truesdale, arc de triompe, yearling sales & birthdays.

​The Jockey Club’s Nevin Truesdale has asked the racing public to protect the Grand National from adverse criticism while at the same time the custodians of the race are repeatedly stabbing it in the back in order to protect the cash-cow that is first and foremost in the minds of the Jockey Club.
In time, I AM MAXIMUS will come to be known as the first winner of the race that replaced the Grand National. He won the National run at Aintree but certainly not the historic race known as the GRAND National.
If Truesdale is asking me to support the new race, then I am willing to abide by his wish. In some ways it was as exciting a race staged last season. But that is not the point. That it resembled a Coral Handicap Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival doth not make it the pinnacle of the sport. It is a new race and it will take time to be accepted by people like myself. It will never, though, be THE GRAND NATIONAL ever again.
What concerned me with what Truesdale had to say on the matter is that they seem to have plans to alter even what we witnessed last April. Perhaps only 28-runners, scrapping the Canal Turn and introducing an upturned dandy-brush, shortening the distance to 3-mile 2-furlongs, establishing speed limits on sections of the course and hell knows what else the damned clerk of the course has in mind.
The Grand National is dead, may it rest in peace.

It is the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday and, sadly, as with the Grand National, it is on the decline. The best horse in Europe, City of Troy, is heading west instead of heading to Paris. There are only two British-trained horses in the race and only one Japanese and German runner. On the bright side, it is as competitive as the Cambridgeshire Handicap, with very little in ratings between the favourite and the outsiders. Personally, I think Shin Emperor is the likeliest winner, with his run in the Irish Champion Stakes looking the best of the entire field. If either Economics or Auguste Rodin were in the race, the latter is but is an unlikely starter, bookmakers would have them vying for favouritism. 

One of my many hobby-horses is why a small percentage of the sale of racehorses at auction cannot be syphoned off to fund after-life care for the horses the breeders’ breed. The top ten lots at Goffs yesterday fetched £7,320,000. 1% of that is £73,000. I would suggest if 1% of all sales above £10,000 were to go to racing, the sport could not only easily fund after-care for racehorses but also bump-up prize-money that might persuade more owners to have their horses in training in this country. Breeders bring these horses into the world; they have as much a responsibility to the horses they sell as everyone else in the chain of a racehorse’s life. At the moment, they are getting off scot-free. 

Everyday, the Racing Post list the birthdays of prominent people in the sport. I would prefer they record the deaths of prominent people but at least in going with birthdays it shines a mirror on how bloody old most of those people are. Today there were only seven-people older than I am. 70-plus, if you must know. And many of that number, as far as I am aware, are no longer active in the sport. It is a demographic laced with foreboding for the sport.