Unknowable

If we thought that we were stiff having Silken Thoughts (pictured in the field this morning) seemingly an unlucky loser at Yarmouth on Thursday, how hard must the connections of Art Dealer found defeat to swallow at Doncaster the following afternoon, ie two days ago?  He was the ultimate certainty beaten, flashing home from nowhere under a negative ride to fail by a rapidly-diminishing nose.  You might have read about it in today's Racing Post, even if there was very little on the subject in yesterday's paper.  Why am I mentioning this, you might ask?  Well, I was on duty for At The Races in the studio on Friday afternoon so found myself commenting on the race.

What can one say when a horse is a certainty beaten because of a bad ride by the jockey?  I thought that I summed it up adequately with "He should have won".  Is there much more to say than that?  If you didn't see the race, I should explain that Tom Queally settled him towards the back of a bunched field which was racing up the stands' rail in a sprint up the straight.  He moved him towards the rail past halfway, which was a poor decision, and then unsurprisingly he found that it took forever to get a run.  The gap only came well inside the last furlong, at which stage it looked impossible that he could be able to catch the two leaders, but that he should be able to run on for third.  During Tom's first few strides in the clear, he only sooled the horse along fairly gently, seemingly happy to get his mount to stretch out for third - and then in the dying strides his mount surged forward, so he rode more vigorously, and he failed by the narrowest margin, finishing extremely fast.  On the TV I pointed out that the horse's astonishing finishing kick had been helped by having been bottled up for so long behind the leaders on a day when there was a very strong headwind, so that for more than five of the six furlongs he was doing very little while the leaders were working extremely hard into the wind; and I also pointed out that there might have been an excuse for Tom's tame effort when finally getting a gap in that at that stage he still didn't have that much room, and didn't look a chance of winning anyway.  And then I just summed it up by saying that he should have won.  Having said that point unequivocally, I couldn't see that there was much more to say.

There was no point in speculating whether Tom had tried not to win or had merely ridden extremely and uncharacteristically badly because that's impossible to tell from watching the race.  Only he knows that, and to speculate is a fruitless cause.  I've trained four place-getters this season who probably should have won and who probably would have won had the jockeys done what I'd asked them to do.  Did the three jockeys concerned set out to get beaten or did they just do their job badly?  I don't know and I will never know.  Only they know.  With one of them I'm at least 99% sure that it was an innocent mistake, with another I'm at least 90% sure that it was an innocent mistake, and with the other I just don't know.  My view is that Tom Queally almost certainly made an innocent mistake on Friday.  I'd imagine that some (probably many) people hold a different view.  But as a pundit on the TV, I don't see how one can put forward the case either that he cocked up or that he deliberately stopped the horse because, either way, it would just be groundless speculation.

Anyway, and here's the point I'm getting to.  I'd like to think that my stint in the ATR studio went reasonably well (and I'm pleased to say that I'll be doing it on a reasonably regular basis henceforth, which is great as I enjoy doing it) but afterwards I received a good reminder that one can't please all the people all the time.  I was barracked on Twitter afterwards, by another TV presenter of all people.  (A RUK presenter, thankfully: it would have been too galling to be publicly barracked by one of my colleagues).  "Incredible analysis by @JohnWathenBerry on that Donny race.  He's reputed to know a lot.  He clearly doesn't know punters aren't that daft".  I'm assuming that 'incredible' is not a compliment and, bearing in mind that I did say that the horse should have won, I assume that I'm being accused of trying to pull the wool over punters' eyes by not telling them that the jockey stopped the horse.  How could I, though?  How could anyone?  It's unknowable whether he did or he didn't.  Neither pundits nor stewards could conclude that he did it deliberately, in just the same way that we/they couldn't conclude that he didn't.

So that's basically my apology.  If you watched the show and thought that my saying that the jockey should have won wasn't being critical enough, then I apologise.  However, I think that I'll stick to saying what I know, what I can reasonably infer or what I can make educated guesses at; and I'll leave wild speculation to the others.  So if you'd like anything more sensationalist than that when I'm on, you might like to turn over to the other channel.

If that wasn't enough of Doncaster, I went there yesterday with Batgirl for their big raceday (ordinary racing, but Madness playing afterwards meant that the sell-out crowd numbered around 25,000 on a cold damp night with pre-racing traffic congestion on a par with Royal Ascot and with a Derby Day feel to the meeting) and had no reason to complain about our jockey.  Jamie Spencer gave her a typically calm and smooth passage through the race, and she ran well to finish fifth, again just finding that the mile is a bit far for her.  The papers keep telling us that she's inconsistent and unreliable, but her form figures rather bely that.  She's now finished in the first three in 11 of her 23 starts and has won four races.  This season her form figures are 23535 - and as her highest winning mark is 68, and yet her last 11 runs have all been off marks in the 70s, it's easy to understand why she's found it easier to be placed than to win of late.  Yesterday's fifth was a good fifth, but her previous fifth place was admittedly a moderate one - but that was on a day when the ground had dried up a lot and she hated the ground, and in retrospect I clearly shouldn't have run her.  But when things are OK for her, she always does her best and runs creditably; and she continues to be an admirable trouper.  Good on 'er.  A few photos of the night night illustrate this chapter, mostly of her down at the start but also including one of Gus running for cover as the band strikes up.