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Don’t know about you, but I’ve been really enjoying the jumps racing over the last few weeks!
I have absolutely no stats to back this up, but I swear the fields even at the lesser meetings this year have had more runners, are of better quality (plenty of support from top yards) and feel much more competitive. There’s another cracking card at Aintree tonight that typifies this.
A good amount of easy ground obviously helps but we’ve had that in other recent summers too. It seems more and more jumps owners and trainers are now taking the ‘season’ seriously.
Mike
Summer jumping has been one of racing’s slow-burning successes, I reckon – and next June marks its twentieth birthday. Where on earth did the time go.
The quantity of good-class races has certainly risen gradually and confidently over the years, and we’ve not even reached this season’s Listed/Graded races yet – the Summer Cup at Uttoxeter (shame it’s not named or distanced as a National anymore, though), the Summer Hurdle and Summer Plate at Market Rasen, the Lord Mildmay at Newton Abbot, and the 32Red Chase and Hurdle back at Rasen, are all still to come.
gc
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.
Absolutely agree, we’re seeing some cracking stuff on a consistent basis. There seems to be at least one tasty class 3 handicap hurdle or chase on most summer jumping cards at the moment. Tonight’s Aintree meeting is a corker too.
I’ve never been entirely sure what constitutes ‘Summer Jumps’ but if it includes May then that has long been a favoured and in the main rewarding month to follow NH.
Tend to start losing interest around this time of year until October but as GC points out the summer NH programme has evolved pretty well since it was given a name and attempt at some structure. Christ I nearly wrote ‘narrative’ there
When there was a NH close season through high summer, the resumption at the likes of Exeter and Newton Abbot in August and on through September was largely messy, hit-and-miss, poor stuff
I am not a summer jumps person and so to a large degree I admit to being ignorant about it. My initial prejudice lead me to the conclusion that jumping on fast ground was going to be dangerous. My question is, is it?
I have seen no stats. Are there more horse casualties in the summer than in the winter?
Love to know your good things for tonight’s ‘corker’. It looks like advantage bookmakers to me. Thought about Cape York each-way for a minute or so but his high head carriage and scruffy jumping was enough to put me off.
Summer Jumps, for those who really need to get out more…
and it enables me to get out to Perth more…
I am not a summer jumps person and so to a large degree I admit to being ignorant about it. My initial prejudice lead me to the conclusion that jumping on fast ground was going to be dangerous. My question is, is it?
I have seen no stats. Are there more horse casualties in the summer than in the winter?
Well the American jumps racing season has always been March through November, with its peak in August. We don’t do the watering in order to get good ground here, either. I have seen timber races run on grounds labeled "hard". and while real statistics are tough to come by (much smaller sample size) anecdotally I can say that fatalities are
very
rare.
This winter was exceptionally harsh, with most of the gallops and racecourses in steeplechase country rendered unusable by snow and ice. The early-season point-to-points were cancelled. This combined meant that the Maryland Hunt Cup was full of horses that had not been properly fit for the race (Imagine if trainers had a month to prepare for the Grand National). Of the 14 horses in the field, only 4 finished. Fortunately nobody was seriously injured, but it was an ugly spectacle. That’s why we prefer to run in the summer.
Love to know your good things for tonight’s ‘corker’. It looks like advantage bookmakers to me. Thought about Cape York each-way for a minute or so but his high head carriage and scruffy jumping was enough to put me off.
Not a single winning favourite and a woeful evening for AP to boot. Game, set and match bookmakers I would have thought.
At least I was spot on about Cape York.
Not a single winning favourite and a woeful evening for AP to boot. Game, set and match bookmakers I would have thought.
Indeed, one can only enjoy a race if the favourite wins. All my previous points are null and void.
I feel such a fool.
Mike
(ps not a single winner bigger than 10-1 either!)
Can you imagine what the midweek racing would be like between May and October without summer jumping?
Not a single winning favourite and a woeful evening for AP to boot. Game, set and match bookmakers I would have thought.
Indeed, one can only enjoy a race if the favourite wins. All my previous points are null and void.
I feel such a fool.
Mike
(ps not a single winner bigger than 10-1 either!)
Sarcasm just about at the same level as your attempts at comedy.
Your post might have made a modicum of sense had I actually said you couldn’t enjoy a race where the favourite doesn’t win.
Can you imagine what the midweek racing would be like between May and October without summer jumping?
Yep, glorious Flat racing action!
Your post might have made a modicum of sense had I actually said you couldn’t enjoy a race where the favourite doesn’t win.
I would have thought your phrase "Not a single winning favourite" heavily implies just that.
In fact, there were seven highly competitive races and I don’t think it’s reasonable to describe the outcome as "game, set and match bookmakers" when the winning prices were 9-4, 5-1, 10-1, 7-1, 10-1, 4-1, 9-2. Every winner was very ‘gettable’.
All of which is irrelevant to my central point which was how much the summer jumps seemed to have improved from the fare we had just a few years ago. The Aintree meeting had stacks of win and place form and these summer NH races seem to be increasingly well-supported by owners, trainers and racegoers (this will continue today at Hexham – a good card with some very decent prizemoney).
Even those who lack your naturally sunny disposition would surely find plenty to enjoy watching racing like this on a lovely summer’s day!
Mike
Can you imagine what the midweek racing would be like between May and October without summer jumping?
I can remember the days before both summer jumping and all-weather racing, as I’m sure many of us can. Call me an old crank, but I still prefer the old system, although I can see the benefit of AW flat racing in the winter.
I am not a summer jumps person and so to a large degree I admit to being ignorant about it. My initial prejudice lead me to the conclusion that jumping on fast ground was going to be dangerous. My question is, is it?
Not excessively dangerous, I’d have said.
It’s an absolute prerequisite of jumps racing between June and September now to follow strictures on watering, and to avoid the production of anything faster than good to firm. I think those guidelines must have got more exacting in more recent years, as there were the odd isolated instances up to and including 2005 of the likes of Sedgefield and Hexham producing officially firm ground and still being allowed to race on. No longer.
Summer jumping’s certainly not immune to fatalities; though how much of that is down to sound or faster surfaces, and how much down to the preponderance of sharp circuits compelling horses to go that wee bit faster than some are comfortable with, is probably a matter of interpretation. For my money, though, I think the layout, positioning of fences, etc. at Stratford is such that mishaps would occur at any time of year, rattling ground or not.
gc
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.
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