with crossed fingers i write ...

​It is the day before the day we have longed-for since the start of the season, for some, as with me, since the end of last season, the flat being for me only an interlude that must be tolerated.
Given how this sport can so easily shoot itself in the foot, let’s hope and prayer neither poor stewarding or the weather is the lead story on any of the next four days. Crossed fingers for Wednesday.
The B.H.A. have made some pretty diabolical decisions this season, with the fiasco at Sandown on Saturday yet another calamity for the sport that could have been avoided by the simple expedient of removing one of the finishing posts. Surely someone must have thought it a good idea since the last cock-up. If you can’t make the job idiot-proof then, as they say, employ a better class of idiot!
To my mind, things haven’t really improved since Saturday. Why, for instance, were there two jumps meetings on the Sunday before Cheltenham and three on the Monday, all of them, on the Monday, at southern courses. Shouldn’t we be wanting all of our top jockeys to be fit for the biggest meeting of the year? Why put them to unnecessary risk of injury by programming five meetings in the run-up to Cheltenham? Shouldn’t we be wanting them fresh in mind and body? Wouldn’t the trainers that employ them prefer to have them at home helping to put the finishing touches to their Cheltenham runners?
Sunday would have been the perfect opportunity to have two all-weather meetings, with two more on the Monday. The three jumps meetings for Monday would serve the sport better spread over the next four days to give jockeys unwanted for Cheltenham plenty of good rides to help boost their careers and bank balance.
But then what do I know? The men and women at the B.H.A. are intelligent and educated, no doubt with a satchel-full of university degrees spread amongst them. Some may have even ridden a horse. Or at the very least know which end to offer a carrot. If only I had attended my secondary modern more often and listened more intently when I hadn’t anything better to do and chanced to go along to classes, I might have used the intelligence I had when younger to more lucrative effect and found my station in life helping the B.H.A. make up silly rules that even a stable lad with zero-years’ experience of the trade might comprehend as flawed.
Did anyone think through the ‘no horse can run twice at the festival’ rule? Because if they had given it the deep thought required, they would have realised it was compromised by the enticement of a bonus to the winner of the Imperial Cup to run at the Festival. In fact, any horse that ran over the weekend, or even on the Monday, could run at the Festival, even on the following day. To stop highly professional trainers from running a fit and healthy horse twice at the festival is plain wrong, especially if it is allowable on every other day of the year.
And why stipulate that trainers must figuratively jump through hoops to prove their horses are fit and able to compete at Cheltenham? Firstly, it is simply a P.R. exercise and secondly it is an insult the Trainers Federation should complain about to suggest that any trainer would take a horse to any race meeting, let alone Cheltenham, that is unfit to be there. It is nothing more than getting their defence in first in case something horrible should happen, which undoubtedly it will. It is pandering to the ignorant whilst taking opportunity away from owners, trainers and jockeys, all of whom have the welfare of the horse as their first priority.
On to matters more vital than chucking mud at racing’s powers-that-be. Anyone who reads ‘Old Moore’s Almanack’ will know that at the end of their predictions for world events each month, they attempt to point readers toward the winners of the big races to come. It is on the lines of ‘a nine-year-old will likely win the Gold Cup at Cheltenham’. And ‘the favourite will win the Champion Hurdle’. Mind you, in this year’s volume they are also making suggestions for the Tote Gold Trophy, a race not run under that name for a year or two. Perhaps someone at the B.H.A. is their racing advisor.
So, I will predict that a mare bearing the name of a fruit will win the Champion Hurdle. There will be a massive upset in the Champion Chase. A big outsider will win the Stayers Hurdle and an older horse will win the Gold Cup and be retired there and then. I also expect Neil King to have his first Cheltenham winner, though it will not be the rider’s first Cheltenham winner.