another win, another win, novices, grade 1's, overlooking an important aspect & to unite is right.

​The success of the Berkshire Millions weekend is a win for me as I have long advocated that regionalised ‘festival’ meetings is the way forward. Summer festival race-meetings form a comprehensive narrative to Irish racing, with many of them tied to local and historic fares. Horse racing gained its popularity in its formative years through local fares, with horse races central to the fun and entertainment. Why is it not possible, for example, for Worcester, Stratford and Hereford to get together to put on a similar, if lower grade, festival. The area abounds in local tradition, with the Three Choirs Festival just one that comes to this tired mind of mine.
The Berkshire Millions three-days is proof-positive that people can come together in this sport for the good of the sport.

Another win for me is the success I.T.V. are making of their terrestrial coverage of horse-racing. I made the bold claim that the sport was in safe hands after watching the first episode of ‘The Morning Show’. I write this in light of the feature in Sunday’s edition of the Racing Post documenting how Channel 4 ‘stole’ the Cheltenham contract from the B.B.C. At the time I was on the mortified side of bemusement that the grand old B.B.C. was being sidelined by the sport. On that occasion I was wrong to be concerned as Channel 4, minus MrCririck who I never warmed to, proved to be a cut above the B.B.C. on all fronts. Simon Holt proved to me that though he was the ‘voice of racing’, Sir Peter could not hold a candle to Holt’s professionalism. That was a sad revelation for me.

Gordon Elliott is aiming Three Card Brag at the Aintree National. What is wrong with that? He is a novice chaser who won for the first time over fences yesterday at Thurles and come Aintree will be having only his sixth run in a steeplechase. Yes. Both Noble Yates and Rule the World won the race in recent years as novices, with the latter having never won a chase, yet to my mind this is a dangerous precedent that might well come home to bite us if a novice of limited experience over fences should suffer a fatality during the race. This is yet another example of how emasculated the new Aintree National is compared to what it used to be.

The reason field-sizes in Grade 1 races over recent years have shrunk is because, as is recognised by all and sundry, there are fewer horses of that calibre around. To provide corrective change to the competitiveness of Grade I’s, action needs to take place. While the decline in Grade 1’s is apparent, there should be less Grade 1 races in all divisions of the sport, especially in the lead-up to Cheltenham, with only a single Grade 1 novice chase over 2-miles and 3 and only one novice hurdle over 2-miles and the intermediate distance between New Year and March to ensure Grade 1’s have true meaning. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Sometimes drastic problems need drastic solutions.

When field-sizes are debated by racing journalists, where they trot-out statistics to either prove the obvious or disprove a myth, what is regularly failed to be included in the debate is the impact of all-weather racecourses. Now cannot be compared to the time before all-weather. Before the advent of all-weather racing, stoutly-bred flat horses would often be tried over hurdles through the winter. Take Night Nurse and Attivo as two prime examples. Yet owners are no longer forced to pay training expenses while their horses stand idle between November and March as the all-weather allows them to pay training expenses for horses that can be in active service throughout the winter.
Also, a horse like Sea Pigeon who failed on the flat, became available for jumps trainers to purchase him, whereas nowadays his type would be snapped-up to race in Hong Kong, Australia or the Far East. It is just a different ball-game to how things used to be.

It fills my heart with pride to see the horse racing industry joining the battle against inheritance tax, a ploy to allow elites to buy-up our countryside, by uniting with landowners and farmers in their legitimate struggle with the progenitors of evil emanating from the corridors of power at Westminster. Yesterday’s line-up of 57-tractors at Fakenham racecourse should be the start of a concerted campaign to bring the dispute to the cameras of I.T.V. and satellite broadcasts. The future of farming coincides with the future of horse racing in this country, mark my words.