Not seeing the wood for the trees can be an occupational hazard for racing professionals. But sometimes the sport doesn’t only look myopic but just plain bizarre. Like when JP McManus’s horse Puturhandstogether won Sunday’s €600,000 Irish Cesarewitch at the Curragh.
Not surprisingly for a race billed as Europe’s richest handicap, a maximum field of 30 runners was declared. Puturhandstogether wasn’t one of them. He was the second of three reserves, there to replace any runners that might drop out.
Reserves keep numbers up to ensure a more attractive betting proposition. It’s entirely possible to argue for their use in a midweek 0-70 handicap where so many have a stake in driving betting turnover. It’s even worthwhile sometimes to turn a blind eye to the inherent flaws in such a system.
But for a race as prominent as Europe’s richest handicap, using reserves on race day was a piece of nonsense.
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Irish racing is keen to sell itself abroad. How much it is prepared to bend over backwards to facilitate Hong Kong’s World Pool is an obvious example of that. But what were punters anywhere to make of the Cesarewitch scenario?
On Sunday morning, Puturhandstogether wasn’t even in the race. And then he was. There were two non-runners. One of them, Shoda, a stable companion of the eventual winner, was taken out due to unsuitable ground conditions.
Puturhandstogether got in and the complexion of the race changed. The enterprising veteran rider Niall McCullagh got his agent to get him on the Cheltenham Festival winner. The horse, reportedly as big as 22-1 in some early betting shows, got backed down to 7-1 joint-favourite and did the business.
Just how incongruous such a storyline is may not be obvious to those involved in Irish racing’s daily grind. Familiarity with the game’s weirder mores might mean you presume certain behaviours and take them for granted. It’s just how things are done here.
But for most everyone else, the bottom line is that the race was won by a horse that wasn’t even a runner on Sunday morning when most punters examined the race.
Perception is a dirty word in some racing quarters. But pretending that how things look to the outside world doesn’t matter is delusional. It matters hugely in substantial areas such as welfare, and in comparatively trivial matters like phantom runners springing into the winner’s enclosure.
This didn’t look like the procedures of a modern, thrusting sport eager for new customers; it looked like stuff from the flapping field, a self-indulgent exercise in suiting participants and letting everyone on the outside go hang.
It’s not like the authorities don’t know how to do better. Disquiet over the reserve system reached a peak all of 12 years ago after the McManus-owned Carlingford Lough won the Galway Plate from first reserve after another of the owner’s horses was withdrawn on the day.
It was such a bad look that the then Turf Club bowed to pressure and recognised how the integrity of big races requires special consideration. With 48-hour declarations the last chance to get a slot in the Plate field was pushed to 10am the previous day.
The Galway Hurdle and the Irish Grand National are the other jump races that don’t permit reserves on race day. It is acknowledgment of public interest for reasons that include ante-post betting. Admittedly that might be all but neutered but it isn’t irrelevant either.
It’s a policy that’s no kind of silver bullet. There have still been less than satisfactory instances of reserves getting into big races, and at least the impression of connections bending the rules to their own advantage.
That the only flat races in a similar situation are World Pool contests implicitly acknowledges how the authorities here recognise how absurd a situation like last Sunday’s looks to an international audience.
Appearing to fill fields on the hoof at the last minute can look farcical. If you can’t glance at a big-race field on race day and not be sure who the runners are, there’s something fundamentally wrong. But this is an environment where flak got fired at Horse Racing Ireland during the summer for there being no reserves on the day itself for the Galway Hurdle.
There is a role for reserves even with the regulatory concerns inherent in such a system. The British authorities have reintroduced them for the ultimate public race, the Aintree Grand National. But the cut-off point is the day before. The basic requirement of knowing the actual field on the actual day is fulfilled.
It would beggar belief that such a valuable race as the €600,000 Irish Cesarewitch failed to clear even that low bar, were it not for abundant evidence as to how Irish racing’s first instinct so often is to suit its own constituency. It did it again last weekend and looked ridiculous doing so.
Something for the Weekend
Japan’s Croix Du Nord (3.05pm) might have to be an exceptional champion to win Sunday’s Qatar Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe from stall 17. But he might just be that. Along with Aidan O’Brien’s star filly Minnie Hauk – drawn in one – the Japanese Derby hero is an unexposed Classic-winning Arc contender from whom the best may yet be to come.
Soft ground might be more of a barrier to the main Irish hope while the French-named Japanese star got no luck of the draw. Byzantine Dream is another hope from Japan with a disadvantageous high slot in 15. It is the 23rd time Japanese racing will try to win the race it covets more than any other. That so much time, effort and money should ultimately revolve around stall position seems too fickle an exercise. But Croix Du Nord might still be talented enough to overcome it.
Saturday’s Longchamp card includes the Prix de Royallieu where Indalimos (4pm) can graduate to Group One level. She beat Consent, slightly unlucky in running, on her last start at Deauville in August and the pair could fight out the finish again.
