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Why don’t they just hike the minimum up to 8st7lb and end this current nonsense?
It was 7st with claimers having to do as low as 6st7lb back in 1977 when I first properly got into racing, but we actually manage to feed everyone a bit better nowadays and times CHANGE.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"A search on the Racing Admin site tells me that there are just 27 professional jockeys that reckon they can ride at 8st 2lbs or less.
Not surprisingly, the list includes a number of the ladies (Hollie Doyle, Hayley Turner, Nicola Currie, etc), as well as a number of veterans who started out when 7-7 was the minimum (Joe Fanning, Jimmy Quinn, Franny Norton, Mark Dwyer, etc). So the number is likely to go down as they retire.
I can only see one argument against making the minimum 8-7 and that is the mixing of 3-y-olds and older horses in middle and long distance handicaps, where in midsummer, the age allowance is still in double figures. The logical answer to this is the one adopted in France, where the 3-y-olds don’t mix with the older horses except in Pattern races.
Make it 9st and Richard Hughes will come out of retirement
Charles Darwin to conquer the World
“The logical answer to this is the one adopted in France, where the 3-y-olds don’t mix with the older horses except in Pattern races”
I’d very much welcome that, but I doubt bookies would. Having more 4yo and above handicaps (and of course 3yos only ones in parallel) would take out one of the more difficult elements in analysis (judging 3yos’ likely rate of improvement) and make the 4yo and above ones even more profitable for those who know what they are doing.
I think George J what would happen if 3 year olds didn’t run in handicaps against their elders is you’d get a lot of very well handicapped 3 year olds heading into their 4 year old season. If you think about it, its much easier for a handicapper to judge the merit of a 3 year old when mixed in a handicap with older horses where you have some solid yardsticks with lots of form to their name than it is to try and gauge how many of the 3 year olds in a 3 year old only handicap are ahead of their mark.
Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way but I struggling to see what the commotion is about. Its 1lb difference isn’t it? I get that Adam Kirby for example could have been able to ride horses due to carry 8 stone 11 under the allowance rule but actually now there will be more horses in the handicap carrying more than his 9 stone minimum because all the weights in the handicap are going up 2lbs not just the bottom, so in theory he has more rides he can do. That is probably in essence why they won’t go near 8 stone 7 as a minimum, because whatever you move the bottom weight to in a handicap you have to do the same to the existing top weight and then you get the horse welfare people on your back saying the jockeys are too heavy to be racing at that sort of intensity.
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