observations on today's news stories.

​Of course, Honeysuckle should be targeted at the Champion Hurdle, irrespective of how she performs at Leopardstown on Saturday. She is unbeaten, is already a winner at the Cheltenham Festival and seemingly has no ground preference. Although I believe the innovation from a 3-day Festival to 4-days – I would actually like a 5th-day tagged on, but not a Festival day – to be correct, it has to be said it is now too easy for connections to duck the challenge of the major races to run in the lesser Festival races. And yes, there are lesser races at the Festival. 
The Mares Hurdle in particular devalues the Festival, even though the concept for encouraging an increase in mares in training is wholly admirable. Horses with the sort of ratings Honeysuckle and Benie Des Dieux have achieved should not be eligible for the Mares Hurdle, encouraging their connections to go for either the Champion or Stayers Hurdle. The Mares race is not titled the Champion Mares Hurdle and if there were a ratings cap it would in many years be a more competitive race.

Now, Mr.Henderson of Seven Barrows. I seem always at present to be having a pop at him. I must be becoming arrogant and too full of myself. If he were to be painted as a mountain, I would be an indistinct figure at the foot. He knows more about training racehorses than I accumulatively know about every subject lodged in my imagination. But to everyone, including the great man himself, Santini is everything you would look for in horse for a modern-day Grand National and as last season proved there might not be ‘another year’. Look, if Santini were to win this season’s Gold Cup, and on last year’s form that would is perfectly feasible, he would be top weight for the Grand National for the next two runnings of the race. He doubtless will be this year. But he’ll not be conceding as much weight this time around and to be honest I doubt if this year’s race will be overly competitive. This year, I suspect, he’ll have to give Bristol de Mai a single pound, in the future, especially if he wins the Gold Cup, that might be seven. Go for the Grand National this season, is my take on it. But then what do I know?

I don’t have a clue how these things work but given the agreed incompetence of the IHRB, shouldn’t those whose livelihoods are dependent on their decisions and adjudications get together to take a vote of no confidence in them?

This is only a thought and the weather may step in and prove moot the debate but wouldn’t it have been, given Wetherby have no expectations of the chase course being fit for purpose on Saturday and Sandown are in the same position with their hurdles course, that the Contenders Hurdle was given to Wetherby and the Towton Novices Chase rerouted to Sandown. A simple solution that for all I know was not so simple to implement. 

Finally: the phrase ‘Trying to be the Best Boy in Class’ keeps coming to mind when witnessing arbitrary decisions made by the racing authorities that have very little sense to them. In Ireland, a country I have heard described as Pravda-Central at the moment, allow amateurs to carry on riding, yet in Britain the B.H.A. are not allowing them to ride. I am pretty sure these same men and women are mixing with professional jockeys, trainers and stable staff at home. I would be pretty sure they are shuttling between professional stables and the point-to-point stables where their pointers are housed. In the same way people in the wider world are shuttling between their places of work, the supermarket and the town park and local leisure amenities. Yet amateur jockeys cannot attend and ride at racecourses that are deemed safe from the dreaded kung-flu.