when going fresh is a gamble without a safety-net.

​I once nicknamed Dan Skelton, privately (I did not e-mail referring to him as Dan ‘likes to be fresh’ Skelton) as criticism for keeping his best horses dressed-up in cotton-wool. Lately to seems to have tired of both the expression and the policy to the same extent ‘best fresh’ tired me at the time. Yet the ‘fresh’ angle has become, to use a loose and overused term, an epidemic over the past few seasons. Paul Nicholls, too, is fond of the term, which is perhaps where Dan Skelton got the idea.
Going to a championship race after only one or two runs is a relatively modern policy; it was not the thing in the days of Arkle or Burrough Hill Lad. Back in the golden days of the sport, if a horse went to Cheltenham with only one-run during the season, something had gone horribly wrong and all the experts would see it as an uphill battle against the odds for a horse to win a championship race with so little match practice before hand.
Marine Nationale is the latest horse to have its future career made much harder, having accrued a ‘little injury’ which will put him off games for six-weeks, meaning he not only will miss the Arkle next week but Punchestown and the rest of the season. So, he will go into his first season out of novice class with only two starts over fences. It is arguable that without the injury, which is plain bad luck, he would have taken in Cheltenham and Punchestown, giving him four starts over fences as experience. But his owner/trainer chose not to start him off this season until Christmas, when the ground would be to his advantage, and then blamed the soft ground for his horse’s poor run at Leopardstown in February.
The ’best going fresh’ policy awarded Dan Skelton no trophies and I would argue that Protektorat is as good this term after many runs than he ever was kept in his stable for most of the season. When Cheltenham is done and dusted and the connections of horses who had been ‘kept fresh’ for the big day and yet failed to land a blow will be keen to gain ‘compensation’ at Aintree and no doubt Punchestown and Sandown, too, and you can bet your bottom dollar there will be no mention of ‘best fresh’ if they should win.
Nicky Henderson often complains during November and December that there are no races – he means no easy races – for both his best horses and those inhibited by a lack of racecourse experience. Of course, he is famous for charting programmes for his horses starting with Cheltenham and working backwards, a policy that has served him well, while also laying a trap for himself when the ground is too firm for his liking in the early months of the season. That said, he has a point.
There should be races early in the season to cater for inexperienced chasers. Young horses are our future, remember, so I say sod betting turnover and lets have some races, perhaps at the smaller tracks, for the better class of horse and especially the inexperienced second-season chasers. If Constitution Hill were to rock up at Warwick, for instance, in a three-horse affair, attendance would double, with no quibbles about the race being uncompetitive. 
Something must be done within the race programme to encourage or arm-twist trainers into running their top horses earlier in the season. I have already advocated, and I do not mind repeating myself, that the Cheltenham Festival might be split into two, with Trials Day, rather a dud in my opinion, made into a two-day meeting, with the first day comprising the Festival intermediate distanced races – the Ryanair, the Turners, the novice mares hurdle, the Mares Hurdle, renamed the Champion Mares Hurdle and run over 2-miles and the Mares Chase and perhaps the Baring Bingham, and on the second-day trials for the other major races at the Festival, the Champion Hurdle, or a Ryanair equivalent for hurdlers, the Gold Cup, etc.
There needs to be a radical look at the sport, both by the B.H.A. and trainers, with a ‘for now’ policy implemented for the start of next season. Doing nothing is the same as the B.H.A.’s tinkering around the edges of the sport. The Dublin Racing Festival is a roaring success; in Britain we need to go in a similar direction.