The Start Of The Flat

If there is one subject of which we have heard too much recently (and that's a bad start because there are, of course, many such subjects) it is what a bad thing it is that The Start Of The Flat ain't what it used to be, and that someone should do something about it.  Well, I don't know what is stranger: that people could be surprised that it ain't what it used to be, or that they could think that there is anything which can be done about it.  Go back before the last war, and you'd find that only a minority of racegoers had more than a passing interest in National Hunt racing, and that there was no Flat racing between the Manchester November Handicap meeting at Manchester in early November and the Lincolnshire Handicap meeting at Lincoln in late March, four and a half months later.

The Start Of The Flat, then, really was a big deal, the end of a four and a half month drought for racing men.  What happened then? Well, firstly the Queen Mother started owning jumpers in the early '50s, starting the process of bringing jumps racing into the fold of polite society, so that eventually it no longer was the poor relation for 'the needy and the greedy' and for those who wanted to take part in it.  It was no longer just about the Grand National for the majority of racegoers, but it was a proper sport to fill the winter.

Even so, though, The Start Of The Flat remained a big thing.  And then came the introduction of the Pattern in the early '70s which decreed that the Lincoln couldn't be a top race because it was a handicap.  A compromise was reached so that for a number of years it was granted Listed status, but even that was gone by the end of the decade.  And then in October 1989 came the real killer blow: all-weather Flat racing was introduced on the Equitrack (remember that?) at Lingfield, so now the racing man had not only jumps racing to entertain him during the winter, but Flat racing too.

Under the circumstances, the resumption of Flat racing on turf really isn't a big deal, and never can be again.  It used to be the really big event of, in the eyes of many racegoers, the first racemeeting for nearly five months.  Now it is the first race-meeting since, um, er, yesterday.  And it is a race-meeting which comes the week after a good Pattern race is run at Lingfield (the Winter Derby) and a couple of weeks after the biggest, most popular, most publicized and most socially prestigious racemeeting of them all: not Royal Ascot (any longer), but the Cheltenham Festival. And a couple of weeks before the race which will attract the biggest TV audience of the lot: not the Derby, but the Grand National.

Under the circumstances, trying to do anything to make The Start Of The Flat a big event really is a non-starter: even saying that the new season started with the (increasingly marginalised0 Craven Meeting or with the Guineas Meeting, or with the Derby Meeting - or even with Royal Ascot - just wouldn't achieve very much at all.  And do we actually want to do something?  All winter we have had intermittent laments in the Racing Post that the winter Flat programme isn't all that much of a hill of beans.

Well, the only hope that The Start Of The Flat revivalists have is if the winter Flat programme disappears off the map altogether (and if National Hunt racing, and in particular the great god the Cheltenham Festival, loses its popularity, which isn't going to happen in the next two or three decades, if at all) - and seemingly it's a big priority to ensure that the opposite of that happens.  So we'll just have to enjoy the racing for what it is - ie very enjoyable sport - instead of demanding miracles.  That's the thing about Highlights of the Year: one can have them, but one can't have them every day, or even week.

This chapter's illustrations, by the way, were all taken between 6.00 and around 7.10 this morning.  You might think that we were heading for a lovely day, to follow the hard frost to which we'd woken up.  Well, so did I, for an hour or so, until the grey clouds rolled back in and we had another bitterly cold grey day.  Dry, but, and it was a degree or two above freezing so our icicles have indeed all gone now, and there's very little snow still lingering.  So I suppose that we are indeed heading in the right direction.  But just very slowly.