jennings/boring, ireland & glenfarclas.

​In his column in the Racing Post today, the ever-excellent David Jennings makes a plea for racecourses to make a day at the races less boring. I now make the plea for a racecourse either in Ireland or Britain to give him the opportunity to prove his point by appointing him for a day to the position of director of operations, to lay on the sort of ‘never-boring day’ he believes the public expect from a day at the races.
I am not mocking him; he makes a sound argument for jazzing things up. He might find the challenge being one of balance, of not alienating the enthusiasts who attend for the betting and the thrill of the sport, while at the same time engaging attendees who resent paying good money for long periods of idleness and boring nothingness. 
High quality playgrounds for kids would be a great entry point. Get youngsters having fun while slowly bewitching them with the spectacle and excitement of horse and jockeys doing battle on the other side of the rails. Children, as the idle might say, are our future. They are not, of course. Adults are the future; adults must build a world that is all we, the elderly, the middle-aged and the youngsters, want it to be.
Music, yes, at the right moments. Experts corralled into a corner giving forth expert advice to those who want insights into what is to unfold through the day, a definite maybe. In fact, I applaud all the ideas for a less boring day put forward by David Jennings, including pony races, though, I suspect, he might want to put aside his ‘never again 30-minutes between races’ if he wants the ponies to entertain the public. Pony races are still races and require all the same formalities as the big horse races.
I truly would like to have David given the opportunity to put his ideas into practise and to discover how much it costs to host a day when the fun never stops.

In Ireland, at this time of year especially, the most interesting race at a meeting is usually the novice or beginners’ chase. These races nearly always attract a full field, even with Willie Mullins running two or three horses, all with graded form to their names. Today Asian Master, Majborough and Tullyhill all contest a beginners’ chase, yet the programme in Ireland does not allow other trainers go elsewhere with their lesser blooded horses. Novice handicaps are as rare as hens’ teeth in Ireland, yet in Britain they are the preferred option as, though I doubt the data would confirm this idea, they are a better betting medium.
Yesterday at Cheltenham, a prominent owner of Nicky Henderson’s bemoaned the lack of opportunities in this country for novice chasers, with her horse, having won a novice chase last time out, having to return to hurdles in order to get a run. It ran poorly; perhaps confused why after learning the craft of jumping the big-boy larger obstacles only to be returned to the smaller kind as if he had done something wrong the last time, even when winning.
Why would one of Ireland’s major owners, who can have their young horses trained by Mullins, Elliott, Cromwell or de Bromhead, where opportunities are easily found, send a similar horse to Nicholls, Henderson, Skelton or any of the Williams’, where novice chases are frowned upon. In the corporate world, or at  least outside of the racing world, there is something called the ‘Peter Principle’, where someone in an organisation is promoted to a position beyond his capabilities and remains there to make a bollocks of things for everyone else and who must navigate away around their ‘Peter’ just to get their job done with efficiency. It is the same at the B.H.A.. Someone thought novice handicaps were the way forward and he or she have not got the balls to admit they were wrong. It needs sorting and it needs sorting now. Oh, and sorry Nicky, but you have to get into the habit of doing what Willie does and run more than one horse in a novice chase when one pops up on your radar.

The Cross-Country races at Cheltenham are becoming favourites of mine when once I thought them rather needless. In fact, I would like another racecourse to invest in a cross-country course as they make a good substitute race for those horses who would in better days be considered ‘National horses’. As handicaps, these races give opportunities unfound anywhere else, and to those, including the letter writer in today’s Racing Post who believes the Festival ruined by the Glenfarclas being a handicap, a better opportunity at the Festival for older, former top-class horses, would be either a conditions veterans’ race or, as I have proposed a thousand times, a 4-mile Champion Chase. As things stand, the Aintree National is now restricted to top-rated horses and is no longer a true Grand National, rather than Red Rum-type ‘National horses’. To have the Cross-Country Chase as a conditions race is to remove another opportunity from the grand types who yesterday fought out a stirring finish to the Glenfarclas.