l'homme presse, sandown, fog, sad farewells, vandals & bahrain.

​L’Homme Presse will be aimed at the Ryanair Chase at the Cheltenham Festival if ground conditions should be heavy in March. Here is my view on this. If heavy ground detracts from L’Homme Presse’s chance of winning the Gold Cup, surely it will detract from his chance of beating speedier horses over a shorter distance. That is not a question, simply my take on the possibility of trying to replicate what the Skeltons achieved with Protektorat last season. Last year it was a rather poor Ryanair, this year’s renewal promises to be a lot hotter.
Given he did not see a racecourse last season until January, after an injury that had kept him at home for twelve-months, I thought to lead the field into the straight in the Gold Cup last season was a valiant effort. As was his 3rd-place finish in the King George last week. To me, as with Brighterdaysahead being swerved around the Champion Hurdle in order to pick-up a much smaller pot on the same day, owners have a responsibility to the sport to ensure their best horses run in the best races and as such L’Homme Presse should be aimed at the race he has the form to win, and that is not a race over 2mile 4, a distance he has not exactly shined over during his progression from novice chaser to perhaps the top 3-mile chaser in Britain.
I just wish trainers, and in particular owners, stopped trying to be smart and when given the rare opportunity to win a gold medal go for gold.

Sandown is in a ‘reasonable position’ for racing to go ahead on Saturday even though the course is not fleeced all round and the temperature on Friday night going into Saturday morning is forecast to drop to minus-3 and not rising above plus 3 during the day. As with Wincanton faced with a similar battle against the cold, I give neither much hope of going ahead. And anyway, after all the meetings over the holiday period, it would allow all concerned a bit of me-time if there no racing for a few days.

On the subject of the weather. Is it possible that racing taking place when it is foggy or extremely cold is detrimental to the health of the racehorse. Be it man or beast, lungs are quite fragile organs, with racehorses especially prone to lung infections and the breaking blood vessels. Can it really do them any good to be breathing in moist fog or cold air either at sprint distances on the flat or over long distances over jumps especially in those final ‘lung-bursting’ final few furlongs?

John Randall’s round-up of the previous year’s human and equine deaths is always a hard read for me, with perhaps the loss of the racehorses more difficult to swallow than the death of the people who owned, trained or rode them. The death of Istabrag, despite all J.P.’s team did to give him the best possible chance to live long into old age, was a loss to me as difficult to come to terms with as the death of the inestimable Alastair Down. I can promise you this, if I should end-up in the same place as Alastair in the after-life, I will give him a vivid dressing-down for not trying to live as long as possible and to have written his unmissable column for as long as possible.

Musselburgh have been vandalised again. A suitable punishment for mindless destruction should be to reimburse the victims of their crime to the full amount and if it should take the perpetrator their whole life to repay, then so be it, and if it should impact on their future life, so be it. I used to think vandals should be horse-whipped to an inch of their lives or even shot at dawn but I realise now that, even if the crime is deserving of such a draconian punishment, it would be going too far and does nothing to compensate their victims.

Whereas I would like to see the Racing Post publish racecards from the French provinces during our National Hunt season, the editor chooses to give us information on racing in Hong Kong, Bahrain and Dubai, of which I have no interest and am inherently against as a good proportion of the problems in racing in Britain is due to the emergence of racing in these far-flung countries.