Quarter-time

This is only the second chapter of the blog in March, but it is very likely to be the last, I'm afraid.  I hope that future months will have more chapters.  And more runners too: we've had three runners during March, taking the total for 2019 so far to eight (after two in January and three in February).  Not much to show for it so far, but hopefully we might be building foundations.  Sacred Sprite is now eligible for handicaps following her run at Lingfield on Monday, and I hope that she'll find those a lot easier than against high-class horses in novice races.

Roy has had an interrupted preparation this winter, so it was good to get him started at Kempton on Wednesday.  He's still quite fresh so a mile first time seemed far enough, but he is (by his standards) very high in the ratings at the moment after his three wins last year, so he found that his opponents were (again, by his standards) quite smart milers.  Consequently he wasn't fast enough, but he's come home sound and should be better for having gone there.  I'd like to think that he will run three weeks tomorrow (April 20th) at the first Brighton meeting, the problem of course being that he's likely still to be rated on the high side.

Despite Roy finishing last, I really enjoyed the trip to Kempton.  Well, I didn't particularly enjoy the trip to Kempton (a harbinger of another season of travel chaos - 90 miles to Kempton with the first 50 miles taking one hour and then the final 40 miles taking two hours; and then going home the long way, ie via Dartford, because, even at that time of night, there were still serious delays around the top left corner of the M25) but I did enjoy the being there.  And even the tortuous outward journey wasn't the end of the world: as it was evening racing I had the luxury of having left home unrealistically early so wasn't fretting about missing the race.

The time spent there, though, was a real pleasure.  It was a warm and sunny (well, until the sun went down an hour or so before Roy's race) evening with very enjoyable company.  It's usually a pleasure to be at Kempton, and it's pretty much always a pleasure to be at the races when Roy runs.  So that was very nice.  It was also a nice, warm sunny day at Lingfield on Monday (and it's been glorious here the past couple of days, Friday and Saturday) but that was a less sociable trip, not least for the fact that I had an article to write so took my lap-top and spent most of the time there squirrelled away tapping the keyboard.

I hadn't been watching the earlier races so didn't know the results, which was fairly stupid as I chatted with both Nicola Currie and Jean-Rene Auvray (independently) without realising that they had combined for the winner of the second race.  (Well, with Jean-Rene I was relieved of my ignorance during the course of the conversation).  Most of my conversation with him revolved around how pleased I am that he has been able to resume training.  He trained previously but had to give up because of financial difficulties, which was very unfortunate as he is a hard-working and very sound horseman who trains his horses well.  I'm very glad that he now has a second chance.

This got me thinking, though. Unless I was hallucinating, I recall reading a week or two ago that the many criticisms being hurled the BHA's way included supposedly it giving licenses to people whose training business is financially unviable.  That's ludicrous.  You only know in retrospect who is going to go bust, and that's too late.  The BHA shouldn't just say that it suspected that someone's business would fail and so he/she shouldn't have a license.  Any profitable training business can become loss-making overnight if horses depart or a bad debt intervenes; any loss-making training business can become profitable overnight if new clients or horses arrive. 

John Dunlop ended up putting his training business into receivership.  Was the BHA (well, Jockey Club and then BHB) wrong to give him a license?  A former champion trainer and multiple Group One-winning trainer - if his business can go bankrupt, then anyone's can.  Few trainers have made a better start to their careers in Newmarket this century than Mark Wallace.  Plenty of horses; plenty of winners; Group winners; good owners.  He only lasted about five years.  Was the BHA (BHB?) wrong to give him a license?  Of course not.  If it had done, he could have, assuming that he fulfilled all the criteria, sued it for restraint of trade, for refusing him a license simply on a hunch (notwithstanding that the hunch would have turned out to be correct) that he might go bust.  Absurd.

We get this in the Town Council.  There are plenty of restaurants in Newmarket, more than a town this size can sustain.  There are more starting up every year.  Most of the new ones go to the wall sooner rather than later.  We get applications for change of use for a building and often common sense says that the venture is likely to be doomed to failure, but we don't object to the application.  If one person has the right to try his luck, then so has the next man.  The training game and the feeding game are both competitive ones, the survival of the fittest (well, not really the fittest, but you know what I mean).  Market forces will decide.  It's not up to the BHA or the local council to decide, and not only because the BHA and the council probably wouldn't pick the right ones anyway.