BIG SIGH: THE FLAT TURF SEASON IS UPON US.

In Ireland, the flat turf season began the day after the Cheltenham Festival came to its mighty conclusion. Aidan O'Brien dipped his toe into the water at Leopardstown, though he waited for Naas yesterday before he started to make a splash. Already he is voicing possible classic trials for horses that we heard very little about last season. It is the flat on repeat; the same old, the same old.

For me, someone for whom the flat's existence is just to fill in the time while the jumpers take their rest through the summer and autumn, the start of the flat is an impudence, an intrusion, bullying its way into the headlines long before the National Hunt season has drawn to a close, before the once most popular and greatest horse race in the world is run. Although the Aintree National is rarely run before Easter, before the Irish equivalent at Fairyhouse, I see no reason why the flat cannot  be waited with until Easter before it photobombs its ugly face in front of the cameras. Easter Monday would be a great day to launch the new season with the Lincoln Handicap and perhaps a couple of Guineas trials. The Lincoln, I believe, needs to be loved more than nowadays it is. Back in the day, and if you go far enough back the Lincoln was considered the equal, if not superior, to the Grand National, the two used to be linked as the Spring Double, with trainers occasionally gaining notoriety for being the latest to train the winner of both.

Today, if the heritage mile handicaps run throughout the season were ranked in importance, the Lincoln, sadly, would not feature in the top ten, with the Royal Hunt Cup no doubt light years ahead of all other heritage mile handicaps. The Lincoln, come the day after it is run, will be forgotten about, unrecognised for a history that goes back as far as the days of Admiral Rous, I suspect. I do not claim that the Lincoln is one of my favourite races. In fact, as it is known for the start of a new flat season, I rather despise it in a way. Yet I am a aware of its history, the importance it once held, that it would always appear high on the c.v. of jockeys and trainers. You only have to go back to 1968, the year the Fosbury Flop transformed high jumping, the year David Nicholson was surprised to witness grown men in tears after he had won the Whitbread on Mill House and Sir Ivor became Lester Piggott's favourite Epsom Derby winner, to Frankincense winning for John Oxley under a welter burden, though more importantly financing Oxley's travelling head lad's, Barry Hills, career as a trainer, having backed the horse ante-post throughout the winter, winning the equivalent in today's money of £1.5-million.

This is the time of year when I roll-out my radical proposal to launch the Lincoln back into realm of great British sporting events. It may never regain the lustre it once held but if my proposal was acted upon it would once again be noticeable. I believe the Lincoln should have the same maximum number of runners as the Grand National, with bookmakers re-establishing the historial Spring Double. I also believe, as the Aintree National is a nod to the history that has gone before it, that the Lincoln should offer present-day jockeys a glimpse of past Lincolns, when the race was started behind a barrier and all the chaos and jeopardy that regularly ensued, with, as with Aintree, providing fistfuls of unlucky outcomes.

In this modern world, we live too much in the future, with eyes and promises always cast in future events and inventions, some of which already make the present confusing for so many. Now and again, we should look to the past and how life for ordinary people was in our forebears time. Yes, a 34-runner Lincoln started from a barrier would annually cause controversy and the leading trainers may turn their nose-up at a race that now needed as much luck as being 'thrown-in at the weights'. But it would take the Lincoln from ordinary if well-endowed handicap to the pages of the national press and on to the screens of mainstream television. The Lincoln would become the flat equivalent of the Aintree National, watched around the world. It might even stop a nation like the Melbourne Cup!