Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

The Turf

Robin Oakley

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Horizontal racing

Nobody ever does racing-speak as well as the Irish. After his Munich recently showed improved form to win at the Curragh, the Irish trainer Eddie Lynam declared, ‘He works like a real machine at home — but until today he raced like a washing machine.’

I, too, woke up last Saturday with my back feeling as though I had been put through several cycles of an industrial-sized washing machine — the legacy of a youth misspent throwing javelins instead of reading improving books like Raceform — and if there is a time I don’t appreciate being forced to do my racing horizontally at home it is in the run-up to the Derby and Oaks. There really is no substitute at this time of year for getting to the track to see the three-year-olds in the flesh.

It is not just the Classic contenders either. The sage John Francome told Channel 4 viewers that he loved three-year-old handicaps. The one thing the handicapper can’t allow for, he pointed out, is growth. So when you get down to the paddock and see for yourself which colts and fillies have grown up and matured from their two-year-old days and which have failed to thrive after precocious first-season promise there is money to be made, or at least less of it to be lost.

At this time of year it is all about measuring the difference. It always makes me think of Ogden Nash’s limerick:

A Crusader’s wife slipped out of the garrison

And had an affair with a Saracen;

She was not over-sexed,

Or jealous, or vexed;

She just wanted to make a comparison.

In racing comparisons are not odious, they are essential.

I had, for example, fancied Ralph Beckett’s Look Here for Lingfield’s Oaks Trial and had backed her before the runners were on view. Had I got to the track I would probably never have done so, because the Channel 4 team informed us that she had not come in her coat and did not look ready. In the event, victory went to Clive Cox’s Miracle Seeker, a half-sister to champion hurdler Katchit but much bigger than him. Miracle Seeker, nicely ridden by Adam Kirby, made all and handled the Lingfield hill, the best preparation for Epsom’s Tattenham Corner, with aplomb. ‘She’s used her stamina and shown she can handle the course. She’s earned a crack at the Oaks,’ said Clive. So she has. If she was trained by Sir Michael Stoute or John Dunlop, she would be half her current 33–1.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page