There was an apparent nod to Jim Hacker in the British Horseracing Authority’s press release on Monday which signalled the almost complete removal of two-year-old maiden races from the programme in the spring and early summer of 2016. “We accept that this is a major change,” Ruth Quinn, the Authority’s director of International Racing and Racing Development, said of the decision to turn 175 maidens into novice events open to winners too, “and therefore potentially a brave move.”
Even Richard Hannon, whose name had been floated as a supporter of the change, seemed a little taken aback to find that there will be fewer than two dozen maiden races before July next year. Whether or not it is a “brave” move remains to be seen but for trainers, owners and punters alike it may take a while to get used to it since the maiden race has been such a familiar feature of racecards for so many years.
The novice hurdle, which includes maidens, debutants and previous winners, is of course a cornerstone of the jumping programme and the new novice events for juveniles on the Flat may well slide into the schedule in much the same way. Jumping, though, is a year-round business and a horse has 12 months to race in novice company even if it manages to win. The proposed change on the Flat covers a short but significant part of the season and may be more susceptible to the law of unintended consequences.
One point to consider is precisely which problem this significant change is attempting to address. The BHA seems clear on this: “Its aim is to address a long-held concern that two-year-olds who win in the early part of the season, prior to the introduction of nursery handicaps, have very few opportunities to assist them along the path of development after an initial early-season success”. The same paragraph in its press statement, however, continues: “Those opportunities that do currently exist tend to attract very small, uncompetitive fields, with an average of 4.83 runners per race over the last two seasons and an average SP for the favourite of 10-11.”
So the actual situation seems to be not so much that there are no opportunities for maiden winners but rather that their owners and trainers are reluctant to exploit them. If five early-season winners line up for a novice stakes, after all, it is quite likely that the end result will be four popped balloons.
Now there should be no excuse not to get promising horses out again, and possibly again and again. Winners will, as they do over jumps, carry a penalty next time out, and the structure of the penalty system will be highly significant. There will, inevitably, be two-year-olds next season that are not quite good enough for Royal Ascot but more than capable of mopping up two or three novice events a month. The penalty structure of the novice events needs to be sufficiently robust to prevent above-average horses running up sequences.
But the 175 maiden races that will vanish from the programme still represent, by definition, 175 individual winners for a wide range of owners, from the Godolphin massive to one-horse enthusiasts for whom any win is a longed-for achievement.
Those victories will now, inevitably, be shared around among fewer individual horses, which will reduce – in fact, further reduce – the chance that a smaller owner will enjoy a moment of glory. On the face of it that does not seem to tally with the recent insistence of Nick Rust, the BHA’s chief executive, that supporting “the heartland” of owners is a key priority.
Of course it is not the role of the BHA to make prize money easy to win, for Sheikh Mohammed or anyone else. If punters are going to gamble on the sport and provide betting revenue to feed back into prize money, racing needs to be as competitive as possible to maximise its return.
That will be the key measure of whether the BHA’s “potentially brave” move is a smart one. Field sizes for novice events will surely increase, which in a handicap would always help to give bookmakers a little more margin. If it is simply no-hopers being added behind a two- or three-time winner, however, it will make precious little difference to the price of the favourite and the early- season programme for two-year-olds could, as a whole, turn out to be less competitive than it was before.
