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The issues with non-triers and cheating occur because UK trainers and bettors give too much weight to the effects of weight. A few extra pounds on a 1200-pound animal shouldn’t cause it to run that much slower!
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The issues with non-triers and cheating occur because UK trainers and bettors give too much weight to the effects of weight. A few extra pounds on a 1200-pound animal shouldn’t cause it to run that much slower!
But it has been demonstrated conclusively that they do. Admiral Rous got it right, for European racing at least, with his weight for age scale, as countless closely contested race results show annually.
That may be to do with the pace of British, French and Irish racing, which (unlike yours) do not involve every horse slugging it out from the moment the stalls open, leaving the least exhausted horse to come home least slowly to win.
Au contraire, your
punters and form experts give too
little
weight to weight: though that may be changing with the proliferation of synthetic surfaces, slower or more springy surfaces where weight differentials may well matter much more, as they do on turf – I’d be interested to hear any expert opinions on this question.
Graded races work well in places like Hong Kong and Singapore where horses progress up the grades for substantially more prizemoney and the punters gets competitive races with a narrow weight band. They obviously have very tight integrity over there as well but in general punters believe that the owners/trainers want to win because the prizemoney is so good and they want to progress up the rankings.
In Dubai the races are also mostly graded although at a very high level during the carnival and this works well except when old stagers don’t get their ratings dropped quickly enough.
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