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Since it got a mention, here’s the Moonlit Path saga as detailed on TRF at the time:
There’s a lot of pros and cons to weigh up but that’s what they pay their negotiators, rights experts & lawyers to do. If there’s a deal to be done, they will find it.
That doesn’t mean that ITV are out of the running though. They are believed to be in negotiations to buy a package from BT.
He somehow managed to finish second on Xenophon off a mark of 117, two runs before it bolted up off 130 in the Coral Cup for Mick Fitz. Quite an achievement, in its way…
If there are roughly 14,000 horses in training (see BHA website) and you test only 2,100 of them (roughly one seventh) what kind of reliable result do you expect to get?
Extremely reliable. That’s more than enough to get a very accurate picture of the levels of infection in the racehorse population as a whole.
Put it another way, if there are 10 positives so far from appx 2,000 tests, what are the chances that you’ve managed to find the only sample of 2,000 from 14,000 with an infection rate that low?
The vaccines are not updated as frequently as human ones, but this is because the rate of antigenic drift in equine flu viruses is generally slower. When they update, incidentally, they use the current strains on the other side of the world as the baseline rather than those in the local population, as these are the ones that are most likely to cause problems if they somehow manage to make it across the Atlantic. The strain that caused an outbreak in Newmarket a few years ago apparently originated in Kentucky.
In the same way, apparently, humans in this country get vaccines based on flu strains in the far east, and vice versa. Clever stuff.
Yes, there is a path, it’s basically a cycle track (the Honeybourne Line) that starts at the station and goes pretty much all the way to the course. You need to keep left at the junction after half a mile or so, then turn right when you get to the sports stadium. Brings you out on Folly Lane, not far from the track.
I’d say you’d need to be an Olympian to do it in half an hour tho, at least on the way there as it’s all uphill. More like 45mins to an hour.
An alternative, if you’re feeling fit and able, is to hire a bike from the Bicycle Hub by the station – costs about £17/day, less than a taxi one-way. I did that all four days last year, transformed my week not having to fight my way onto a bus full of drunks at the end of the day … And the ride back is fantastic, hardly need to pedal, track to station was 12 minutes on Gold Cup night!
On a separate point, I wonder if the British education system should change its attitude to gambling. We have sex education for all the right reasons – children need to know the facts to develop healthy attitudes and take the right precautions. Instead of avoiding the subject of gambling, perhaps more should be done to teach children about the mathematics]. What are your odds every time you spin the roulette wheel? Why is blackjack a sucker’s game? If you’re all-in with QQ against AK pre-flop, who’s the favourite and why? Many children are cosseted from the subject of gambling until suddenly they find themselves 18 years old, with independence, credit and the legal right to play. Surely it’s crazy to let people loose like that – especially if the big underage cover-up of the gambling world creates allure and mystique.
I have no direct evidence for this, but I’d be willing to bet that most FOBT/online casino/etc addicts did poorly at school and don’t have a GCSE grade C in Maths. It raises an ethical question straight away that people with minimal-to-zero understanding of probability should be able to gamble at all.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2011/dec/06/why-not-teach-betting
Tunnel Bear is your friend.
Very much this. I love my bear, he was tunnelling for – and, indeed, to – England when I was in the States recently.
FWIW, I can’t help thinking that the person who sold CushionTrack to Santa Anita was more than a little like the guy who sold the monorail to Springfield
I thought some places had stopped using Tapeta? I did wonder about taking out shares in it
when it was first mentioned.
Santa Anita tried Tapeta for the Breeders Cup in 2008 and 2009. Europeans had their best results and Santa Anita promptly reverted to dirt with US breeders complaining the Tapeta had upended their bloodlines.
(will be interesting to see what happens this year now that a lower-tier but enterprising HK trainer has taken a good but not great horse – Rich Tapestry – from the Sha Tin dirt training track to a US dirt Group 1 win – trainer’s first G1 anywhere and HK’s first in the US. though the horse is by Holy Roman Emperor and a Dermot Weld cast-off after not fulfilling middle-distance expectations.)
Meydan was built with Tapeta, opening March 2010. US horses stayed away, and it too has now been torn up in favour of dirt.
I’m pretty sure they never had Tapeta at Santa Anita. They were initially sold something called CushionTrack but had drainage problems. They brought in an Australian firm who produced another surface called Pro-Ride and added that to the mix, but the local trainers didn’t take to that either after another mauling in the Breeders’ Cup and pretty much forced the track to put dirt back down.
The Tapeta at Meydan wasn’t really Tapeta by the end either, as they had mixed so much extra stuff into it to try to get it to bind in the high temperatures. If you look at past World Cups on YouTube, you can see that it started out as a mid-brown colour and ended up nearly black. It was horrible to even walk on, really sticky and unpleasant, and some (many?) horses just couldn’t act on it at all.
Guilty of having steroids on his premises? Might have been for the stable cat as far as proving anything about horses is concerned.
Not just "steroids", anabolic steroids. Including this one:
http://www.naturevet.com.au/internation … php?pid=81
If you give that to the stable cat, it will eat you for breakfast…
You missed nothing at the Rutland (though it is where William Hill died, in the bath according to legend).
Personally always stay in Bury St Edmunds when up at Newmarket. The Abbey gardens are beautiful, plenty of nice pubs & restaurants, there’s the smell of hops drifting from the Greene King brewery and it’s just more pleasant all round. It’s about 10 minutes and £5 on the train from Newmarket. Worth a ponder if you haven’t already booked.A number of Newmarket trainers have had horses treated for stiff joints by a qualified vet from a reputable and long established Newmarket practice. By the strict wording of the rules of racing, it is the resposbility of the trainer to ensure that their horses aren’t given any banned substances, but should we really expect them to check the list of ingredients of every product. And bear in mind, even if they had, there was nothing that would have immediately shown that Sungate contained a banned steroid. That info was only obtainable by means of a detailed internet search.
Once it became known that Sungate did contain stanozolol, they stopped using it. The amount of steroid in Sungate is small and becasue it’s injected into the joint, not into the muscle, it’s effects on the horse are negligible, compared to what Butler was doing with the stronger substance.
Hi AP
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I’d be interested to know how you can be so sure that there is nothing on the packet to suggest what the active ingredient in Sungate is. I’ve not held one in my hand, but pictures of the packaging on websites selling Sungate when the Butler story originally broke seemed have Stanozolol written on the side in fairly large letters. And there’s actually no reason why the manufacturers would want to hide it – after all, the drug is legitimately manufactured, and licensed for use on horses.Topanoora, at 8-1, was disqualified from first place in the 1991 Hardwicke in favour of Rock Hopper, the odds-on favourite. Not that I’m still bitter, mind.
