The PLOG (Punter's Blog)

Plog 34 - 6/6/11:
'And THAT Is What You Ride To...'

THE group of people that watch racing twice a year - the ones that tune in for the Derby as well as the Grand National - may well have watched in disbelief at what occurred at the finish of the world's greatest Flat race (so some say), which took place this year on June 4th, run as usual at probably the world's least suitable track for staging a top-class horse race. Going uphill, then round a steep downhill bend, then coming up a straight with an adverse camber, with the ground falling towards the far side rail - if Epsom was a new racecourse, it would have Brighton's or Yarmouth's race programme, not Group races.

There's little doubt that the best horse in the race, Pour Moi, won. But the young jockey that nobody had heard of before the race, a chap called Michael From Barcelona, or something like that, gave the horse the worst ride in Derby history. Even I know that you don't want to be last at Tattenham Corner in the Derby, and I'm not talking about the ice cream queue. A downhill home straight gives those up front the advantage, so had the horse ridden by Joseph O'Brien (pushing away from before the bend, I think the occasion went to his head too) been good enough, he might have held on.

As it was Pour Moi came there with a great turn of foot - before the Anthony Knott-moment when Michael From Barcelona stood up in the irons a few yards before the finish, allowing the runner-up to close the gap to a head.

This got me thinking again about something that occurred to me after the Peter Carberry-debacle, when he put himself in with a chance of leaving Uttoxeter in an ambulance, had the angry racegoers who'd backed Monty's Moon been able to do to him what they said they were going to.

Simples; it's time to introduce a winning post that is uniform in appearance across all racecourses, which is clearly visible and recognisable.

There is one already, I hear you cry. Sure, it's a red circle, we know that. But, if you look around and you watch enough racing, you see that not all winning posts are the same in appearance. At Stratford, for example, the post there is a red circle with a swan carved into the middle of it; and there are plenty of tracks where I guess the winning post could actually get lost against a background of a large crowd.

Introduce a winning post that looks the same at all tracks - the same size, the same colour, the same height off the ground - and you can then say to the jockeys 'this is the finish, do not stop riding out until you go past this'. There's no guarantee that introducing a standard 'lollipop'-appearance will mean that jockeys never ease up too soon again, but if they know what to look for, then at least British racing will have done something about it.

Then, in future when Michael From Barcelona rides in Britain, he can start his win celebration when the prize is definitely in the bag.

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© Roy Waterhouse
2011

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