Tonight will be fine

It's been a very good week for us with our two runners.  Salisbury was good.  It's generally a lovely racecourse to visit; even better if one's horse runs well.  Kryptos ran very well.  For most of the race I thought that he was going to win, but through the final 300m it gradually became clear that he wasn't going to be able to reel in the leader Surrey Hope, the mount of Ryan Moore.  He's still very unseasoned, physically and mentally, and it was no disgrace that he couldn't quite get himself organised well enough to win.  Particularly as the winner is a very nice horse and was ridden by Ryan Moore, who is always hard to overhaul on a leader.  Ryan never goes too hard too soon, but always manages to save a bit for the end - as the other jockeys found when he landed a mighty victory on Eminent at Deauville on Tuesday.

So Kryptos was good.  And then Hope Is High was even better.  (Which isn't strictly true.  He was beaten a neck off 84 while she won by seven lengths off 59, which clearly means that his performance was markedly superior).  Common sense said that she ought to win as she had been a 'certainty beaten' in a very similar race over course and distance 16 days previously.  But, of course, luckless losers don't always become winners next time.  However, this time, aided by a typcially perfect Silvestre De Sousa ride, the theory did indeed become the practice, for once.  So straightforward!

On the previous occasion, the Julia Feilden-trained Best Example had finished just over two lengths and one place behind her, giving her 6lb.  It seemed fair to estimate that Hope's mishap coming out of the stalls might have cost her about five lengths.  This time Best Example was again giving her 6lb (Hope had gone up 3lb in the ratings, but Best Example no longer had a 3lb-claimer on board) so it was fair to suggest that Hope ought, if the theory held true, to beat Best Estimate by about seven lengths.  So what happened?  Hope won, Best Example was second, and the margin was seven lengths!  Even accustomed as we are to how consistent genuine horses can be, this was truly remarkable.  Maximum plaudits to both horses.

So that was lovely.  We'd had rain overnight and through the morning (as had Yarmouth, 8mm of it, which meant that we were racing on perfect ground, which is always a pleasure) but it turned out to be a gloriously sunny, very warm evening.  Conditions were idyllic, just right for a wonderful evening of racing.  10 out of 10 for Hope; 10 out of 10 for Silvestre; 10 out of 10 for every aspect of Yarmouth Racecourse (including its ground and weather) and all involved in its running.  And it gives me (nearly) as much pleasure to say that today as it did to be there last night.

So what's been happening in the wider world?  I see that Adam Carter has been found guilty in that long-running BHA enquiry, but that John Wainwright was inevitably exonerated.  Why do I say inevitably?  Do I know that he was innocent?  Of course not!  I have no idea whether he was innocent or guilty.  But I do know, if the Racing Post reports of the hearing were accurate, that the BHA's barrister made such a poor job of presenting his case that the case was doomed to failure.  One might say that if the BHA had to resort to making the idiotic 'he was using an "out-of-sorts" jockey, therefore he didn't want to win' line of reasoning a plank of its prosecution, then it clearly had so little on which to base the case that John must surely be innocent.

However, however weak one's case, one wouldn't stoop to using such nonsense if one had any common sense as it just makes one's case look weak, whether it is weak or not.  The key to pushing one's cause if one's case is weak is to conceal just how weak it is, rather than to emphasise (one could even say exaggerate) its weakness.  The pushing of this line of supposed logic didn't actually tell us that the BHA's case was weak; it just told us that it was being incompetently put.  And if you put your case incompetently, you're going to lose irrespective of its merit.

You have to feel for the BHA as it doesn't seem to have had much luck with its lawyers.  One didn't have to be a lawyer to realise that Mathew Lohn, on the basis that he intermittently worked for the BHA, was not qualified to be the supposedly independent adjudicator in any case in which the BHA was the prosecutor; you just needed to have a measure of common sense.  The BHA was entitled to feel aggrieved that he didn't point this out when offered the job of adjudicating in the Jim Best matter, and it is now again entitled to feel aggrieved that its barrister has based its case on a line of 'reasoning' so flawed that it doomed the case to failure.

What else has happened?  Well, we had the tragedy of Permian's death, and we have the announcement of plans to reduce the amount of non-runners.  These are connected, aren't they?  As I see it, if you declare a horse, you want to run.  If you then scratch the horse, you generally do so because of one concern: the horse's welfare.  You are either concerned that the ground has become too soft and the horse is likely to labour on it or has become too firm and the horse is unacceptably likely to jar up or worse; or you just are no longer happy that the horse is physically or mentally in a condition to be pitched into a race.

There has been far too much written and said following the death of Permian on what would have been, by British standards, a rock-hard track.  I don't really want to add to the already-excessive pontification on the subject, but I would be interested to know how many of the people who have lambasted Mark Johnston for not being cautious enough, for supposedly being too cavalier with the horse's welfare and for running the horse on an occasion when, with the wisdom of hindsight, we can say that he would have been better off not running, how many of them have on other occasions sounded off about trainers being too cautious, being too concerned with their horses's welfare and being too free to scratch their horses.