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An old hobby horse of mine, but still relevant I think. Run all the hurdle races on the current Old Course and all the chases on the current New Course.
The Grade 1 status of the Stayers Hurdle and the Triumph is mocked by the lack of hurdles in the final mile of those races.
Timeform comment from their site:
“dropped out, still off pace before 2 out, finished strongly”
And so far as I know, anybody can view those comments simply by registering for free on the site, linking to the result and ticking the box labelled ‘Race Notes’.
I’ve never paid any fees to Timeform and accessed that comment with no problems once I’d logged in.
Q F,
The comment you quote from the Sporting Life site is also repeated word for word on the Sky Sports, Irishracing.com and Racing TV sites. It’s almost certainly generated by the Press Association, not by anybody working for those sites.
And equally almost certainly a rush job, written by somebody with little or no experience of race reading.
Lets face it, Willie Mullins is clearly the most hopeless trainer in the game. He’s already sent out 43 (Forty Three) losers this week at Cheltenham, and even if he wins every race tomorrow, there will be another 15 losers.
Fifty eight losers in four days! Any other trainer operating like this and somebody would be reviving that old cliche about throwing enough mud and hoping some of it sticks.
Well that’s novel, a vet doing a ‘pre-race check’ on a Henderson horse at 2:30 pm instead of 6:30 am.
Realistically, why would anybody want to be a NH owner in this country at present? Two major factors in my view:
1. The dream for most potential NH owners is either a Celtenham Festival runner or a National runner. Both of those are currently made close to impossible as the irish trained horses take up so many of the available slots.
2. The costs are spiralling, from initial purchase, to training fees, transport, riding fees, etc, etc. I had a conversation with a long standing dual purpose trainer last year, who told me had a waiting list of potential NH owners, willing to invest £50 – £80k up front. But he can’t buy decent horses for that sort of money – the stores and point winners go for six figures to Irish stables, the flat horses with hurdling potential go to Australia or the Arabian Gulf for sums that would have been thought ridiculous ten years ago.
When you add in the risk of injury and long layoffs that are inevitable for NH horses, is it any wonder that numbers are declining. And fewer horses in training equals smaller fields in races.
Great to see, plenty of bottle from Goshen and a good ride from the young jockey, who kept him going when many would have accepted defeat. Made my day (and no, I didn’t have a bet).
Thanks Drone, I never thought of looking on there for the answer. Of course we have the Norfolk Stakes now on the same basis.
Presumably the job interview goes along the lines of ‘Take on this tricky and unpaid job, and we’ll name a race after you once you’re dead!’
One old race name that has always intrigued me is the Coventry Stakes at Royal Ascot. Every other race at that meeting has either a royal connection, a link to the course itself, or a local place name, but why Coventry?
And it’s not new, as my battered 1913 form book shows the Coventry Stakes on day one of Royal Ascot, won by the The Tetrarch, who scored by 10L eased down and started at 100/8 on!
And to add to the mystery, the 3M chase at Kempton that most of us still know as the Racing Post Chase, before sponsorship, was called the Coventry Handicap Chase. It’s a name that you might expect at Stratford or Warwick, but not at Ascot or Kempton.
“in some jurisdictions today’s Lingfield card would have been scrapped owing to insufficient entries and the prize money moved to another meeting”
Except that if the meeting is scrapped, there is no prize money for another meeting. Because the prize money paid out by Lingfield comes almost entirely from media rights income – no races, no income.
There is one other race he could run in, the Scottish Champion Hurdle. Ideal track and distance for CH.
It’s a limited handicap with a 20lb weight range, so he’d carry 11-12 and everything else would be on 10-6. A good test, but one I suspect most of would expect him to pass if he was 100%. It’s not until April 20th, so plenty of time to resolve his health issues.
Of course Henderson won’t even consider it, although he did once run My Tent or Yours in the race under top weight a few weeks after he’d finished a neck second in the Champion. But he was owned by JP McManus and we all know that he makes the decisions about where and when to run, not the trainer.
So the pointless petition reached the 100K target, and begat a pointless debate, in which the usual suspects (MPs with racing interests in their constituency) said the expected things.
Then the relevant minister stood up and read out a pre-prepared statement, almost certainly written by one his civil servants, which totally ignored everything said in the previous two and half hours.
Now the MPs are talking about getting a meeting with the PM. And that’s pointless as he won’t be PM by the end of the year and there’s no chance that he’d make this a priority in the run-up to an election.
Nor is there any chance that a Labour goverment would do anything to tone down the actions of the un-elected commissioners at the Gambling Commission. Indeed, I would expect that government to be looking at cancelling the VAT concessions made available to racing, which would increase owners costs by 20% overnight. The return of a betting tax would be no surprise either.
Racing will survive, it always has, but probably on a smaller scale.
Just to add a correction, Ms Murphy talked about a crowd for Kingwell Day of ‘about 3,000’.
The official figure was 5,133!
The biggest attendance at that meeting since the Levy Board started issuing figures. Which probably means that students and music will become a permanent feature.
“we might end up with just a handful Group races as years go by compared to now”
That sounds like a good idea, as the Pattern has resembled Japanese Knotweed ever since it was first introduced.
As for the Long Distance Cup, maybe it’s just a committee with some traditional ideas about race names – this one is mundane with a capital ‘M’.
But does it really matter whether it’s Group 1 or Group 2? Upgrading it won’t change a single thing about the race itself, it’s already run at level weights with the same prize money as the two following Group 1 races (Sprint and Mares). The only difference would be bigger penalties for the winner in the staying races before Royal Ascot the following season.
“Listening to Henderson”
Not a policy I’d recommend, as it’s always tedious and often misleading.
Sometime back in the late 80’s I think it was, I was stood next to a large, tweed suited gentleman in the Arkle Bar on Mackeson Gold Cup day, waiting to be served. His turn came first:
‘Three Mackesons please’ – ‘We don’t stock Mackeson sir’ – ‘But it’s Mackeson Gold Cup day’ – ‘I’m sorry, but there’s just no demand for it’ – ‘Yes there is, I’m demanding three bottles!’ – ‘Sorry sir, what else can I get you’ – ‘I suppose if I come back next month, you won’t have any tractors in stock either’.
At which point he stomped off, leaving a bemused barmaid looking at me and hoping I’m a lager drinker!
If you really want to resolve the multiple entry issue, it would be fairly easy. First, stop having entries so far in advance of the meeting. I’m pretty sure that when I first went to the Festival in the early 80’s, only the Champion Hurdle and the Gold Cup had an entry stage earlier than the process that applied to all other meetings.
There’s no logical reason why the novice races need to close to entries in January, with a second stage in February. It’s purely and simply a money making exercise, although I’ve no doubt the PR men would argue it’s good publicity.
Return to entries at the six day stage and extend the current rule that states no horse can be declared for two races at the meeting, to make it no horse can be entered for two races. No doubt there will be complaints, but as long as it’s the same for everybody, it can’t be called unfair. The names of the horses that have been entered can be monitored on the Racing Admin site, so if a trainer wants to avoid a particular opponent, he has that option.
But before criticising Mullins, keep in mind that the Racing Post had a regular pre-Cheltenham headline that read ‘Martin Pipe yet to decide ………’.
