the dark art of handicapping.

​It takes between a week and 10-days for I.T.V.’s theme music to the Grand National to get out of my head and about 3-months for thoughts and images of the race to fade into the miasma of my memory.
Cloth Cap, so we were constantly told by experts, was 14Ib well in last Saturday and because of it he was many tipsters idea of the winner. Without being clever, he never struck me as a Grand National sort of horse, though his disappointing effort was due to a wind problem. When I heard Jonjo give this as a reason for his run, I thought how can a horse display signs of a wind ailment during a race and not give any indication on the home gallops? But in his excellent article on his ride on Burrow Saint in the Racing Post on Monday Patrick Mullins commented that when upsides Cloth Cap he could hear him gurgling, though it is possible he might have swallowed a clod of earth.
So, although being 14Ib well in, Cloth Cap was no good thing. 
I admit to knowing very little about handicapping racehorses. I sometimes look at the weight allotted to certain horses and cannot understand how a horse with six zeros against its name can be allotted a higher weight than one consistently in the frame. It is the same with ratings, a pseudo-science I often refer to as ‘a load of old bollocks’. When Cyrname was given that ridiculous rating, making him the highest rated horse in Britain, he beat a horse with absolutely no form over 2-mile 4, the distance of the Ascot Chase or whatever sponsor’s name it was called. If the race was over 2-miles I could have understood the handicapper’s reaction. But did he ever look himself in the mirror and ask ‘can I justify making Cyrname the best chaser in Britain? Is he really superior to Altior and Clan Des Obeaux? Is he as good as a Gold Cup winner?
And as for the rating of a horse being adjusted upwards when he ‘stands in his stable’ that is simply bizarre.
How can anyone be certain a horse has improved just because it has won a race. For once I agreed with the O’Leary brothers: how can Tiger Roll be, at the age of eleven, having never contested let alone won a Grade 1 race, be as good a horse as he was as nine-year-old after winning a 4-mile novice chase and three cross-country races. Yes, he has won, narrowly, two Grand Nationals but the rating he is burdened with will put him top-weight of any handicap, no matter what the opposition.
Look, to my way of thinking horses should only be re-evaluated by the handicapper after either three runs, so it can be rated as a median of those three races, or if the horse hasn’t run beforehand, after seven-weeks, so the form of the beaten horses can be fully analysed. To return to Cloth Cap; will his rating remain where it is after his poor run in the Grand National or will he be adjusted down to take into account that run?
When good honest horses are being handicapped out of winning races it verges on fraudulent behavior. Why? If a trainer or jockey ‘stops’ a horse, gives it an easy race with plans for the future in mind, if found guilty he or she will lose their licence. Yet a handicapper can stop a horse by giving it more weight than it is capable of winning with. You see horses handicapped on the basis of form they displayed two or three seasons in the past. This is plainly wrong and my system of adjustment to ratings every seven-weeks or after three races would give handicappers’ greater scope. Or perhaps a different type of handicap be established, races based on median ratings, where the rest of a horse’ history is ignored and its weight determined on the median of its last three-races. Just an idea, one worth a letter to the Racing Post methinks!
Of course, the call for handicapping to be reviewed has come about due to the drubbing Irish-trained horses have given to British-trained horses at the Cheltenham Festival and at Aintree. Personally, I think the main reason is that simply most of the top horses are now trained in Ireland, though that is to overlook the success of the smaller yards in Ireland that won races at Cheltenham. Above the state of handicapping in this country, I think the race programme is to blame.
The Irish do not have a major chase for Gold Cup horses until Christmas-time, though they have plenty of condition chases for trainers to prepare their horses for the tests to come at Leopardstown, the Dublin Racing Festival and on to Cheltenham and the Spring Festivals. The slide in this country began with the instigation of the Betfair Chase in November and staged at a course where heavy ground is almost always guaranteed and with virtually no condition chases in the lead-up to help trainers’ prepare their horses. The Irish ignore the race, as does Nicky Henderson, as it comes too early in the season.
If the main thrust of the early part of the season was the King George, with ‘trial’ races leading up to it, there would be room for those horses to take in a British version of the Dublin Festival and still be fresh for Cheltenham and Aintree.