best 25, mullins, windsor & blackmore.

​In today’s Racing Post, the grandee of racing journalists, the always reliable and informative Peter Thomas, was tasked with coming up with the best 25 National Hunt horses since the year 2,000. It was not an arduous task, I should imagine; rather akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Once he had decided to cull any horse to have won big races prior to 2,000, as with Hurricane Fly, it was simply a case of assigning numbers 1 through 5 and the rest could be assembled in any order. Who could say with any conviction whether Thistlecrack should be rated higher than Imperial Commander or Big Buck’s higher than Kicking King?
Obviously Kauto Star is number 1, in my eyes he would rank number 2 of my lifetime given a c.v. that even Arkle would envy. If it were not for the barren years when his heart weakened, my all-time number 2 would be Sprinter Sacre, mainly for the Barry Geraghty days when he was simply sublime but also for his always under-appreciated second-coming in 2016 when he retook his 2-mile crown beating the following season’s Ryanair winner, Champion 2-mile chase winner, as well as 2 previous winners of the Champion 2-mile chase.
Peter Thomas places Denman 3rd and that is to be respected. As with Sprinter, in his pomp Denman was the second-coming but, again as with Sprinter, heart problems stymied his career, as injury stymied Arkle’s. In my opinion, Peter Thomas’s opinion cannot be objected to.
One day I will explain to any young person, anyone under 50, why Arkle was by far the greatest racehorse of all-time and why his stable companion Flyingbolt might even be considered the second-best.

Patrick Mullins is riding in the first race at Catterick tomorrow, an amateur riders’ handicap chase, for Ryan Potter. Last week he rode a winner for Neal Mulholland and got a few winners on the board during the summer. Is he attempting to add a British amateur title to his multitude of Irish equivalents? Given all the juicy odds-on chances he rides for his father in Bumper races on home soil it might be considered a risk chancing his arm on quite ordinary horses trained over here.

A good time was had by all at Windsor yesterday, it seems. I must admit it was a joy to see jumping at Windsor again and hope it continues long into the future.
Wetherby have a few flat fixtures nowadays, as Windsor intend to have 3 or 4 jump meetings a year. It begs the question why other tracks that at the moment are either all-flat or all-jumps, do not make a similar leap. Worcester used to have flat meetings which were discontinued as they were not well attended by the public. Yet given they forfeit any number of meetings per year due to flooding from the nearby River Severn, could they not consider holding a few flat meetings or even mixed cards? Nottingham, too, used to stage National Hunt and stopped due to losing too many meetings due to waterlogging. But could they not stage mixed cards through the summer or even the odd jumps only fixture. Clerks of the courses need to look outside of the box they are restrained by. Flat races and hurdle races are held at the same meeting in Ireland, so why not in Britain? Windsor achieved their third-best crowd of the year yesterday when ordinarily the racecourse would be making no money throughout the winter.

After three-months absence through injury, today heralds the return of Rachel Blackmore. Naas is the place, I think, and her Supreme winner from last season Slade Steel is her first ride back. As modest as she is, she is box office and the only sadness is that no other female jumps jockey is anywhere close to being in her slipstream. In Ireland, she remains unique and that is not good for the sport. In Britain, we have a dozen female jockeys who ride regularly, even if none of them are anywhere close to achieving the success enjoyed by Bryony Frost. And by God, is she missed in this particular quarter of racing’s backwater!