Racing numbers just don’t stack up
Late in the afternoon course manager, Peter Roe, popped into the Fairyhouse press room and told us the crowd was a paltry 3,126.
He looked and sounded disappointed, and was fully entitled to be. The meeting finally took place at the fourth attempt, after Roe and his team and Horse Racing Ireland had done everything in their collective power to ensure the massively attractive programme wasn’t lost to the weather.
The original triple Grade 1 card was a cracker, but then adding another Grade 1 in the shape of the John Durkan from Punchestown and Cork’s Grade 2 Hilly Way Chase made it one of the strongest cards staged in this country.
And yet only a little over 3,000 thought it worthwhile to attend, which emphasised, as if emphasis was needed, that attendances at race meetings in Ireland right now are hovering at a dangerously low level.
I know Wednesday was hardly the ideal day and a postponed meeting, especially one that had been put off three times previously, is never the same when rescheduled. The economy is shattered and all of that as well, of course, but traditionally racing folk have always been able to find the readies one way or another.
The day could hardly have been better, crisp and dry, and Fairyhouse is no more than a mighty throw of a bowl from Dublin, where the bulk of the population resides.
The weather had conspired, together with HRI and Roe inspiration, to produce an eight-race card which housed most of the big names in the National Hunt game.
But only the diehard followers were biting and you could virtually say that every one of the 3,000 plus at the track was a racing man through and through.
When Sea The Stars went to Leopardstown for the Irish Champion Stakes, there was a general feeling of disappointment that only some 9,000 attended. After all here on view was one of the greatest horses of all time, but we told ourselves that racing fans in Ireland were essentially National Hunt people.
And that’s why Fairyhouse was such a shock. If racing couldn’t get a respectable crowd for what was on offer then where in the hell is it going?
Clonmel on Thursday was yet another jolt to the system. I walked into the betting ring before the first race and couldn’t believe how few bookmakers were on site. The Clonmel ring is, ironically, a square and one side of it was completely empty. On one of the other four sides stood a lone bookmaker.
There were just 27 bookmakers in total, way below what would have been expected a short few years ago.
Right, back to Fairyhouse and the actual racing. Hurricane Fly was good in the Hatton’s Grace, but did the performance justify wholescale slashing of his price for the Champion Hurdle?
I think the bare form is a trifle suspect. Runner-up Solwhit, admirable and all as he is, can hardly be regarded as a serious Champion Hurdle candidate any more and the proximity of both Voler La Vedette (third) and Mourad (fourth) demands that questions at least be asked.
Toner D’Oudairies won the juvenile hurdle in good style and is our best three-year-old right now, but you could not see him matching Paul Nicholls’ Sam Winner.
The jury is out on Mikael D’Haguenet, following his fall at the last in the Drinmore Chase. What this told us is that a lot, at least, of the old ability is still there and you really can’t wait for him to reappear.
The contest that had me literally tearing my hair out was the handicap hurdle won by Noel Meade’s Asigh Pearl. The previous time she had run was at Down Royal in early November. She was the nap from this source and I backed her each-way, absolutely certain being out of the first three was not a possibility. Silly boy! Asigh Pearl disgraced both herself and myself, finishing seventh of nine finishers behind Montan, beaten forty five and a half lengths.
At Fairyhouse one or two still believed, she was the medium of a little support from 20-1 to 16’s, and proceded to power home two lengths clear. Montan was eighth.
