1.4-million & celebrate the inferior.

​Last year’s German Derby winner, Palladium, runs over hurdles at Huntingdon today for prize-money that is perhaps the equivalent of what it cost Lady Bamford to transport him from his homeland to Lambourn. The short jaunt to Huntingdon is intended to be a baby-step on a journey that will take the horse to Royal Ascot and the Hardwick Stakes. Some journey; some jeopardy.
Buying a thoroughbred racehorse, albeit one with stallion potential, for 1.4 smackeroos would have a parallel with an art investor spending 1.4-million on a work by a Dutch master and hanging it not in a museum but in a bus shelter. Both Lady Bamford and the fictional art investor are trusting to luck their prize possession survives the trial by fate.
Of course, 1.4-million bucks comes with no guarantees of success and I dare say Palladium is yet to be considered one of the top ten inmates presently lodging at Seven Barrows. Indeed, he is no certainty to win at Huntingdon today. He might win with his head in his chest, on the other hand he might run ingloriously and never see a hurdle again. 1.4-million only guarantees intrigue and the possibility of someone getting their nose burnt. Someone recommended Palladium to Lady Bamford; someone’s reputation is on the line.
I hope he wins as it will further add to the intrigue to the run-up to the Cheltenham Festival, another British-trained hope, the majority of which are with Nicky Henderson, in our decade-long desire to overpower the Irish at the only meeting where it seems to matter. What is in his favour at Huntingdon today and perhaps Cheltenham come March, is that Nico de-Boinville will ride him without fear, without thought to his ridiculous price-tag. It will just be another ride in another novice hurdle for a man who is without doubt one of the top jockeys of his era.

Alan Sweetman’s piece in the ‘All Things Ireland’ strand got me thinking about what I wrote yesterday inspired by his mental walk down memory lane brought-about by a very ordinary handicap chase run at Navan.
‘Ordinary’ handicaps, the sort run every day of the week in Britain and every other day in Ireland, do not usually have runners from the major stables in either Britain or Ireland, and given a need to help those who must live on scraps left by the big-players in the training ranks, would it not be a debatable idea to have a small number of ‘festival meetings’ specifically for horses with a low to lowish rating.
What many journalists choose to overlook when championing the culling of meetings in order to gain surplice prize-money for the mega-wealthy owners to scoop-up, is that the bedrock of our sport, as it has been for a century or more, are the loyal one-horse owners and small-time breeders who are in the sport for the love of it. To my mind, they also have a right to, if not to make the sport pay, at least break-even on their expenditure. For them, the option of transferring their horses to another country is not tenable. For them, it is the love of the horse that trumps all else, the opportunity to see it on a weekly basis, to make a fuss of it, to be in its life for more than the few minutes in either the parade ring or, if lucky, the enclosures for winners or near-but-yet-so-far 2nd, 3rd or 4th.
So why not give consideration to celebrating those horses who will never be good enough to run at a Cheltenham Festival and who are owned and trained by people who do not necessarily seek the limelight of the t.v. cameras. No race, if this proposal came to fruition, need have more than £20,000 to the winner and would not cost a whole lot of money for any company that chooses to sponsor such a meeting.
What would be assured is that every race would have maximum fields and every race would be competitive and would create more than one ‘headline story’. To survive, this sport needs to actively support everyone who works in the industry and a few festivals as I have described would go a little way to buttering a lot of bread. Yes, the big trainers would sneak a well-weighted young horse into one of the races but I could live with that as long as the majority of the prize-money goes to deserving causes.