Today’s best bets, by Chris Cook
Ralph Beckett has been accused of slapping Australian racing in the face with a fish, after he posted an incendiary blog on his website suggesting that the lack of Australian entries at Royal Ascot this year is a result of tighter rules on steroid use in that country. The Hampshire-based trainer suggests that Australian participation in the Group One sprint races at the Royal meeting might now be a thing of the past and that some of their winners there may have benefited from doses of steroids during their careers, a suggestion which has previously been denied by some of the trainers involved.
Beckett’s blog was intended to enlarge on a recent tweet in which he asked of Australian winners at Ascot: “Were they really, really good, or were they really, really medicated?” He points out that, until 2013, Australian rules allowed racehorses to be treated with anabolic steroids, so long as they were no longer detected in a horse’s system when it raced. That situation changed in September of that year, when Australian racing announced a flat ban on anabolic steroid use, to take effect from May 2014.
“Since that happened,” Beckett writes, “the number of Australian horses arriving here to run at Royal Ascot has fallen off a cliff, to the point where this year there are not any entries ... I hope we see plenty of Australian sprinters running here again – but I doubt it will happen. Though it is unlikely either that we will hear the line that was often trotted out about Australians improving European horses when they arrived down under. Come to think of it, we stopped hearing that a couple of years ago.”
As for Australian successes at Royal Ascot over the past 15 years, Beckett writes: “Nobody involved in the industry here, (or anywhere else) believes that the aforementioned Australian sprinters didn’t get ‘help’ when out of training. (Steroids only show up for three months on a blood picture). Nor is anyone accusing their trainers of cheating. They were acting within their rules, it just so happened that they weren’t our rules, but they were running under our rules of racing. There is the same issue with the US where steroids are still legally given to horses out of training, yet runners are invited from there too.”
From 2003 to 2012, there were six Australian-trained winners of Ascot’s valuable sprint races. Questions about steroid use by visiting Australian trainers have been raised before and Beckett is hardly the first British trainer to express concern, Mark Johnston, Roger Charlton and Hughie Morrison having also spoken on the subject in years past.
Peter Moody, who trained Black Caviar to win the Diamond Jubilee in 2012, has insisted she had never been given steroids. Joe Janiak conceded that his Takeover Target, the King’s Stand winner of 2006, had been given a steroid to help him over the effects of travelling to Hong Kong later in his career, prompting a positive test, but denied there was any performance enhancement as a result. He refused to say whether he had used the same drug prior to the horse’s victory at Ascot.
Both Ascot and the British Horseracing Authority have declined to comment on Beckett’s blog.
It is known that some Australian connections were interested in bringing horses to Ascot this year. Jameka, for example, was ruled out only after suffering travel sickness in late March. Winx, who has won her last 17 races, has been linked with a visit to Ascot next year. Both horses began their careers after Australia brought in its ban on anabolic steroid use.
Beckett’s blog has already drawn a frosty reception from Australia, including from the Victoria-based trainer Sam Pritchard-Gordon, who tweeted: “Nicely written article; that holds the Oz hand while slapping its face with a fish!” He and others suggested that the excellent prize money on offer in Australia was the main reason for horses not travelling to Britain. Beckett responded: “Our prize money was always poor, so how does that explain the lack of entries now?”
Turning to today’s action, the aforementioned Mark Johnston might be a good man to follow. The Middleham man didn’t make the strong start to the Flat season that I quite expected and his strike-rate for April ended at a modest 14%. But it looks like his horses needed either a first run or a couple more weeks because he’s had 11 winners at a 20% rate in the past fortnight.
Election Day (4.00) runs for him at Musselburgh and can build on his reappearance second, when he might have bumped into a useful John Gosden sort at Beverley. The three-year-old, who won his final two starts last year as a juvenile, is 11-8.
An hour earlier, 6-5 is fine about Atteq (3.00), who hosed up last week at Beverley and goes again under a penalty. Richard Fahey stuck a tongue tie on him for the first time last week and, on the basis that that made the difference, another big run seems on the cards.
Johnston’s Highly Sprung (3.40) could appreciate the greater emphasis on early speed at Lingfield, having been reeled in by a couple of rivals over a furlong further at Leicester last time. He’s back down to the mark from which he won at Yarmouth in September, since when his rating peaked 10lb higher than it is today. He’s 9-2.
Half an hour later, Bumptious (4.10) seems popular at 4-1 from an early 13-2. A half-sister to the useful Godolphin beast Wedding Ring, she must have needed her third maiden run last month, her first outing for more than a year, but it would be no surprise if Ismail Mohammed has her ready for this handicap debut.
Postponed retired
Roger Varian reports this morning that his stable star, Postponed, has suffered a stress fracture and will not race again. The Newmarket trainer said the six-year-old “has been a magnificent racehorse to have in the yard and it has been both a pleasure and privilege to oversee the second phase of his career. I am very grateful to Sheikh Mohammed Obaid for allowing me that opportunity and to Postponed himself for proving such a willing and talented ally.
“A stress fracture like this wouldn’t usually be a career-ending injury – except that it’s May and he’s six, and we don’t want to take unnecessary risks with him. He’s done us all proud, and we owe him a great debt of gratitude.”
Varian inherited Postponed from Luca Cumani a couple of years ago, after the owner decided to move his horses. The horse won a King George at Ascot for Cumani, then added a Sheema Classic, a Coronation Cup and a Juddmonte International for Varian. But he was a disappointing fifth in the Arc in October, having started as favourite, and did not recover his best form in Dubai this spring.
Timeform’s Racehorses of 2016: a review
Tony Paley: The Flat season finally takes centre stage on the British racing scene this weekend when horses hurtle down the famous Rowley Mile straight at Newmarket in the Guineas. The publication of the respected Timeform’s latest Racehorses annual is another indication of the changing seasons, from the jumps to action on the level, but it’s a jockey rather than a horse that earns particular attention in the introduction to their volume, which traditionally focuses on the sport’s big talking points.
Hayley Turner was the first female jockey to ride 100 winners in a season and Amy Ryan became the first woman to win the apprentice riders’ championship in 2012 but both are no longer in the saddle. Timeform believe the latest addition to the ranks of top women riders still has prejudice to overcome.
“The talented Josephine Gordon won the latest apprentice title convincingly and, having ridden out her claim, looks set to enjoy a good career, even in the face of British racing’s chauvinistic attitude to women,” state Timeform, who highlight one area of particular concern.
“She rode for over a hundred different trainers in 2016,” they point out, “including Sir Michael Stoute and Hugo Palmer, and had her first of several rides for Godolphin – a winning one – just days after trainer John Berry had raised a touchy subject when suggesting that Muslim owners, in particular, have a bias against female jockeys and ‘because nearly all of the best Flat horses in Britain are owned by Muslims, it means women jockeys don’t get rides in big races very often’.”
Gordon is definitely not in favour of the decision of the French racing authorities to introduce a 2kg (4.4lb allowance) for female jockeys (outside the top races) from this season, saying she found the idea ‘a little offensive’ but that move is one that will be closely monitored.
A female rider regularly riding in the Classics will be one indicator that times have changed. Meanwhile, it wouldn’t feel like a normal 2,000 Guineas without an Aidan O’Brien-trained favourite and the classy Churchill will be the powerful Ballydoyle stable runner heading the betting on Saturday.
Timeform’s essay on the classy colt Churchill includes a digression, and the annuals are crammed with such delights, on the racing history of Winston Churchill, the towering political figure he was named after - someone who only came to racehorse ownership at the age of 75. “Politics, by the way,” point out Timeform, “meant that Churchill was forced to miss seeing Dark Issue win the Irish 1,000 Guineas – ‘The General Election was my owner, and I was already entered among the runners’.”
The six-page read on Churchill includes a reminder, during the 2017 ‘election campaign, that our “current prime minister Theresa May and her husband [enjoyed] success as [racehorse] owners in the mid-’nineties [when Dome Patrol officially ran in the name of a syndicate].” May told the Daily Telegraph it was “the most surprising thing about her” in a survey the newspaper conducted into the Tory leadership candidates in July.
Timeform believe that Churchill’s “prospects of proving fully effective over much further than a mile – and of making up into a viable Derby candidate - are not obvious. The 2,000 Guineas looks the Classic for him at this stage.”
It is the comments on the Guineas favourite’s stable companion, Caravaggio, that are most revealing about the O’Brien modus operandi. Timeform think “Churchill might feel very short-changed as merely being described by the trailer as ‘a very special colt’,” especially as they point out that the trainer has form where “hyperbole – an exaggerated statement not to be taken literally” is concerned. O’Brien, in recent times, has said of Australia: “We’ve never had a horse like this”; of Gleneagles “as exciting a miler as we’ve had,” and of Caravaggio: “the fastest we’ve ever had”.
O’Brien’s comments on Caravaggio come in for particularly close scrutiny. Timeform point out that the trainer said: “In his last piece of work [before winning the Phoenix Stakes at The Curragh last August] Caravaggio hit a top speed of 45 miles per hour – no horse in Ballydoyle has ever been able to do that,” but in their essay on Caravaggio, the form ratings and speed figure experts write: “The essay on Kingman in Racehorses of 2014 suggests the colt ran to a speed of just over 44 miles per hour, widely regarded as the limit of a thoroughbred’s capabilities.
“O’Brien’s oft-heard decrees of greatness for a particular season’s star performer have clearly been made with an attentive eye on the horse’s future career as a Coolmore [stud] stallion.”
Comments in the entry on Limato (“Timeform’s assessment of the going often differs from the official, with clerks of the course relying more on subjective judgment informed by going stick readings taken before racing – but not during – and are often hours old by the time of racing”) have a familiar ring. A decade ago during the 2007 season – the wettest in recent times – there were pleas from many, including Timeform for an investigation into the issue of going reports.
Timeform’s conclusion “that little has changed since 2007 to address the need to provide accurate going reports all the way through [a race meeting], which would be of obvious interest and relevance to owners, trainers and punters alike” are a damning indictment of the sport.
‘Racehorses of 2016’, with ratings and an individual commentary for 11,148 horses, including every one that ran on the Flat in Britain last season, costs £79 in the UK, from Timeform, Halifax, West Yorkshire and is also available online at timeform.com/shop.
Friday racing tips
Chepstow
1.20 Icebuster 1.50 Perfect Quest 2.20 Laraaib 2.50 Babyfact 3.20 War Chief 3.50 Charlie Victor 4.20 Master Dancer 4.50 Sigurd (nb)
Musselburgh
2.00 Prazeres 2.30 Faithful Promise 3.00 Atteq 3.30 Go George Go 4.00 Election Day (nap) 4.30 Vallarta 5.00 Cosmic Ray
Lingfield
2.10 Willwams 2.40 Time’s Arrow 3.10 Staffa 3.40 Highly Sprung 4.10 Bumptious 4.45 Pharoh Jake 5.20 Arab Moon
Fontwell
4.55 Prince Mahler 5.25 Jaunty Inflight 5.55 Work In Progress 6.25 Dawnieriver 7.00 Talkischeap 7.35 Itoldyou 8.05 Canford Chimes
Cheltenham
5.10 Are They Your Own 5.40 Pride Of Parish 6.10 Always Archie 6.45 Barrel Of Laughs 7.20 The Flying Doc 7.50 Jepeck 8.25 Full Trottle
