Taxes on optimism, on hope

I'm back to normal after the trip to Newcastle on Monday.  We were home very late so I didn't get much sleep that night, but had a good nine hours the next night.  Plus the return to good weather is a big help too.  That always makes things easier.  For two thirds of the race, Wasted Sunsets' performance was good to watch, but she cut out inside the final two furlongs and weakened into sixth.  She had had a wind operation in the spring and, having been understandably uncompetitive in maiden company on her first run after it, she ran a lovely race when third of 15 at Yarmouth second up, in her first handicap.

I'm often sceptical about wind operations, but that day provided a very happy reminder that they can be a big help.  This week's run, by contrast, was a very dispiriting reminder that the benefits resultant from soft palate cauterization don't last forever.  (Although, of course, the procedure can always be repeated).  So that was our trip to Newcastle on Monday.  I've caught up on a few things since then, over and above sleep, and one of them has been studying the pamphlet which has arrived from the BHA with the title, 'Revitalising the race programme for the staying horse'.

This title is music to my ears as I am someone who trains mostly staying horses.  There are some very good ideas in this.  The introduction of a few more nice staying handicaps for three-year-olds is a very good thing.  Ditto good staying handicaps for fillies and mares.  Reintroducing maiden races beyond 12 furlongs is also interesting, not least because it might entice a few high-class National Hunt horses to chance their arm; although I'm not sure that putting in more two-year-olds' maiden races at 10 furlongs is a good idea.  If we are wanting to foster the career of a stayer, I'm not sure that I'd running him/her in maiden races that far so early on.  (I don't think that I've ever run a two-year-old beyond an extended mile).  But maybe that's just me.

More staying races in the Pattern is a good thing.  But, realistically, Pattern races are just a pipe-dream for anyone working on a limited budget, which is most people.  That's not your aspiration, unless you're even more optimistic than you have to be anyway.  You get the odd Sergeant Cecil and the odd Trip To Paris, but they don't come along too often.  If you operate on a limited budget and you aspire to find a nice stayer, the Cesarewitch has always been your Derby.  It's a great race, a proper time-honoured big race.  And it's probably unique among the big handicaps in that you don't need to have chanced upon a stakes-class horse to get a run in the race, and to run in it with some sort of rough chance.

The existence of a proper big race that one can aim at is a massive incentive to race stayers.  When you get a horse starting to show some staying potential (think Il Principe, think Warring Kingdom, think Rhythm Stick, think Indira, think Delatite) you dream that the next year, or maybe in two years' time, you might be lining up with a chance in the Cesarewitch.  Of course, most times you don't get there.  And, of course, on the rare occasions when you do actually get as far as running in the race, most times you are one of the 30 horses who are unplaced rather than one of the four who finish in the frame.  But it's a dream - and it's a justifiable dream which is a big incentive towards persevering with unfashionable staying bloodlines.

But now that's gone.  From next year, the entry fee for the Cesarewitch, if one stays in the race right through the 48-hour declaration stage, will be £12,500.  My basic training fee is £40 per day (plus VAT).  One might typically expect a horse to be in training for 10 months in the year and spelling for two.  Obviously there's a lot more to it than this, as there are extras (race-day expenses, farriery, veterinary) plus the Heath Tax for using the gallops; and the two months out of training will cost something too.  But it's not too far from the truth to say that it will cost a year's training fees to run in the Cesarewitch, which is a lottery with 30 of the 34 runners finishing out of the first four.

That basically means that very, very few people racing horses on a limited budget will have a runner in it.  If you have a horse in the Cesarewitch who is a 25/1 shot, your horse is one of the better chances.  I haven't worked out what the owner's share of the winner's prize-money would be, but I don't think that it would be too far off the mark to say that paying that entry fee to run in the Cesarewitch would equate to having a £12,500 bet at 33/1 about winning the race.  Even if you're getting 33/1 about a 25/1 shot (and for many owners their horse would be a 40/1 or 50/1 or 66/1 shot, or longer) there still aren't many owners who would contemplate betting £12,500 on their horse.  It's astonishing that Newmarket thinks that there are, notwithstanding that last year's winning owner Tony Bloom might do so without batting an eyelid.

My favourite Cesarewitch memory is the late Carol Whitwood's lovely old horse Wave Of Optimism finishing second of the 33 runners in 2000, carrying 7 stone 8lb (with George Baker claiming 5lb off his 7:13) and starting at 40/1.  That was the kind of result which gives us all hope.  Do you think that he would have run if the entry fee had been £12,500?  I don't, either.  For all the good that this new BHA initiative to promote stayers will do - and there is plenty of good in there - making a run in the Cesarewitch out of reach of the average owner is a massive step in the wrong direction, undoing so much of the good work.  I'm amazed that the BHA has allowed Newmarket to do it.

The other flaw in the new measures, over and above failing to prevent Newmarket killing the romance of the Cesarewitch, is a new bonus scheme.  These schemes just don't work, and they fall into the same category as the Cesarewitch entry fee: a tax on optimism, a tax on hope.  Realistically, these bonuses are nearly all won by the major players as they are for maiden and novices' races rather than handicaps, and coaxing the small players into signing up to boost the pools of money available to the few who win really isn't a good thing.  A tweet from Stuart Williams summed up the red herring of the bonus scheme perfectly: "Will make zero impact unless you broaden the range of stables/owners that win them."

One could argue that the bonus scheme is actually worse than useless.  I think it takes a six-figure sum out of the general prize money pool because it gets a big levy grant to supplement the entry payments, and I imagine that it will be expensive to run.  These bonus schemes always seem to be more labour-intensive than one might expect them to be, and you could say that the biggest beneficiaries of them are the civil servants who are paid to administer them.  Leaving that aside, though, arguably the most surprising thing about the brochure of measures to boost staying races is the omission of any reference to the fact that we already have a very good rule to promote staying races, ie the rule which says that every programme has to have two races beyond a mile whose distances add up to at least two and a half miles.

This is the most important thing underpinning our commitment to promoting middle- and long-distance racing. The only problem, of course, as this blog so often highlights, is that it is so poorly enforced.  There are usually several programmes each week which don't adhere to it.  Next week we'll have Lingfield on the Thursday and Ascot on the Saturday.  Just enforcing this rule would be a step in the right direction, far easier and far more effective than some new bonus scheme.  Doing that, and persuading Newmarket not to kill the Great Cesarewitch Dream, would be two very good and very simple steps to promote staying racing.