We didn't, by the way, get to run Frankie at Wincanton on Saturday. He narrowly missed out on getting a start in the divided novices' hurdle. Still, he holds two entries for this week (on Thursday and Friday) so I hope that he should finally be able to run again shortly. We also have Dr Darcey entered at Huntingdon on Thursday in a novices' handicap hurdle and Kadouchski in the conditional jockeys' handicap hurdle at Sandown on Friday which he won last year. Both are intended runners. Peter Hatton rode Kadou last year when he won, and would be the obvious choice this time, but Joe Akehurst will ride; Joe has done a lot of schooling
for us this season, rides very well and fully deserves another ride for the stable, to follow the two rides he had on Alcalde in the autumn. With Kadouchski's last four runs all having been in steeplechases, it seemed a good idea to have him schooled over hurdles before the race, just to get his eye back in for the smaller jumps. And I'm very glad that I did: Joe schooled him on this beautifully fresh (but cold) morning up on the Links and, while he jumped very well, he gave the hurdles far too much daylight the first time he went up the line. All was well that ended well, and it didn't take him long to regain the preferred long-and-low hurdling trajectory. These few photographs, reproduced chronologically, illustrate how it went.
Kadou, mind, still has to get into that race on Friday. The legacy, I suppose, of all the recent abandonments, the race has a big entry and he is 34th in order of the 38 entrants. 18 get a run, so we need 16 of the 33 horses ahead of us not to be declared for him to get in. I think that he will, but stranger things have happened. And with Frankie having been eliminated so often recently, elimination certainly won't come as too much of a shock, disappointing though in this particular case (ie when the horse had won the race the previous year) it would be. This, then, brings me nicely on to the topic of elimation. It is one of those things which, unless one is being eliminated, one doesn't really notice that it exists. The paper
prints the runners, but it doesn't print a list of the horses who were declared but who aren't in the field - a list which can often be longer than the list of runners. Take, for instance, a 51-65 mile handicap at Kempton on Thursday. I don't know how many were eliminated, but 64 horses were entered and the race had a full field of 14, with the top weight being 9 stone 4lb and the bottom weight being 9 stone; ie, if your horse was rated below 61, he wouldn't have got in. As there is no reason to suppose that there wasn't an even spread of ratings among the entrants along the 51 to 65 spectrum, it seems fair to assume that, alongside the 14 runners, there would have been in excess of 40 horses eliminated from the race. Which is remarkable - but, sadly, not uncommon.
This ties in nicely with the Racing Post's letter of the week (an unofficial award decided by me). This was written by Larry Stratton and was published in today's paper. I hadn't read the article, but apparently the Racing Post a few days ago carried an article saying that it was good that the drop in the size of the British and Irish foal crops has been arrested. Larry's letter pointed out the folly of this assertion. As the one thing about which everyone had been in agreement was that we had a major over-production problem, and that the drop has gone part of the way to addressing this, it is bizarre that the Post should have decided that it's a good thing that such a reduction will not continue. (Almost as bizarre as Howard Wright's criticism in Friday's paper of Newbury for offering free admission to their rescheduled Tote Gold Trophy meeting that day). The reason, supposedly,
was that we are apparently in danger of there being not enough horses around to fill the racing programme, a strange and groundless theory which ignores the large amount of yearlings who failed to find buyers at last year's yearling sale (and the number of yearlings who couldn't even get a place in a sale). Let there be no misunderstanding: if we are in sight of there not being enough horses in training to fill the racing programme (which we are not) then this would NOT be because there weren't enough thoroughbreds of racing age alive in the British Isles, but because there weren't enough owners to put them into training. The one thing (even more so than the universal belief that we have had an over-production problem) which unites all of racing's and breeding's participants is the belief that, for the long-term health of the sport, there needs to be a greater financial incentive for owners to put horses into training, and this is a message which we are all trying to get across both to government and to the betting industry. For the Racing Post thus to give the opposite impression, by saying that the problem is going to be lack of horses rather than lack of owners, is at best irresponsible. And Larry did an excellent job in pointing this out.
We didn't, by the way, get to run Frankie at Wincanton on Saturday. He narrowly missed out on getting a start in the divided novices' hurdle. Still, he holds two entries for this week (on Thursday and Friday) so I hope that he should finally be able to run again shortly. We also have Dr Darcey entered at Huntingdon on Thursday in a novices' handicap hurdle and Kadouchski in the conditional jockeys' handicap hurdle at Sandown on Friday which he won last year. Both are intended runners. Peter Hatton rode Kadou last year when he won, and would be the obvious choice this time, but Joe Akehurst will ride; Joe has done a lot of schooling 
for us this season, rides very well and fully deserves another ride for the stable, to follow the two rides he had on Alcalde in the autumn. With Kadouchski's last four runs all having been in steeplechases, it seemed a good idea to have him schooled over hurdles before the race, just to get his eye back in for the smaller jumps. And I'm very glad that I did: Joe schooled him on this beautifully fresh (but cold) morning up on the Links and, while he jumped very well, he gave the hurdles far too much daylight the first time he went up the line. All was well that ended well, and it didn't take him long to regain the preferred long-and-low hurdling trajectory. These few photographs, reproduced chronologically, illustrate how it went.
Kadou, mind, still has to get into that race on Friday. The legacy, I suppose, of all the recent abandonments, the race has a big entry and he is 34th in order of the 38 entrants. 18 get a run, so we need 16 of the 33 horses ahead of us not to be declared for him to get in. I think that he will, but stranger things have happened. And with Frankie having been eliminated so often recently, elimination certainly won't come as too much of a shock, disappointing though in this particular case (ie when the horse had won the race the previous year) it would be. This, then, brings me nicely on to the topic of elimation. It is one of those things which, unless one is being eliminated, one doesn't really notice that it exists. The paper 
prints the runners, but it doesn't print a list of the horses who were declared but who aren't in the field - a list which can often be longer than the list of runners. Take, for instance, a 51-65 mile handicap at Kempton on Thursday. I don't know how many were eliminated, but 64 horses were entered and the race had a full field of 14, with the top weight being 9 stone 4lb and the bottom weight being 9 stone; ie, if your horse was rated below 61, he wouldn't have got in. As there is no reason to suppose that there wasn't an even spread of ratings among the entrants along the 51 to 65 spectrum, it seems fair to assume that, alongside the 14 runners, there would have been in excess of 40 horses eliminated from the race. Which is remarkable - but, sadly, not uncommon.
This ties in nicely with the Racing Post's letter of the week (an unofficial award decided by me). This was written by Larry Stratton and was published in today's paper. I hadn't read the article, but apparently the Racing Post a few days ago carried an article saying that it was good that the drop in the size of the British and Irish foal crops has been arrested. Larry's letter pointed out the folly of this assertion. As the one thing about which everyone had been in agreement was that we had a major over-production problem, and that the drop has gone part of the way to addressing this, it is bizarre that the Post should have decided that it's a good thing that such a reduction will not continue. (Almost as bizarre as Howard Wright's criticism in Friday's paper of Newbury for offering free admission to their rescheduled Tote Gold Trophy meeting that day). The reason, supposedly,
was that we are apparently in danger of there being not enough horses around to fill the racing programme, a strange and groundless theory which ignores the large amount of yearlings who failed to find buyers at last year's yearling sale (and the number of yearlings who couldn't even get a place in a sale). Let there be no misunderstanding: if we are in sight of there not being enough horses in training to fill the racing programme (which we are not) then this would NOT be because there weren't enough thoroughbreds of racing age alive in the British Isles, but because there weren't enough owners to put them into training. The one thing (even more so than the universal belief that we have had an over-production problem) which unites all of racing's and breeding's participants is the belief that, for the long-term health of the sport, there needs to be a greater financial incentive for owners to put horses into training, and this is a message which we are all trying to get across both to government and to the betting industry. For the Racing Post thus to give the opposite impression, by saying that the problem is going to be lack of horses rather than lack of owners, is at best irresponsible. And Larry did an excellent job in pointing this out.
2 comments:
Too many races rather than too many horses would seem more logical
I do not follow that logic. If there were to many races why are races being split into two divisions and horses balloted out.More horses want to run than races available for them.
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