Forum Replies Created
- Posts
Because he’s vice president and prime minister of his country.
By all means ask searching questions of trainers who train horse for him, but I don’t think our government (plus a number of companies) would be too happy if he, or any other memeber of the Dubai ruling family, got an ear-bashing from a sports journalist and this then led to some politically embarrassing diplomatic or trade relations hoo-ha.
Can’t believe people like Nick Luck
Me too.
I’m sure he’s a pleasant person in real life, but his fawning interviewing style really grates. (Not of course that he’s unique in this regard).
No one wants to see every other interviewee being given a doing over, and clearly when your talking to someone like Sheikh Mo then you have to be pretty deferential, but he could do with being a lot more probing than he is. For a journalist, he has very little nose for a story, or what questions to put when he does stumble across one. In fact he seems more to deliberately look the other way when any hint of controversy arises!
And why do we have to have so many old Etonians and old Harrovians occupying all the pleasant, well-paid jobs in our sport?
I doubt they’ll run Galileo Gold in the Derby, he has a reasonable chance of staying 10f in time, but not 12f. The St James Palace looks a far more likely option for him.
I thought the coverage was pretty good, especially the post-race analysis. C4 definitely raised their game, sadly for them too late
Hard-core fans always complain when these world class sporting events are on TV that it’s dumbed down and they’ve sold out to the hoi polloi.
But people need to remember that events like the GN or the Silverstone grand prix attract once-a-year viewers that aren’t au fait with all the nerdy minutiae that “proper” sports fans adore.
A
Culloty’s stats are certainly peculiar. You wonder whether there’s a problem with his hay or water supplier, or maybe he just has one way of training and it just happened to work for one or two horses in his yard. Or perhaps he’s a poor judge of a young horse and tends to buy slowcoaches. Maybe a statistical freak. Who knows?
I remember working with someone whose family had a horse with a trainer who’d actually had a Festival winner many moons ago, but his record, apart from this one horse, suggested he could barely train ivy up a wall.
Doncaster and their sponsors will want their big race to seen by the widest possible audience, so bringing the race forward is a sensible idea.
Let’s see how the viewing figures for the C4 and More4 racing segments turn out, and how they compare with those for the F1 qualifying.
As for the ATR guest, well, name me some countries where racing is regularly shown on one of the main TV channels.
There’d be no point in having it scattered about between races, it would completely lack focus and nobody would bother watching.
If you’re going to do it at all, don’t be half-@rsed about it.
Have it as a standalone event with its own slot in the main body of the card i.e. not the cop-out first or last event.
Not a bad idea at all, perhaps it could work over 5 furlongs. I doubt if you’d get group class colts or fillies turning up, but with the right money and publicity, perhaps the sort of tough, high-class 5 furlong horses you’d find in the Vodafone Dash or the Bovis h’cap (or whatever they’re called these days)
Harness racing, particularly across the atlantic, used to have a great tradition of time trials, but that seems to have disappeared in recent times.
The last significant one was Niatross’s record-annihilating 1980 time trial at Lexington where he paced the Red Mile in 1 49 1/5, knocking nearly 3 seconds off the old mark.
Here it is on youtube, filmed from the grandstand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlZCF-g3__I
Not great value at 5/1.
With the sort of mares Frankel got in his first season, I’d be surprised if he got a large number of 2-y-o winners.
Harbour Watch looks the most likely candidate to me.
Those stats mean nothing in the way you’ve presented them.
What is meaningful is the rate of deaths, not the total number.
Please show the number of horses who ran at those tracks during the period, also if possible split hurdles/chases.
Only then can we draw any useful conclusions.
That’s good news. The ABP initiative is going well, much better than I expected it would.
Good stuff, Apracing.
Re Brondesbury, he was a remarkably quick horse, a bit of a freak really. He’d have been unbeatable over 1/4 mile.
I believe there was some interest in him from quarter horse breeders in America, but he ended up standing in Australia, where he didn’t do particularly well.
Thanks, KS. Any idea how they split percentage-wise – horseracing/harness only?
I’m not KS, and I don’t know that particular split, although the great majority of French courses would have at least some trotting races, but many stage races an all 3 disciplines.
Figures for 2014 show around 4900 flat races, 2200 jump races and 11000 trotting races run.
For Sweden, the numbers are 600 flat, 22 (twenty-two!) jump and 8750 trot.
Source: http://www.horseracingintfed.com
The above posts tend to confirm the died-in-the-wool inward-looking nature of the sport, and not just in this country.
Whether it’s fans, administrators or journalists, xenophobia rules.
So, I try to follow some of but it’s difficult.
For example, the Global Sprint Challenge is a worthwhile series, but gets zero coverage.
