limiting trainers to 4-runners per race.

​The B.H.A.’s proposal to limit trainers to a maximum of four-runners per race is sound. I don’t like it as it is a form of discrimination, though I am forced to concede that in the present circumstance where the gap between the super-trainers and the hard-grafting smaller trainers grows by the season, it is a brake in need of administering.
Why the B.H.A. are going down this road and not the Irish racing authority is the real debate here as this subject is far more of a problem in the Emerald Isle than this side of the pond. Perhaps the B.H.A. had visions of Gordon Elliott having fourteen-runners in a single race at the Cheltenham Festival or, more likely, they have to come realise that by limiting the number of runners in the Grand National to 34 there was a favourite’s chance of having over half the field trained by Elliott and Willie Mullins between them. Perhaps, in private, Aintree and the B.H.A. have conceded that in forever tinkering with the Grand National they are slowly killing the golden goose by a thousand cuts and cannot risk having the race won year by year by one of the super-powers of the sport and further diminishing the public’s affection for the race?
Limiting the number of runners any one trainer can have in prestige races is worth trying, though I cannot see the Coolmore ‘lads’ being pleased about it, given they like to have as many runners as possible in the Epsom Derby, for example. This cap on runners could, conceivably, have a detrimental effect on betting turnover if Aidan O’Brien is limited to four-runners when if he were allowed six, each-way betting would be available to punters. I believe Coolmore having five or six runners in a classic is a different problem to Elliott or Mullins dominating a race at the Cheltenham Festival.
Also, during periods when the weather intervenes and, as of now, there have been wholesale abandonments, especially towards the end of the season, trainers might have a dozen well-bred youngsters in need of a run before going out-to-grass for the summer. To have to choose which horses to run would be an added dilemma, having to tell an owner that it is his or her preference to run other owners’ horses.
This ‘rule of four’ must come with a caveat that in periods after drought, flood or frost, some races should be except to allow trainers the opportunity to run horses desperately in need of racecourse experience. Or indeed to get horses ready for the prestige races to come.
The B.H.A. are in consultation with all relevant stakeholders about the proposal. Quite why they are consulting, though, is beyond me. We already have a fair idea who will be against and who will be for the proposal: the super-power owners and trainers will want to pour cold water on the proposal; the smaller syndicates, owners and trainers will be wholeheartedly behind for the proposal. I would imagine jockeys associated with the super-power trainers and owners will have misgivings as potentially the 4-runner rule will further limit their chance to getting on a lively outsider and potential winner of the Grand National, for instance.
One of my main moans about the B.H.A. is that it prefers ‘talk’ to ‘data’. They implement whip guidelines with regularity without the support of data from trialling each and every possible variation from no whip to a free-for-all. Data moves science. Data proves and disproves theories. The four-runner rule is worth trialling, especially with the Cheltenham Festival and the Grand National, amazingly, already on the horizon. Just bring in the rule for a trial period and let it fly its course. 
One benefit of the four-runner rule will be that owners of horses trained by the super-powers with, say, the Grand National in mind, will be forced to send them to other trainers in order to, perhaps, achieve a life’s ambition of having a runner in the big race. That, if only for a short period, can only be of benefit to the trainer lucky enough to get a new horse in the yard, perhaps a lively outsider for the world’s greatest horse race.