For the second time in a week, a relationship between a trainer and a bookmaker was under scrutiny on Thursday after Nicky Henderson disclosed that Altior, the favourite for the Champion Chase at Cheltenham in March, will miss his intended return in the Tingle Creek Chase because of a wind problem, and revealed the news via a blog on the Unibet website.
Altior had been on the drift in ante-post betting for several hours by the time Henderson’s blog post went live at around 6pm on Wednesday. Anyone in the know was in a position to hoover up money looking to back Altior, or back other leading contenders against him, safe in the knowledge he would not be going to Sandown on 9 December.
Once the Henderson blog was live, it became clear Altior had “made a whistling noise” last Saturday, which was diagnosed on Tuesday as “a small issue with his wind whereby his larynx isn’t opening sufficiently”. This seemed to contrast abruptly with a quote from Henderson to At The Races on Monday two days after Altior’s whistle alerted him to a potential problem, that the chaser was “totally on target” for the Tingle Creek.
Henderson did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday but, after more than three decades at the peak of the game, his yard is full to overflowing and he might well argue that were he to report every niggle affecting one of his horses, he would have little time for anything else. Altior’s “whistle” simply turned out to be far more significant than it seemed at the time and the trainer would also feel obliged to pass on any bad news to an owner first. Even in the age of mobiles and email, people can sometimes take a while to track down.
Yet Altior does stand out as the stable star at Seven Barrows and, while the owners pay his training bills, it is punters, via the money they lose in betting, who provide a significant part of the prize money. It does not feel right that the news of a wind problem emerged via a betting site four days after the first hint of a difficulty. While there is no suggestion Unibet made use of its advance knowledge, the moves in the markets on Wednesday imply that somebody did.
The other recent case involving a trainer and a bookmaker concerned David Evans, who was fined a total of £3,140 for withholding news of a non-runner from his yard in an attempt to get a better price about a stablemate in the same race.
There are so many odd and disturbing aspects to the Evans case that it is difficult to know where to start. It emerged at the hearing that Evans routinely received price boosts, from 3-1 to 7-2 for instance, when backing his own horses with Ladbrokes. He got a boost when placing a £6,000 bet on Black Dave at Wolverhampton in January 2015, having told a trader at the firm in the same call that Tango Sky, his other runner in the race, was about to be scratched. And Ladbrokes then cut the price about Tango Sky from 7-2 to 3-1, despite having just been told, from the horse’s mouth as it were, the horse would not be running.
An odd thing to do, on the face of it, except it ensured the Rule 4 deduction from winning bets on the race, calculated on the basis of a horse’s price at the time of withdrawal, would be 25p in the pound and not 20p. Ladbrokes also held on to Evans’s stake, as Black Dave finished fourth at 6-4, having laid a £6,000 bet at inflated odds when the same firm routinely restricts punters to betting in pennies if they show they persistently beat the SP.
Even Evans himself suggested afterwards that a fine, rather than a suspension of his licence, was a “very lenient” outcome, which is the one aspect of the case about which there is very little argument at all. It was, ultimately, Ladbrokes that passed on concerns about the trainer’s bets to the British Horseracing Authority but the relationship had until then been very cosy indeed, leading to an inexcusably casual attitude to price-sensitive information.
But then, there seems to have been a similar delay in getting information into the public domain as quickly as possible in the Altior case, which also involves a relationship between a trainer and a bookie but one that is, as things stand, entirely legitimate. Henderson is one of a growing number of top trainers and jockeys who contribute columns for betting sites but there are some snippets of information that demand immediate release. When it comes to a horse like Altior, there is nothing too minor to report.
• This article was amended on Friday 17 November to reflect the fact that Nicky Henderson made his comments to the At The Races channel on Monday and not Tuesday.
Friday’s tips, by Greg Wood
Cheltenham 12.40 Dueling Banjos 1.15 Magic Dancer 1.50 Exitas (nb) 2.25 William Henry 3.00 Cause Of Causes 3.35 Vision Des Flos (nap)
Lingfield Park 11.50 Not After Midnight 12.20 Ballesteros 12.50 Choice Encounter 1.25 Part Exchange 2.00 Top Mission 2.35 Persistence 3.10 Flowing Clarets 3.45 Termsnconditions
Newcastle 12.30 Jassas 1.05 Chu Chu Percy 1.40 An Laoch 2.15 Katy Royal 2.50 Dica 3.25 Chanceanotherfive
Chelmsford City 5.45 Haylah 6.15 Corked 6.45 Georgian Bay 7.15 Hammer Gun 7.45 Jack Of Diamonds 8.15 Miss Mirabeau 8.45 Iley Boy 9.15 Entertaining Ben
