Another long gap between chapters, I'm afraid. Eleven days since the last one. (My excuse is that when we aren't having runners, I don't feel so obliged to update this on-going overview). We've had one runner since then: The Rocket Park over a mile and six furlongs at Salisbury two Fridays ago, ie nine days ago. He ran well in an odd race. The field didn't set off unrealistically fast, but after half a mile or so a couple of horses got into a speed duel up front. They started to go, to borrow a phrase recently made famous by Darren Flindell in Sydney, 'lickety-split', and the result was that the horses who chased this ludicrously fast pace faded badly at the end, while the horses who laid well back off it dominated the finish. (Under the circumstances, the run of the race was put in by the horse who finished sixth).
The two horses who beat us came from well back, and we came from even farther back (considerably farther back still). The Rocket Park has no early pace and just stays on, as he had shown when winning at Thirsk previously, and it was the same here, with the crazy mid-race tempo really accentuating this. We looked like being completely tailed off for much of the race, but Howard Cheng had judged things well and we were able to finish strongly into third. (In fact, we probably were only keeping on at the same pace, or were slowing down considerably less rapidly than the others).
To an inexperienced eye, however, it might have looked as if we had deliberately been given too much to do and were flashing home, or that it had just been an ill-judged ride. The waters were further muddied by the fact that Howard isn't getting many rides and consequently found his fitness sorely tested in the longest race he'd ever ridden in, on a horse who was off the bridle more or less all the way; so he didn't look as vigorous as some might have liked. And the upshot was that I made my second visit to the stewards' room of the summer for a 'running and riding' enquiry. Unbelievable.
Happily, common sense prevailed and no action was taken. I was so obviously telling the truth in my answer to the question of whether I was happy with Howard's ride, the answer being, "Yes, but I wouldn't have said that had I trained one of the horses who made the running." It's so strange. The majority of ill-judged rides are put in on horses who go too fast in the early stages, but British stewards never seem to worry about that, instead focussing their attentions on horses who might have gone too slowly in the early stages.
(Not so in Australia, with Hugh Bowman having just received a three-week suspension for getting his fractions wrong by going too fast in the Run To The Rose - which is an odd one because, to my thinking, if it was a genuine error, which I believe it to have been, no punishment should have been given, but if it was intentional the penalty should have been three years rather than weeks). Anyway, as regards our race, it was in retrospect slightly frustrating, but basically I'm always happy to see a horse run well (which he did) and, after becoming resigned mid-race to him being about to put in a very poor performance, I was actually happy to end up in third.
There's plenty going on in the wider world, of course. The passing of Pat Smullen has very sadly loomed over the racing world in the past week, while the seeming resurgence of COVID-19 is hanging over the national landscape. We'll have to wait and see what the consequences of the latter will be, but at least we can be happy that the racing fraternity is more than doing its bit. In fact, at times I feel that we are the only people taking this seriously. This particularly struck me when we went to Chester last month. Things are done impeccably on the racecourse, but we couldn't believe our eyes as we drove away.
Driving down a street in Chester early in the evening, we passed a pub with a beer garden, which appeared to be packed, with people behaving as they used to do in that far-away land where nobody (other than the virologists who created it, prior to its release into the world, intentional or erroneous) had heard of COVID-19. And the funny thing was that there's a pub within the racecourse at Chester which obviously was empty during racing. But what struck me was that there were menus and flowers on its outdoor tables. When I remarked that it was rather sweet that they had taken the trouble to do this, the point was made that presumably it would be open in the evening after the racing was over!
I spoke to someone who attended a recent sale at Doncaster. Sales are the same as racecourses in that the protocols are very strict - and then he said that in the evening he walked back from the sales-complex to where he was staying and had to pass through what he described as 'the night-club area', and he said that the area was packed with no social distancing, no mask-wearing etc. So many people in England appear to be either too stupid or too selfish to act in a way which might minimise the transmission of disease (and I gather that plenty of them congregated in Trafalgar Square yesterday) but at least racing's conscience can be clear.
3 comments:
Hi John given the sad news about crowds not being allowed back to racing , i do wonder if the racing family isnt shooting itself in the collective foot when you see the poor turnouts for reasonable prize money at HQ today the ground is not (unless you have a downpour) at the extremes , so i am at a loss to see why there are not more runners . The racing industry en mass needs to address this if they are to put forward a salient case for Government support in these troubled times . For example having only four runners for twelve thousand prize money over one mile four is pathetic ; particularly as a similar race at Listowel has the full sixteen field plus reserves admittedly for double the money (less conversion rate) . I know there is no easy answer you cant force people to run in a particular race but if you wont to get people to subsidise the sport this is a dreadful advertisement as is most of the rest of the card and as was Goodwood yesterday
Just noticed there is an almost identical race at Pontefract today which has a lousy turnout for similar money
I can't understand why people do this, Neil, ie highlight, say, a Class Two race, point out that there aren't many runners and say that owners don't want prize money. Of course they/we do! But you only get prize money if you finish in the frame, and you need a Class One-standard horse to finish in the frame in a Class One race, a Class Two-standard horse to finish in the frame in a Class Two race ... Unplaced horses don't get the money, and the vast majority of horses in training are not Class One -or Class Two- standard horses. The ability pyramid is always going to mean that there are more middle-of-the-road horses than high-class ones, but the situation is exacerbated at present as the prize money is so poor by the standards of other countries that there's a dearth of Class Two horses here. If you'd seen John Gosden's interview on RUK after Lost In Space had won a Class Two two-year-old race earlier in the afternoon, you'd have had this explained to you. Gosden said that Lost In Space will now go to the sales and he'll be bought to go overseas because his earning potential is so much greater elsewhere. You might say that £12,000 is a big prize for those horses to be racing for, but in Australia they'd be racing for $80,000 and in the USA it would be $65,000. So it's no surprise that there is a dearth of Class Two horses left in Britain to run in these types of races. So I'd say that the race which you have highlighted sums up why British racing is in such trouble, rather than highlights that the problems are much less acute than people are saying. Does this make sense?
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