Leopardstown gallops

There is a big difference between taking a five-year-old racing and taking a three-year-old racing, even if the three-year-old was the five-year-old two years ago, if you follow.  (Humans we’re talking about here now, little people, not horses.)  Incidentally, neither activity is in the same ballbark as taking a three-year-old and a one-year-old racing at the same time, or taking a four-year-old, a two-year-old and a zero-year-old racing, even if you do have help on hand.  You don’t want to be taking full responsibility for the three of them, that’s for sure, not if experience is any kind of a guide (one racecourse is not big enough), unless, of course, you are into penance (it is Lent after all).  Even if you are, better to wear sack-cloth and flail yourself periodically with a cat o’nine tails than to try to master the three of them and a seven-race-card all at once.

So I took myself and our five-year-old up to Leopardstown yesterday.  Divide and conquer.  It’s a tough one for said five-year-old, she loves horses but, if she touches one and rubs her eye without washing her hands, her eye will flair up like a strained tendon.  (Scary day the day we discovered that one.)  So she knows she’s not allowed pet them, not even when they are standing still, but she likes when they look at her.  Mansony (number four, big white noseband thing) looked her straight in the eye in the pre-parade ring and it made her day.  She liked the chips, she liked standing by the rail and hearing the horses’ footsteps, she loved being high up in the stand and using the binoculars (if you look through the other end the horses are really small apparently), and, when her nose got cold just before the bumper, she decided that we would watch the last race from inside the glass and that we’d stick around for just some of the après-racing gallops, not all of them.

So we saw the much-vaunted gallops, now considered as significant a stepping stone to Cheltenham glory as the King George.  Hmmm.  I’m not so sure.  I remember Sky’s The Limit in 2006 all right, a white charger emerging from the half-light and everyone wondering what it was before finding out and backing him into 11/1 for the Coral Cup and watching him doing the exact same thing in shimmering daylight at Cheltenham, remarkably, a five-year-old under 11st 12lb.  There were a couple of others, like Total Enjoyment in 2004 and Cooldine last year, but most horses are just there for a good leg-stretch and a bit of a school, and it’s difficult enough to draw too many conclusions.  For an antonym, remember Rule Supreme, failed to complete the school, then won the Sun Alliance Chase two weeks later.

I guess people are there to see what nuggets of information they can pick up, things that ‘normal’ people won’t see.  I think it’s an Irish thing, it’s in our racing culture to try to get the inside track.  We love to be in the know, have a little bit of knowledge that we think most people don’t have.  It’s why the bumper, the race with by far the fewest lines of form on view, is historically the biggest betting race on an Irish racecard, it’s why people still flock to pre-Cheltenham evenings, it’s why punters ask you what you know, not what you fancy or where you think the value lies.

J’y Vole looked good and Mikael D’Haguenet jumped more than adequately and Barker will need to come on a fair bit and Forpadydeplasterer is alive and well, but what a horse does under race conditions these days is much more relevant to Cheltenham for me, and Tranquil Sea looked very good in the Newlands Chase.  I would be lying if I said that I didn’t kick myself a bit when I saw the Edward O’Grady-trained gelding coming clear on the run-in under just a squeeze from Andrew Mac.  There is no real reason why I would say that, but if I did it would be a lie.  Metaphorically of course.  There I’ve been, looking at 7/1 about him for the Ryanair Chase for a while now, thinking I’ll be clever and wait for non-runner-no-bet before backing him, just in case.

Even when I saw him entered and declared yesterday, I thought, sure even if he beats his rivals here doing handsprings, they can’t shorten him up too much, and he probably won’t be that impressive, he will probably need the run at least a little and he almost certainly needs a bit further than this two-mile trip to be at his best.  Clever indeed.  Wrong on nearly every single count.  He could hardly have been more impressive and the bookmakers are not a collective that is apt to miss an opportunity.  He is now no better than 5/1 and that is much closer to his correct price, unfortunately.

“That was a great day Dad.”  Made mine.

* For more of Donn’s thoughts visit www.donnmcclean.com.

Categories: Horse racing Irish Racing