The turf
Classic mistakes
Robin Oakley
Racehorse trainers don't come any shrewder than Barry Hills. If Barry perseveres with a horse there's usually a good reason, as he has shown this season with four-time winner Calcutta. Noting that he had supplemented Storming Home for last Saturday's Champion Stakes at Newmarket, after the colt had won over 12 furlongs on the Newmarket course two weeks before, I had reckoned him each-way value at the morning 10-1. But with an Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty underway the day job for CNN required my presence in Dublin and I had to do my racing in the Paddy Power betting shop in Baggot Street, where I made the classic mistake. Well, several of them actually.
Mistake number one was seeking local opinion on the Irish candidates in the Cesarewitch. I first approached a uniformed (and, we must hope. off-duty) Garda officer who was studying the 6f from Cork. He proved to be no help with my inquiries, hut the betting-shop consensus seemed to be that Pat Hughes's horse Rapid Deployment, winner of the Irish equivalent the year before, was the best prospect. 'He'd have a good chance,' said the shop manager, and with Paddy Power paying a generous five places on the race I had a go. Alas, it was the other Irish entrant, Dermot Weld's Direct Bearing, which I should have backed.
Pat Smullen was sitting behind the leaders with a double handful on Direct Bearing for most of the last half mile and when he kicked clear it looked all over. It would have been, but for another inspired ride from this year's apprentice-jockey find Ryan Moore, who set out after him on Martin Pipe's Miss Fara and grabbed Direct Bearing on the line. But even the place return from the 16-1 each way would have been nice. My pain though was nothing to that of Dermot Weld who confessed that, after a year of planning, 'Today was the day with this horse.' He had, he admitted, had a few quid on at 25-1.
My second mistake came in the Dewhurst Stakes. Again I saw some eachway value in Tout Seul, although I never really imagined him winning as he was to do at 25-1. Not heavily convinced, though, I allowed coincidence to sway me in favour of the David Loder-trained Dublin, who came nowhere. I then sank some more funds into a 'give him one final chance' bet
at Stratford on Spring Grove, Robert Alner's potentially classy chaser who was on my Ten To Follow last year and whose season fell apart after a couple of falls.
The fourth and final mistake, which blew the rest of the decent win I had enjoyed the previous Saturday with cross doubles on Kieron Fallon's mounts, was to listen to my betting-shop companions about the Champion Stakes. One had a chum who had been turned back from Dublin airport by Ryanair the previous evening when heading for Newmarket, where he was to be picked up by Jamie Spencer. Spencer had told said friend in a consoling phone call, it seems, of his confidence that he would win the Champion Stakes on Moon Ballad. Not too difficult a prediction, of course, since the horse was favourite anyway, but out of the window went my each way on Storming Home and I dumped my remaining funds on Moon Ballad. Naturally, he finished second while Storming Home lived up to his name and won in his awful sheepskin cheekpieces.
Anyway, there was further confirmation that 'inside information' doesn't guarantee anything and another 8-1 winner missed. I have said it before and I will say it again: Never let strangers talk you into changing your bet. But I wouldn't lay over-heavy odds that I will keep to my own advice.
There was plenty of good advice last week from the incomparable Jenny Pitman when she and I shared a platform at the Cheltenham Literary Festival to discuss writing about racing (and, yes, we are friends again despite a legal contretemps in the past). I am not sure she shared my belief that racing must have a truly independent body to oversee security and discipline in the future, controlled neither by the Jockey Club nor the BHB. It is a question of appearances above all else. With Jockey Club members and BHB board members owning horses themselves and having friendships with trainers, the link must be broken to assure an increasingly suspicious public that nobody gets special favours. Jenny's big worry was with betting exchanges. Rightly, she does not like the idea that racing insiders can make money out of losers by encouraging their friends to lay them. But I was certainly taken with one of her suggestions. Furious with the bad image being developed for racing by the endless squabbling between bodies like the BHB, the RCA, the ROA, Jenny's demand was for a strong figure to sort them all out and her characteristically pungent suggestion was for 'a woman with balls' to do so!
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