romance LOst and horse racing.

​Gordon Elliott has eleven of the twenty runners in today’s Troytown Chase at Navan. Gavin Cromwell saddles four and Henry de Bromhead two. One of Ireland’s most prestigious handicap chases dominated by three of the top four stables in Ireland. Is that good for the sport? Is it a sign of the times? Is it a warning of dire consequence to come?
Where horse racing once held a definite advantage over most other sports is that it could often offer the sporting public a surprise package in the major races, as when Grittar won the Grand National, ridden by an ageing amateur and trained by the two-horse stable of owner/trainer Frank Coton. Or when Coneygree, ridden by a claiming jockey and trained by the Bradstocks, a family operation of less twenty-horses, won the Cheltenham Gold Cup. The claimer went on, of course, be one of the best horseman/jockeys of his generation, Nico de Boinville.
On Saturday, at Cheltenham, and, yes, it was an interesting and exciting day of racing, the meeting was dominated by the top stables in the country. They may be excellent ambassadors for the sport, but Skelton and Nicholls taking it in turns to win the major races is not necessarily good news for the sport. If Sheila Lewis had won the Paddy Power with Straw Fan Jack it would have made a better headline than Paul Nicholls winning it yet again.
At some point in the F.A. Cup this season a minnow will cause an upset by beating a top-tier side. It happens once-a-year but as with Maidstone United last season, they are not going to progress to the latter stages of the tournament. 
A 200/1 winner at Kelso or Fakenham, though, can breakthrough the racing enclosure and become general sporting news; the rank no-hoper defying form and odds to write its own bit of history in a sport with hundreds-of-years-worth of history. Of course, as with Maidstone United, none of these shock winners go one to achieve anything further of note but our sport can not only a newsworthy shock on a Monday but provide equine romance at its very summit.
Remember Norton’s Coin, the 100/1 winner of a Cheltenham Gold Cup that seemed destined to be Desert Orchid’s second victory in the race. The horse was trained by owner/farmer Sirrell Griffiths of Rwyth Farm, Nantgaredig, Carmarthen, Dyfed – yes, I looked it up – as far from the realms of sporting glamour as anyone could get. The old horse still resides there, under the front lawn, where, perhaps, Sirrell and his wife might want their bones laid. He shocked the racing and sporting world that day, defeating the nation’s favourite horse of all-time, yet no one said a word against him. The farmer from Wales had conquered the sporting world and he was revered and respected from that day forth.
I suspect it is circumstance brought about vested interest that is killing the romance. I do not apportion blame on those who presently dominate the sport. I dislike the manner in which, in Ireland, the famous four conducted themselves when the I.H.R.B. brought in sixty races restricted to trainers outside of the top four in hope of levelling the playing field by a degree or two and to keep as many trainers as possible from going broke. But the sport is suffering by the choice of owners to only patronise the select few trainers. Football has gone the same way, with the top few clubs signing the best young talent and leaving smaller clubs with inflated bank balances but a poverty of top-class players.
It is not like the Aintree National is there to supply a dose of romance once in a while, and when Aintree becomes the preserve of the top stables in Britain and Ireland, with exotic runners from the U.S. and France as likely as a permit trainer ever winning the race again, you know a shop window for the sport has been boarded-up. One of my heart-felt reasons for why I believe the changes to the race are not in the sport’s best interests.