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No need for me to revise my opinion of the Spencer ride on Horsted Keynes at Ascot. It was outstanding jockeyship to achieve that second place and subsequent runs confirm for me that hold up tactics are essential for this tricky horse if he is ever going to land a top race.
No need to revise your opinion – that after all is what it is – if you thought Spencer should have won either. A horse may only get his/her ideal conditions once in a season. For this horse no reason to suspect that wasn’t Royal Ascot. The ground wasn’t as quick on his return to Ascot and Goodwood represented a step up in trip on a track that clearly doesn’t suit plenty of horses. Add in that he is/was a lightly raced horse who looked to have a very hard race at the Royal meeting plus you don’t get too many horses who consistently feature in one cavalry charge after another and you have plenty of reasons why the horse may have disappointed. Far too easy to try and explain things purely in terms of a change of jockey.
No need to revise your opinion – that after all is what it is – if you thought Spencer should have won either. A horse may only get his/her ideal conditions once in a season. For this horse no reason to suspect that wasn’t Royal Ascot. The ground wasn’t as quick on his return to Ascot and Goodwood represented a step up in trip on a track that clearly doesn’t suit plenty of horses. Add in that he is/was a lightly raced horse who looked to have a very hard race at the Royal meeting plus you don’t get too many horses who consistently feature in one cavalry charge after another and you have plenty of reasons why the horse may have disappointed. Far too easy to try and explain things purely in terms of a change of jockey.
I think you need to remember why the thread was started, to slag Spencer off for his ride at Royal Ascot not to complain about a change of jockey.
Your reasoning appears to just be guesswork without any foundation.
Plenty of horses have hard races at Royal Ascot, no reason why more than a 5 week break from then shouldn’t be sufficient for 99.99% of horses to recover from, particularly as they had him ready for the Bunbury Cup two weeks previously.You state horses may only get their ideal conditions once a season, of course while possible is not the norm for the vast majority.
Horses don’t have to win to have run a great race as Horsted Keynes did at Royal Ascot.You say the ground wasn’t as quick at Ascot on his return but the time of the race was about 1 second quicker than at Royal Ascot and I haven’t heard connections saying the course didn’t suit him at Goodwood although they said the ground was ideal.
I couldn’t have entertained backing Horsted Keynes in either of his last two races, as I said before the first one the jockey change was a negative for me due to the tricky nature of the horse, Spencers good record on the horse, 2 wins and 2 2nds and him riding the horse on his best ever run plus Crowley having no experience of riding the horse before.
The Goodwood run just looked a panic run to me a few days after a disappointing run.Hopefully for him the decisions were the owners rather than Varian’s.
My understanding regarding the riding arrangements for Jim & Fitri Hay’s horses is that Jim Crowley is now called on to ride most of them. Jamie Spencer had a retainer with the Hays, but this ceased when his Qatar job began, although he had ridden for them a fair amount when available since then. So I wasn’t surprised that Spencer didn’t ride Horsted Keynes in his races since Ascot. Maybe they will be reunited at some point, I hope so.
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