my new brilliant idea.

​If I try to concentrate on an idea, to flesh out the vagaries of the concept into something substantial, with the veneer of many weeks of careful study attached to it, pretty much a 100% of the time my brain will fail me. Then, with an eruption of many Sheldon Cooper bazzingas, just to prove that it has not gone to mush, my brain will present, fully-formed, an idea brimming with initiative and the question mark of why no one else has ever thought-of it before.
This is such an event, such an idea.
Although being a traditionalist I was not at first keen on the idea of the Dublin Racing Festival and yet not for the first time I have been proved wrong. I didn’t like the idea of cherry-picking races from other racecourses and shoehorning them into one meeting to produce a spectacular show that could bottom so many horses that it weakened the Cheltenham Festival. In fact, so warmed by the resulting big weekend and excited from the soles of my feet upwards that I.T.V. are televising the meeting for the first time, I propose enlarging the Dublin Racing Festival by staging on the same weekend a two-day Cheltenham Trials Day.
Yes, there is the risk of putting too many eggs in two Irish Sea separated baskets, what with the February weather and the worrying inability of the Cheltenham drainage system to cope with the type of monsoon weather that when first installed dried out the course to the effect that firm occasionally featured in the going description.
But think about it for a moment. One of the tantalising aspects of the Cheltenham Festival is the rivalry between the Irish and the home team. So why not stage, on the same dates in the calendar, a ‘trials weekend’ – the Dublin Racing Festival is in effect trials for the Cheltenham Festival – at both Leopardstown and Cheltenham. The same races at each course, Triumph Hurdle trial at Leopardstown, for instance, followed fifteen-minutes later by a Triumph Hurdle trial at Cheltenham. Champion Hurdle trial at Leopardstown followed fifteen-minutes later by a Champion Hurdle trial at Cheltenham. Gold Cup, Arkle and Champion 2-mile trial at Leopardstown followed fifteen-minutes later by the same trial at Cheltenham. And so on.
Of course, it would need cooperation and coordination between the two courses and by the racing authorities of both countries and for it to succeed as imagined it would require the weather in the two countries to synchronise in perfect harmony. And if the weather did let us down either in Ireland or in the Cotswolds, the disappointment would be as gut-wrenching as Crisp getting done inches before the winning post by Red Rum after so magnificently destroying the Aintree fences image as being horse-withering banks of solid oak – but such idea are what dreams are made of, right?
And if Ireland can finance a weekend of wall-to-wall Grade 1’s, why can’t the same be achieved here? 
This idea would shine a bright light on what is usually the dullest time in the British racing calendar and would illuminate what awaits us during the middle of the following month, the brightest light in the British racing calendar. As with Ireland, we are having to survive as wretched a time as any of us can remember for our sport. I suspect if all these government restrictions continue for many more months, the sport here and in Ireland will be holding on for dear life by its boot straps.
This time next year we simply have to have something bright and beautiful in place to help kick-start the recovery towards a sustainable future. A Dublin Racing Festival staged on the same two days as a Cheltenham Trials Festival is that ‘something bright and beautiful’. I move that this proposal be put to the house. Or the B.H.A..