the lincoln handicap.

​The Lincoln Handicap, formerly run at the Carholme, Lincoln, but now parked on Town Moor, Doncaster, is a flicker of a flame to the raging inferno it once used to be. Before and after the 1st World War, it was a race more prized than the Grand National, with the Spring Double an aspiration for trainers and punters alike. The Lincoln represented the arrival of spring.
Nowadays the Lincoln is just the first of a season-long series of heritage mile handicaps and a long way from being the most prestigious. The Lincoln has become a light on the horizon of a sport that limps into view, stays its hand for a few days and sputters into life in April with the Craven meeting at Newmarket, with by then the Lincoln firmly forgotten.
The flat begins with a whimper when with very little thought it could dazzle like a troupe of flamenco dancers. Now a two-day meeting when it might become a festival of the arrival of the flat.
So here goes, impressing no one, I should imagine. Why not begin the flat with a six-race all-handicap card that comprises an I.T.V. style accumulator, accompanied by an advertising campaign, with a £1-million first prize for anyone who can name all six-winners? With a slightly mad, almost certainly radical Lincoln Handicap has the final event.
The Free Handicap for 3-year-olds (not necessarily transferred from Newmarket) could open proceedings, shining a light of the progress and possibilities of the previous season’s two-year-olds and whether any runner might play a part in the classics to come. The Newmarket Town Plate might be resurrected, the 2-miles 2-furlong handicap lost from the Doncaster programme and in need of restoration. A 5-furlong handicap, a 12-furlong handicap and either a six-furlong handicap or a mile handicap for 3-year-olds. Big fields, big fun.
Here is the thing, though. Unless Doncaster could conform to my radical proposal to transform the Lincoln into a race of jeopardy and intrigue, a flat equivalent of the Aintree National, I would suggest the Lincoln meeting be transferred to Newmarket. You see, tipping one’s hat to tradition and history, I propose the Lincoln Handicap should become a 40 (or 34 – this idea was born in my head before Aintree wrongly decreased the maximum field to 34) runner race, started from a barrier!
I want to escalate the Lincoln from something quite ordinary to a race where the public hold their breath. There will be difficulties with a bumper-field race not started from stalls, though not-so-much once the race is started. Back in the day, it could easily take twenty-minutes or more for the starter to achieve an even start. Though back in the day the more savvy jockeys knew how to manipulate the starting procedure in order to achieve a flying start. Races could be won at the start in the days before the advent of starting stalls.
Getting 40 (or 34) horses in a line, especially with 40 (or 34) jockeys with zero experience of barrier starts, would be akin to shepherding cats and t.v, would have to allow for the possibility of a delay. But this would be a one-off. I am not suggesting any other race should be altered in this way.
My thinking is this: the flat should begin with a bang and not a whimper. The Lincoln is an historic race, with a history that goes back to the origination of the sport and it is beholding on the B.H.A. and others to give the race the opportunity to be what it once used to be. The flat should have a race with similar jeopardy to the Aintree National and racing should also reach out to the public with a £1-bet that could win them a life-changing amount of money, especially with the Aintree National staged the following Saturday.
What greater sight would there be than 40 (or 34) horses thundering down the Town Moor or Rowley Mile, much in the same vein as the first six-fences at Aintree. Though perhaps the fear on the faces of the jockeys riding in the Lincoln might be more memorable. The unknown is always fearful, is it not?
This Saturday’s race will produce, I predict, nothing that could be described as extraordinary. A Lincoln with 40-runners (or 34) started from a barrier can only produce the extraordinary.
It will never happen. It will never even be debated.