Horse race conditions should always be fair and logical

The victory of Nicky Henderson’s Joyeuse in Saturday’s Premier handicap hurdle at Newbury sparked a debate on social media about the qualification criteria for handicap hurdles at the Cheltenham Festival.

The six-year-old mare, despite winning a £155K handicap by eight lengths, needs to run once more over hurdles to be eligible for handicap hurdles at the Cheltenham Festival.

This may seem harsh, but the race conditions for the Cheltenham races were specifically designed to stop unexposed novices from making a mockery of the handicap system at the Festival.

Race planning can be a pretty thankless task at the best of times, but more often than not the conditions attached to races are based on tried and tested formulae or straightforward logic. However, on occasions it is hard to work out the thinking behind the conditions of certain races.

Take, for example, the latest race in an Auction Novices’ Hurdle Series that was run at Naas last Saturday. The race was restricted to horses that were sold at a recognised public auction as national hunt store horses for €45K or less. These horses were allowed to have subsequently won a Bumper (valued at €12K or less) and/or a Hurdle (valued at €12.5K or less) and as many point-to-points as they could muster as long as they were not resold at a public auction for more than €45K.

I can understand the logic of framing races to encourage people to buy store horses at public auctions and this series of races offers lucrative opportunities for those that have done so at the lower end of the market, for €45K or less, but why would you then discourage them from reselling the horse publicly in order to remain qualified for this series of races?

If you buy a store horse for €45K or less and it turns out to be a good one and you want to cash-in by selling it on, the new owners will not be able to race the horse in this series if they paid more than €45K at a public auction. But if you sell it to them privately for any amount of money it remains qualified.

Among the entries for Saturday’s race was a horse called Kish Bank which won a point-to-point by 30 lengths before being sold privately to Gigginstown House Stud. The well-beaten runner-up in that point-to-point was subsequently sold at public auction for £55K, so we can assume that Kish Bank’s new owners paid several hundred thousand for him.

Copper Jack, which was the horse beaten 30 length by Kish Bank in that Tinahely point-to-point had been purchased at a store sale a year earlier for £24K, but was subsequently resold at a public auction for £55K and by virtue of that second sale price doesn’t qualify for this series of races.

De Temps En Temps was another entry for Saturday’s race and that horse was also sold privately after finishing a close second in a point-to-point. The winner of that point-to-point later sold for £140K at public auction and I would imagine Paul Bynre paid a similar price when he purchased De Temps En Temps privately.

On top of the fact that you could have a horse that has changed hands privately for telephone numbers qualifying for a race confined to horses sold publicly for €45K or less, that same horse can then avail of a weight allowance in this series of races which is determined by its original store sale price.

If the first public sale of the horse as a store was for €9K or less it gets to carry 8lbs less than its rivals in the Auction Race. That seems a little unfair if the horse subsequently changed hands privately for hundreds of thousands.

Each race run in this Series is worth €20K and a horse can potentially win two of these qualifiers prior to running in the €75K finale at the Punchestown Festival. Not an insignificant carrot if you were thinking of purchasing an eligible candidate from the point-to-point fields. But if you are buying a horse for more than €45K you have to do so privately or it won’t remain qualified.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to allow all horses that were bought as stores for €45K or less to remain qualified for the series regardless of their subsequent sales value?

Changing the subject, it was sad to hear of the death of his highness the Aga Khan last week. He had been an immense presence on the horse racing scene throughout my entire life and his iconic green silks with red epaulettes were racing’s equivalent of Ferrari’s Formula 1 livery or the football strips of teams such as Man Untied or Liverpool.

It always meant something when you would see his colours printed next to a horse’s name on a race card and it must have brought an immense sense of pride and achievement to the trainers, jockeys and stable staff associated with his runners in the famous silks that had been carried to victory in many of the world’s biggest races by the likes of Shergar, Sinndar, Harzand and Zarkava.

The Aga Khan’s bloodstock empire includes two stud farms, Sheshoon and Ballyfair, that border the small village where I live on the edge of the Curragh in Co. Kildare. Generations of locals have worked on those farms, some would have been in the employ of his grandfather who originally purchased Sheshoon stud in 1923.

It will be an unsettling time for those whose jobs were dependent on him and they will be hoping that the next generation will carry on the family tradition of breeding and racing horses in Ireland.

Finally, my thoughts and prayers are with Michael O’Sullivan and his family after his awful fall at Thurles last Thursday.

I didn’t watch the race and the first inkling I had that something was wrong was when I saw notifications of a delay to the following race on the card at Thurles.

As news began to filter out from the course that Michael had taken a very bad fall and the medical team were awaiting the arrival of an air ambulance my heart sank.

Everyone with a love of horse racing is aware of the risks jockeys take to entertain us, but for the most part we rarely give them more than a second thought as we are only concerned with our own self-centered interests. Incidents like Thursday bring into sharp focus how extremely dangerous horse racing is for the participants.

The improvements in recent years to the safety equipment and associated protocols in relation to race riding have made a difference to the overall picture, but serious injury is still a constant threat for every jockey when they go out to ride in a race.

Please God Michael, with the help of the medical staff at Cork University Hospital and the support of his family, will make a full recovery.