yesterday the cambridgeshire, today the arc.

​Do you challenge yourself to tip as many winners as the I.T.V. team of experts on any single day? Tom Segal, they are not. Have you ever challenged yourself to better Tom Segal on any given day? My point is this, apart from studying form and weeding out horses with a preference for ground which on the day is the opposite and preferences for flat or hilly courses or going left or right, every other factor in lumping on to a horse is pretty much guesswork. It is why your grandmother or a friend who wouldn’t know Redcar from Cheltenham can find a 33/1 winner while you languish all day backing loser after odds/on loser. It is why horse racing is such an addictive and fascinating pursuit.
Astro King was hardly mentioned by the panel assembled at Newmarket by I.T.V. to point the viewer in the direction of the most likely winner of the Cambridgeshire Handicap, one of our best races of the year. I’m not saying I would have put him up as a likely winner as I thought he had too much weight in a race with so many horses holding perfectly good chance of winning. I went for Crack Shot at the other end of the handicap which ran okay as did a dozen others.
What Astro King did prove yesterday is when a good trainer gets a talented horse to train, the job can be done equally as well as, say, Sir Michael Stoute, the previous trainer of Astro King. The top owners would do well to think on this when deciding the fate of the lesser horses they have in training with the top end of the trainer’s list trainers. A move to someone like the Kublers’ might prove more profitable than simply shipping a disappointing yet well-bred horse to the sales or selling abroad.
I continue to be dismayed and annoyed by ‘t.v, experts’ and trainers pour cold water with immediate effect on any suggestion that a horse, and I make the example of Vandeek to make my case, shouldn’t be thought of as a Guineas horse as ‘he has so much speed that he would be better off going for the Commonwealth Cup’, a race spoken of these days as if it is a classic in itself. Frankel has ‘so much speed’, didn’t he? I rest my case.
In dismissing the Guineas, in September of a 2-year-olds life, for pities sake, as ‘not in our thoughts’ and then talking in glowing terms of the Commonwealth Cup as if it is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, people are kicking our classics down the road as if they no longer held the glitter of years gone by. The connections of Vandeek should be disappointed if the horse does not prove to be a classic winner, not exulted by the possibility of winning a non-classic race at Royal Ascot. In time, if not already, Royal Ascot is beginning to loom over flat racing as a ‘winning there is the be all and end of all of the sport’ as the Cheltenham Festival sucks in the glory from the rest of the season in National Hunt. If mega-rich owners can dismiss the opportunity of winning a classic with the nonchalance of a waving hand, preferring the lesser glory of lesser races, then it is no wonder the sport currently is travelling a long uphill road pushing a hand-cart.
The Arc? Lester and Nijinsky losing in 1970 to Yves Saint-Martin and Sassafras remains one of my biggest disappointments in life as well as horse racing. The ‘experts’, desperate to find an explanation for a defeat that on all-known form was as likely as The Maldives sinking beneath the waves, fell to criticising the jockey for leaving Nijinsky with too much to do, few of them complimenting Saint-Martin for his opportunistic riding that presented Lester with a mountain to climb. For those too young to remember Nijinsky, just think of how you would have felt if Frankel had suffered defeat.
Incidentally, anyone wishing to know all there is to know about the history of the race, the only source you will need is Malcolm Pannett’s book ‘A Century of the Prix de I’Arc de Triomphe’.
I think everyone would agree that this year’s renewal is not one of the most intriguing in the history of the Arc. Ace Impact may prove a great winner and go on to be the Nijinsky of the modern era and only a stunning victory for the French horse will elevate the race today to be on a par with the great races of the past. The ground has come in his favour, which should negate any negatives about his ability to stay 12-furlongs. Do I think, as if matters, as I am as poor a tipster as I am a surgeon, he’ll win? Perhaps. Instinct nods me in his direction. But!
If I were to totter across the bridge over the Torridge to one of our betting shops, which, undoubtedly, I will not be doing, I would go each-way on Bay Bridge as I suspect the horse, without any announcement along the way, has been trained specifically for the race and there is no one better at training a horse for one day in the calendar than Sir Michael Stoute. And what a weekend that would make for Richard Kingscote, having already won the Cambridgeshire and the Royal Lodge at Newmarket.