Responsiblity

What a wonderful Grand National meeting.  The first day was good enough, good enough for a whole meeting.  But then it got even better, with wonderful little Tiger Roll winning the Grand National.  He's such a lovable little horse (all for the more so for being so little) and the presence of Davy Russell on his back is the icing on the cake.  The unlucky and fatal fall of Up For Review did take a lot of the gloss off the race, and it was hard to enjoy the immediate aftermath of watching that.  But, thanks to Tiger Roll, it still ended up as an occasion to savour.

That race aside, Kalashnikov's Grade One victory under Jack Quinlan was far and away the highlight from a Newmarket perspective.  That was just so good.  He's been so well trained all the way through by Amy Murphy, and she and her father (who owns the horse) deserve particular praise for not blaming the jockey and taking the easy way out of using a more fashionable jockey instead when things weren't running smoothly earlier in the season.  Plenty of people would have done so, and it's great that it has turned out that that would have been the wrong way to proceed.

One might say that it would have been the case that there would have been no wrong answer because, while he would have won with A. N. Other too, that's not the point: the taste of victory would have been considerably less sweet with anyone else in the saddle.  That was the highlight of a wonderful afternoon of sport on the Thursday, while Newmarket's two runners in the Foxhunters the same day (one trained by Richard Spencer, one by James Owen) both ran creditably too.  And then, of course, Newmarket had a runner in the Grand National, even if the horse couldn't be said to have been trained on Newmarket Heath.

But does that matter?  Does it matter that Richard Spencer was listed as the trainer of Outlander (or that Phil Kirby was listed as the trainer of Don Poli) when the two horses had only joined their new trainers' teams less than 48 hours before the race, at Aintree, and had never been to the trainers' stables?  The trainer listed is the person responsible for the horse on the day of the race.  How much of the preparation the trainer has or hasn't undertaken doesn't matter.  That's not what the name of the trainer tells us: it tells us who is responsible for the horse on raceday.

It's the same with training partnerships, which we keep being told should be happening here.  I can't understand that.  All they do is make the listing of the information on the race-card and in the papers much more unwieldy.  Telling us that two people, rather than one, are responsible is actually more misleading than telling us that only one person is.  Ultimately you have to have one person in the firing line if something goes wrong.  One person to be fined, suspended or disqualified if a crime or misdemeanour has taken place.

Saying that we have to have more than one name listed because more than one person has played a key role in preparing the horse for the race is silly.  Of course more than one person has played a key role.  Surely nobody thinks that, just because only one name is listed, one person has trained the horse in isolation?  Saying we need the second name to clear up any misunderstanding just makes it more confusing, implying that only two people are involved and that the credit can be fairly distributed by using two names.

Of course there are some trainers who do everything, but very few; and none who train more than about four horses.  You could have three co-trainers listed, without listing the most crucial person in the process, ie the person who rides the horse every day.  This listing of the trainer isn't meant to be a list of credits of those who have played their parts in the horse's preparation; it is the name of the person who will carry the can if things go wrong, the person who will take responsibility for what happens when that horse runs in that race.  In Outlander's case it was Richard Spencer.  In Don Poli's case it was Phil Kirby.   Gordon Elliott had ceased to be responsible for the horses on the Thursday.  Is that too hard to understand?