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MY idea of a flat campaign for Constitution Hill would be to start with one of these three:
Sagaro Stakes
Yorkshire Cup
Ormonde StakesThe key to a Melbourne Cup run will either be the rating or a “win and you’re in” race and he looks the type to carry a bit of weight so the Northumberland Plate must be a possible.
Prep race for a trip to Flemington – perhaps the Irish St Leger – and then off to sunny Melbourne and then a stop in Saudi on the way back to run in the Red Sea Handicap before coming back to Blighty.
I was once a Flat member at Kempton and we were very well looked after in the Clubhouse back in the day – this was well before the coming of the Polytrack.
I saw ENTREPRENEUR win his maiden – I didn’t know at the time I saw a future superstar in the same race – SILVER PATRIARCH ran eleventh that evening.
Despite all that, the truth is the land around Kempton is worth tens of millions for residential redevelopment – the site is very well placed with its own railway station and easy access to the M3. It’s a far more lucrative prospect than Hurst Park was back in the 1960s.
If it goes, why not spend some money on Huntingdon and move the King George there? It’s a right handed, flat track so why not?
The synthetic fixtures can go to Chelmsford which is under utilised and the turf jumps fixtures can be moved around – Windsor, perhaps thought that would mean ARC having to pay out?
As has also been said this week, a declining horse population is going to force cuts in races and meetings so losing the odd jumps fixture (whisper it quietly) isn’t going to make a lot of difference.
The other problem is the very best jockeys will want to ride for very large amounts of prize money.
You can have them ride Class 2 or Class 3 handicappers but every race will need to be, I reckon, £150k minimum so make it a million pound race day.
The other question is when as it will need to fit round other big races. One thought I had was to make it the first day of a two day Champions fixture with the second day Champions Day in mid October.
The Haydock numbers for their three days supposedly very good.
I think we need to have a clear split between these various “events”. Have the Sunday Series wholly at the start of the season and have it finished by Royal Ascot.
As for the Racing League, it would be nice to have a fixture at a non-ARC track and ideally at Dundalk but that would create all manner of logistical issues. I know originally it wasn’t held during either Goodwood or York and I think that should be re-instated with perhaps a 2 weeks on, 1 week off system through July, August and early September.
As for the Shergar Cup, it’s neither owt nor nowt currently. If you want an International Jockeys’ Challenge (which other countries have to be fair) make it more valuable and perhaps tack it onto an existing festival. Make it the fifth day of Goodwood (with the Stewards’ Cup) maybe.
A Great Britain & Ireland Team should be Buick, Moore and Murphy. An Asia team should have Joao Moreira and Zak Purton and a Rest of the World team should have James MacDonald but how would you get them all to be at one place?
If I could make a single change to the meeting, I’d move the Chesham up to a mile (round or straight, not sure?) and make it the first 2-y-o race in the calendar over the distance.
Additionally, I would add an bonus for the winner if they returned to the Royal meeting the following year and won any race over a mile and a half or further (handicap or Group race).
Ireland has Champions Weekend at Leopardstown and The Curragh and that’s effectively the end of the Irish season (in terms of quality).
I think there’s a Group 2 (the Beresford) after but that would be that.
The problem race for us is what we all think of as the Observer Gold Cup (I don’t worry about the November Handicap which hasn’t been the same since they moved it from Castle Irwin where they used to have 75 runners and it was always won by a 33/1 shot ridden by an apprentice carrying 4 stone 12 lbs in weight).
Where do you fit in the mile Group 1 2-y-o championship race?
Perhaps swap the Newbury/Doncaster weekend with Champions Day, scrap the Doncaster November card and run it as a two-day meeting (Saturday and Sunday) – call it the October Handicap, double the prize money and run it in mid-October as a big race alongside the final card at Newbury.
Then have Champions Day at the end of October (fourth Saturday) – more gap from the Arc, less to the Breeders Cup. Add the Observer Gold Cup to Champions Day as an 8-race card (run it on the round mile).
After that, you’d have the final Newmarket meeting (which gets no terrestrial tv coverage as they go straight into jumps mode) with Cheltenham and Wetherby the fifth October or first November weekend.
The problem this year is we have five Saturdays in May – most years we don’t.
Once we have the Lockinge, there would normally be two weeks to the Derby but this year there are three. We have the Temple/Sandy Lane which, along with the Irish Guineas meeting, makes for a busy weekend and then it would be straight on to Epsom (that’s why they moved the Sandown card from the Tuesday after the Bank Holiday to the Thursday so it created a launch pad for the Derby meeting).
This year, it doesn’t work because we have the extra Saturday and it’s a vacuum in truth.
Hill offers a solution to a problem which rarely exists – we can all cope with one quiet Saturday before the Derby.
I was at Sandown. He didn’t blow me away as a physical specimen in the paddock but looked ready.
I was more taken with the Ralph Beckett colt STANHOPE GARDENS.
In the race, RULING COURT didn’t break well but Buick never had a moment’s worry and the fact the horse was backed in from 8/13 to 4/9 suggested a lot of people knew he was very good. He quickened very nicely and Buick didn’t have to do a lot to come home by five and a half lengths.
Is he a Guineas or Derby winner? Far too early to tell – there was a lot to like about the performance and it may be the second and third are also decent.
I was at Lingfield last Wednesday – not too many round the unsaddling to see the “auction”.
I thought she might make into a decent hurdler and £4k wouldn’t be a lot on that basis and you could breed from her but no takers.
FIREFOX for me – didn’t have the best of runs in the Supreme. Not saying he’d have won or even finished second but would have been much closer to MYSTICAL POWER.
What we need, it seems, especially in the jump season but perhaps for the flat too, is flexibility.
It was interesting to see bigger fields at Hereford yesterday where the ground had dried up a bit so clearly there are horses ready to run and waiting for the ground to dry further.
There’s some flexibility in the system now with extra meetings put on after a spell of poor weather or if there is a clear demand from trainers for extra opportunities. The problem for the tracks is these extra meetings don’t attract the punters – look at Plumpton, they lost the meeting on Tuesday January 16th and put on an additional fixture on the following Monday.
The normal Plumpton attendance is about 1,300 for a Monday meeting – the additional meeting had just 506 paying spectators.
It comes down, as @Cork All Star, says to the question of in whose interests racing is run? The courses have far too much power now because they have taken ownership of the product. In other jurisidictions, the central authority tells the courses when they can race and perhaps we need a bit of this here woith meetings which regularly fail to get numbers of runners scrapped (such as the Leicester all chase meetings) and more flexibility to provide additional fixtures if there is demand.
Final thought – if courses want people through the gate for the additional fixtures, they could start by cutting admission prices by 50%. Most courses have social media so can publicise additional fixtures and perhaps offer discounts for last minute bookings for lunch. The alternative is to do what Lingfield does now and close almost all the food outlets and run the whole meeting as cheap as possible – understandable with 150 paying spectators and two bookies. The logical step from that of course is to run the races without any spectators as happened during the pandemic.
Lingfield calls it “Winter Flat” racing. It’s only the media that have dubbed it All-Weather racing.
Can you blame the surface if a meeting is lost to either fog or high winds?
Meetings have been lost because heavy snow has prevented access to the course even though the surface is raceable.
I do agree the vulnerability of the surfaces in the current cold spell is troubling – it’s not exceptional and I think the specifications of both Polytrack and Tapeta do suggest it should be raceable in much colder conditions than we have currently which raises some questions about track management and the experience and surface knowledge of course clerks.
For me, the central question is whether Nicky Henderson should be dictating the going at any track.
I read on the Racing Post the ground at Newcastle is currently Good to Soft, Soft in places yet they are watering.
Would they be bothering if Constitution Hill wasn’t a possible runner? I don’t know but do we want to go down the Auteuil route of constant watering to produce guaranteed soft to heavy ground? We could do that – we might not need to at Lingfield for example but even tomorrow it’s Good to Soft on the chase course having been virtually waterlogged barely a week ago.
There is a wider point – perhaps the water tables are so low the ground is drying exceptionally quickly despite the rain we’ve been having and you have to water to hold even Good to Soft in the north east and without it the ground would be Good.
The second problem is where you have separate Flat and Jumps tracks and the ground on the latter is left throughout the summer to become hard and unraceable. At Chepstow, for example, they switched hurdle races to the flat track – I suspect Sandown’s hurdle track will be fine so is there an argument for giving courses more latitude to switch to alternative tracks if required?
At the Irish National Stud, I believe.
A magnificent place and an excellent tour of the facilities available.
I suppose one option is to do what the French do at Auteuil and water constantly to provide soft or heavy ground.
Lingfield don’t need to do that – I was there on Tuesday and it was basically waterlogged by the last.
Summer jumping is predicated on watering to provide ground which is “safe” for jump racing so why not do the same for winter jumping and if a course wants to artificially water to produce soft/heavy ground, as long as it’s well advertised in advance, why not?
Listening to the good sense on here, I’m reminded of the old adage “less is more”. Five days is indefensible on any grounds of quality so it comes down to commercial greed. Perhaps the plan is to move the Midlands National to Cheltenham and run it as the fifth day highlight.
It depends what you want – if you want a Royal Ascot-type scenario where every race has some quality (yes, they have the Queen Alexandra, I know) then some of what’s in the four day programme needs to be refined or ditched.
If you want a Punchestown-type scenario of good races in conjunction with shall we say “lesser” events, also fine. There used, I believe, to be a Seller many moons ago – maybe bring back a high-grade selling chase or hurdle on your new fifth day.
The current problem is the plethora of races fishing for the same horses in the same pond. Your top novice hurdler or chaser can run at 2 miles, 2 miles 5 furlongs or 3 miles – they all have Grade 1 races. The emergence of the intermediate distance championship races mirrors the rise of the 7-furlong race on the flat. The 7 furlong horse is now thought of as a specialist in his/her own right rather than an unfortunate stuck between six furlongs and a mile.
We also have the rise of the “other” festivals – Aintree was once the Grand National plus a few other races – now, it’s a mini-championship meeting in its own right. Prestbury is no longer the only place that matters just as the top 3-y-o colt miler can swerve the Guineas and still win the St James’s Palace. For the British, there’ likely to be less Irish competition at Aintree given the proximity of Fairyhouse and we now have Punchestown in late April as well.
I have to confess, I wasn’t in favour of the idea of the “Winter Million” when it was first mooted so have I been won round? Partly.
First point, I was told General Admission was £40 which seems a little on the nose for the actual quality of the races – it would have been braver to charge a tenner and get more through the turnstiles.
Second, Lingfield were both lucky and unlucky with the weather – it’s been such a benign winter the meeting wasn’t in any serious threat but I thought on the Sunday the ground had dried up quite a bit. If you are going to market the Winter Million as “Cheltenham for Mudlarks” (and there’s clearly a niche for that) then you need to see some proper wet heavy ground.
Perhaps we could see Lingfield as England’s Auteuil – guarantee Heavy ground, put up some decent money and try to get some French jumpers come over to take on our Heavy ground performers. I think the Million has more of a future doing that than trying to be yet another Cheltenham “Trial” meeting.
The fixture list contains redundancy because meetings were often lost due to waterlogging, snow, frost etc but in a mild and benign winter with scarcely a meeting abandoned you end up with too many races for the horse population especially at the top end. A more proactive BHA would take this on by either a) culling meetings which weren’t needed or b) changing racing conditions on a one-off basis to ensure the “quality” races remain competitive and have more handicaps if that’s where the demand is.
Longer term and recognising milder winters and the use of frost sheets have likely permanently reduced the number of abandonments the fixture list needs to be re-designed to ensure the programme better reflects the reality of the horse population. Yesterday’s ludicrous small fields at Cheltenham and Doncaster testify to the need for urgent reform.
