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Pathetic fields with good prize money across the country today (including field size bonuses).
Are there too many good races and not enough good horses?
Do we need more lower rating handicaps on our Saturday cards and fewer graded races aimed at the higher and more uncompetitive end of the market?
Or is it simply a case of the good horses being held in reserve and/or avoiding a hard race ahead of Cheltenham?
Maybe scrap handicaps ,no more protecting handicap marks ,able to take on the big boys without getting hammered if you finish too close.
Lobbing weight at a horse to effectively stop it is hardly fair in my opinion and i personally don’t believe that a a stone either way at the lower weight range makes a scrap of difference to a result.
If they pitched the prize money right you would still have races suited to all grades of horse.Not enough horses to go round at the top end is why the Graded races have small fields. If you look at the horses still left in the four major championship races at Cheltenham, about half the field in each of them is trained in Ireland, so not many left to run in the trials over here.
E.g. in the Gold Cup, there are just 11 UK trained horses left in the race. Of those, 8 have run within the last three weeks at Cheltenham, Newbury, Kelso and Ascot. The other three are the Bobs Worth and the Nicholls pair.
In addition, we now have more handicaps than ever at the Festival and trainers (and owners) that want to run in those races prefer to avoid a rise in their rating at this late stage – handicap entries are made next week and weights published the following week.
Again as an example, the 2m 4f novices handicap chase is restricted to those rated 0-140. If your novice chaser is now rated between 135 and 140, you’re guaranteed a run. If the owner has booked a hospitality unit and invited twenty friends to watch his horse run at the Festival, what trainer is going to risk a rise to 141 or higher by running in a Graded novice chase? Or worse still a drop to 130 that would see the horse eliminated at the overnight stage.
As I’ve mentioned on here previously this winter, what should really worry the BHA is the lack of runners in ordinary novice hurdle races. That’s the clearest sign that small fields in handicap hurdles and novice chases will be with us for several years ahead.
The trouble is this isn’t just a graded races / Cheltenham problem, this is happening in all races at all tracks in all grades. Take a look at any card this winter and you’ll see that at all levels, 14-runner novices’ hurdles have become 9-runner affairs, 8-runner novices’ chases have 4 or 5 runners, and even NH Flat races, which often had large fields, are struggling to make double figures.
There were some figures put up on here a couple of months ago showing a sharp decline in the number of NH horses in training – surely that has to be the real problem. Supply and demand would imply that the only solution is for the number of races (i.e. fixtures) to reduce in line with the amount of available runners.
Mike
There just doesn’t seem to be enough NH horses, maybe better race planning would help ?
Small fields again tomorrow at Ffos Las as usual, what is the point of a track miles away from anywhere that doesn’t attract any runners and runs on bottomless ground ?
I’m not convinced that small fields is a problem
It makes it easier to find winners……I never bet on races with more then about 6 or 7 runners unless I’m having a flutter on 50/1 EW shots
I can see small fields is a problem for the bookies because they want us punting on 20 runner handicaps…..
I quite enjoyed watching the racing today……all the small field races didn’t spoil my enjoyment
Is there any link to the reduction in national hunt horses since the introduction of the all weather? My presumption is that there must be especially in novice hurdles.
I would say Phil is partly right …
Today FfOS lAS 36k for 40 runners 7 races
Pau 335k Euros 95 runners 10 races
Both courses rated heavy to desperate !!
The plain fact is money talks , why would you want to invest in a jumps racehorse when you are racing for peanut…when you can buy a horse for very small money ,,,race it at an AW track and have loads of races and fun with peanuts on offer for prizes
Thats the way our racing has become
at F-Las less than 1k per runner prize money
Pau roughly 3.5 k prize money per runner
Go figure,,,,,
I think you’re right. You’ve got to have patience to invest in a NH horse. Not only do you have to wait longer before they’re ready to race, they can’t run as often. A horse like dear old General Tufto must give his owners no end of pleasure, running most weeks as he does.
Plus there’s so many more opportunities for them to run. Much as I love NH, if I did decide to have a horse, I’d have a low grade flat horse. Well to be honest, that’s all I could afford!Ricky,
The difference is not just down to prize money. Monday to Friday next week, UK 18 meetings (Flat and NH), France 8 meetings.
Much easier to maintain bigger fields and higher prize money per race with a slimline fixture list.
It can and does result in some races being heavily over subscribed, but they also have an intelligent system of dividing races to meet demand.
It’s not so much the small fields that bother me, it’s how uncompetitive they are that gets on my nerves.
Yesterday’s Victor Ludorum Juvenile Hurdle at Haydock had four runners and the favourite, Top Notch, was 2/13 in the betting.
Over at Wincanton we had a Novice Hurdle with a whopping 12 runner field but the Novice hurdlers aged 5, 6 and 7 were so poor that the Juvenile hurdler Zarib went off 1/4 Fav.
It’s absolutely pathetic from a punting and even a watching perspective and just to add insult to injury the headline writers get the hype factor going about Top Notch, when he faced little more than a walkover. One firm saw fit to cut the horse by six points for the Triumph Hurdle in the aftermath. Dear Doctor.
Thanks for the good crack. Time for me to move on. Be lucky.
he difference is not just down to prize money. Monday to Friday next week, UK 18 meetings (Flat and NH), France 8 meetings.
Alan , you have it in a nutshell , we just have too much racing for the racing population of horses , however I do think money plays a part
We have to have loads of racing to satisfy the bookie demands , France do not , they are self sufficent and as such the game is much better run and enjoyed
As an owner though, you have been for years ..its hard to make a case for buying a jumps horse and racing it for pleasure (and a few bob here in the UK )..whereas you can buy a AW low grade type for 10 grand or less and race it for years knowing it wont cost the earth , but you wont win much either , we might not like it , but AW accounts for a big chunk of our racing now , and its growing …so Jump racing is being marginalised for the very few that can afford it
Too many graded jumps races is certainly a part of the problem. The late nineties saw less than 100 Class A races most years, last year it was up to 186! Add in being "kept for Cheltenham", the decline of the North and most of the top horses owned by a handful of the super-rich and you have the current situation.
Year Class A Races (Chase and Hurdle – UK)
1997 91
1998 97
1999 101
2000 97
2001 90
2002 123
2003 126
2004 128
2005 141
2006 143
2007 150
2008 150
2009 150
2010 140
2011 164
2012 166
2013 172
2014 186The expansion of Cheltenham isn’t helping. The fact there’s a ‘race for everything’ at the festival now means that horses which might have been targeted at February fare just aren’t any more.
Why bottom your horse out in the Ascot Chase with the Ryanair and Melling still to come? Before, when there was no Ryanair, specialist 2 and a half mile chasers would probably all have run at Ascot.
The Victor Ludorum is suffering from a surfeit of juvenile hurdles, combined with the lack of decent ones trained in the north.
The big owners come and go – David Johnson, Stewart Family, Graham Wylie – at the moment it’s all Simon Munir, but I don’t see that as a problem. More of a problem, at least in Ireland, is the scale of Mullins’ dominance.
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