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Friday 9 January 2009

The turf

Team tactics

It is a fine line between horses drifting off a line and jockeys steering them that way. Things are not always as they appear. But the key question is the one raised by the shrewd professional gambler Dave Nevison. If O’Donoghue or McCabe had looked back and not seen Johnny Murtagh neatly poised behind them, would they have made the same move to wave somebody else’s horse through like a regularly rewarded head-waiter steering a favoured customer to the best table?

Suspicions of team tactics are inevitably raised by O’Brien’s tendency to run a whole clutch of horses in some of the top races as pacemakers. But that is a separate issue. Pacemakers are allowed. Most racing authorities accept that it is for the good of the breed in the long term to have races run not as a dawdle with a sprint at the end but at a truly testing pace throughout. Provided that pacemakers do not impede other horses as they fall back, there is no offence in that. Occasionally, though, the suspicion lingers that somebody is being a little too clever for the good of the sport, reckoning, as a US Senator once put it, ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time and those are the ones to concentrate on.’

At the end of the day the Juddmonte aftermath is an encouragement that the racing authorities are not confining their inquiries to ferret-faced ten-horse trainers with greasy trilbies who are seen too often in the wrong racecourse bars. They are prepared to go after the big boys too. But perhaps the penalties for improper team tactics may have to be looked at again. A fine of £5,000 may be a life or death matter to a 12-strong yard with dodgy payers. To somewhere like Ballydoyle it is chicken feed. Perhaps the ultimate penalty should be the possibility of losing the race. And who, by the way, will be disciplining the Newmarket stewards who first felt there was no case to answer?

More articles from: Robin Oakley | this section

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