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Yes, and the statement I was quoting said that Arkle was "a complete freak" and that "there will never be another one like him", which puts my response into a historical context too.
The point is that Timeform’s ratings would have you believe that there has indeed never been another one even vaguely like him, apart from the one living next door at the time. In fact, that goes beyond mere co-incidence and into the realm of fairies at the bottom of the garden.
It is the ratings that Arkle and Flyingbolt were given, and their complete separation from everything else, that is the point. I’ll up the ante from earlier, and say that is probably more like a 10 million to one chance, with the alternative being that Timeform’s jumps handicappers in the 1960s, who had only been doing the job a few years, got carried away with all the (quite justified) adulation. Which do you think is more likely?
This ‘coincidence’ argument when it comes to Flyingbolt and Arkle is a patent nonsense.
Isn’t it the case that we have the
three
highest-rated chasers of the day in the same yard right now? Is that merely coincidence??
No, I think you’ll find that your comparison is where the nonsense lies. The difference today is that they are not collectively rated nearly a stone and a half clear of any other chaser that’s drawn breath in the last 50 years. Apples and oranges.
No need to apologise Aristo, it’s a moving elegy to an undoubtedly great horse. In its way though, it also suggests to me that the personality cult surrounding the horse was so pervasive that even level-headed handicappers got carried away.
I didn’t do statistics in any depth, but I’m sure there’s someone on here who would be able to put a figure on the likelihood that ability in the horse population over the last 45 years could be spread in this way ie. two horses nearly a stone and a half clear of everything else, and living side by side.
If it’s anything less than a million to one, I’ll be very surprised. It’s surely more likely that the horses Arkle was beating were unusually poor, and also perhaps that their trainers and jockeys had accepted defeat before they turned up.
Arkle was a complete freak lads. There’ll never be another one like him and it’s completely pointless comparing today’s horses to him. Just enjoy the horses that are around now for what they are but don’t insult peoples intelligence by suggesting they could be as good as Himself.
The problem with this statement is that according to Timeform, there was indeed another one very much like him – only 2lb inferior in fact – who was living in the next-door box at precisely the same time. Quite a coincidence, no?
Yet every other horse ever bred to jump a fence over the last 50-odd years – a quarter of a million or so perhaps, and possibly many more – has been at least 19lb inferior to the pair of them (and the third-placed horse in Timeform’s all-time list, Mill House, was also racing at the same time).
I find that very difficult to believe.
The sodium bicarbonate idea is good in theory, but it has been proved ineffective on many occasion, and i too would agree that it is good in theory but in practice, the impact is limited.
Has it? I’d be interested to read the relevant peer-reviewed papers, any chance of a link?
Also not sure how this idea can sit alongside the strike-rate figures for any number of Californian trainers that went from over 20pc to single figures when they introduced isolation barns a few hours before racing. They were clearly doing something to their horses that had to be carried out very close to race time, and when they were prevented from doing it, their horses stopped winning.
Since milkshaking is accepted to have been widely practised at the time, if it wasn’t the bicarb that was having that effect, what was it?
From PA:
DENMAN MISSES NATIONAL DATE
Denman has been scratched from the John Smith’s Grand National following his comeback defeat at Kempton on Saturday.
Trainer Paul Nicholls officially took last season’s Cheltenham Gold Cup hero out of the Aintree marathon this morning.
Weights for the race, for which the nine-year-old was ante-post favourite at around 10-1, will be unveiled tomorrow.The same poster put the identical query on the Betfair forum a couple of days ago. I feel a Martingale coming on.
If memory serves, Alan Amies, who was working as a race reader, actually managed to back Equinoctial to the tune or £20 or so. He was probably the only person there who did, and the bookie who paid him was more than a little put out to be handing over a four-figure sum on what should have been the mother of all skinners.
Do you think the Computer Timeform is worth the extra money?
I have kept with Timeform Perspective.Don’t have the figures to hand but I think CT is about £150 more than Perspective (for each code), so considering CT is the Racecards, Black Book and Perspective rolled into one, then yes I do think it’s worth the extra. And having spent many a year thumbing through the Perspective, CT is a doddle to use in comparison, notwithstanding its propensity to ‘pause and ponder’ rather often.
Wouldn’t put anyone off continuing with the printed Perspective though; it did take me a while to adjust to having it all on a screen.
My brother is in computer software and he does not see why a computer version should be more expensive than the file. He reckons anything computerised would not be as expensive to produce as paper.
Mark
Correct, in fact it should probably be much cheaper if you were simply looking at the cost of producing it.
What you are paying for is convenience and relative speed. I’ve used both the Perspective and now Computer Timeform, and despite CT’s fairly basic nature, wouldn’t go back to paper for anything. Every second you spend leafing through the Perspective looking for the race you want is time that you could spend looking at and digesting actual form instead. And how long would it take to find out the next performance for every horse in a race using the paper version? With CT, it’s one click.
This is what Alan Lee has to say about the matter in tomorrow’s Times
Very good piece, but Julian Muscat according to the byline.
Great to see that it’s on YouTube too, with loads of Racing UK branding all over it.
Shame that there’s so little else in the way of British racing on there these days thanks to the very same Racing UK’s disgraceful act of cultural vandalism a few months ago…
Beyer hates synthetics with a passion, perhaps because they remove the overwhelming emphasis on pure speed from American racing and as a result mean that his Beyer speed figures, which must make him a fortune, have much less relevance.
He is, of course, entitled to his view, but certainly can’t be seen as any sort of detached commentator. Try the Paulick report for links to other American responses to the Breeders’ Cup, including one pointing out that it was the first steroid-free running too, which help to even things up a bit.
He ran Oasis Dream in the same race, so he shouldn’t really need reminding.
Oddly enough, I’m sure he said that the exact same thing after Oasis Dream won the Nunthorpe that year, when debating the merits of the Sprint against the Mile. Just goes to show it’s always worth checking "facts", even when someone has spent years training in the States and had a winner at the first Breeders’ Cup.
