the 60s. One of them who I didn’t even include in the 0% club is a 115 rated hurdler making his flat debut. I mean this race just needs binning its clearly just a race for people who fancy a runner to chuck one in for. Absolute nonsense of a race.
Agree it is an underwhelming end to the meeting but it is a tradition and I don’t see Ascot getting rid of it.
I’ve went with Wild Waves here at 15-2, but the way he’s going I think that I’ll be able to get bigger than those odds this afternoon
Sober also the last leg of a 7 fold in case I get this far.
7 fold free bet – Treamnor top 3, Rebel’s Romance top 3, Inisherin top 4, California Dreamer top 5, Jarraaf top 6, Seraph Gabriel top 5, Sober to win
The race is a bit of an anachronism in the modern era. However, it was the race that Brown Jack – the Red Rum or Desert Orchid of his day – won six times in the late 1920s/early 1930s. Which means it helped to inspire one of the best pieces of writing about racehorses.
In retirement, a Pathe News crew made a film about the horse entitled “Where Is Brown Jack Now?” It was shown in cinemas before the main feature.
The film made an impression on the young Philip Larkin and inspired him to write one of his best poems:
“At Grass”
“The eye can hardly pick them out
From the cold shade they shelter in,
Till wind distresses tail and mane;
Then one crops grass, and moves about
– The other seeming to look on –
And stands anonymous again.Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps
Two dozen distances sufficed
To fable them : faint afternoons
Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,
Whereby their names were artificed
To inlay faded, classic Junes –Silks at the start : against the sky
Numbers and parasols : outside,
Squadrons of empty cars, and heat,
And littered grass : then the long cry
Hanging unhushed till it subside
To stop-press columns on the street.Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.
Summer by summer all stole away,
The starting-gates, the crowd and cries –
All but the unmolesting meadows.
Almanacked, their names live; theyHave slipped their names, and stand at ease,
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a fieldglass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies:
Only the groom, and the groom’s boy,
With bridles in the evening come.”3rd January 1950. From “The Less Deceived”.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.