Ruby Walsh: Will BHA be consistent or admit racing must leave room for a roll of the dice?
Powerful Glory and Jamie Spencer win The Qipco British Champions Sprint Stakes (Group 1) for trainer Richard Fahey. Pic: Healy Racing.
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the BHA offices this week as they discussed the fallout from Champions Day at Ascot last week.
How on earth do the powers that be within the confines of the British Horseracing Authority deal with Powerful Glory and Cicero’s Gift winning Group 1 races on Ascot's card last Saturday at 200/1 and 100/1 respectively? After all, they have set a precedent on this, and one assumes they don't have double standards.
Personally, I thought it was terrific to see connections roll the dice and get a result, purely because their connections believed they could, just like Poniros’s connections did in last season's Triumph Hurdle. But shock results and beating ‘well-fancied’ horses, in the eyes of the BHA, don't add to the customer experience, even if it is the magical unpredictability of sport.
I accept there are differences here but, ultimately, there aren’t. When the horses went to post on March 14, 2025, for the Triumph Hurdle, Poniros had, according to BHA ratings, shown himself to be a better Flat horse, by 2lbs, than the 5/4 fav East India Dock.
I still wonder how I didn't notice, but that was my mistake, nobody else’s, and one doesn’t need to be a resident gallop watcher at Closutton to draw the assumption that the Champion trainer would have schooled him. The bigger mistake was letting him run at 100/1 and having nothing on him, but life is full of errors.
Did I make the same mistake last Saturday then? Well, no, because according to the BHA handicapper, Powerful Glory was the worst horse in the race, albeit of a high standard, but he was still rated 20lbs inferior to the 2/1 fav Lazzat.
He had run twice as a three-year-old and beaten one rival at Haydock last May. He then had a wind op and finished last of five at Beverly on his only other run, 25 days before his Ascot triumph.
“Raced in last, hung right and struggling 2f out, never dangerous,” were in the in-running comments for the Beverly run. Outside of his trainer, nobody could predict he would run so far above anything he had ever shown before.
Cicero’s Gift was a talented three-year-old in 2023, but in the next two seasons, he had come up short in two Group 2s, three Group 3s, one listed race and a conditions contest at Goodwood. He had won a handicap and a listed race last time at Sandown on soft ground but looked an open book with a rating of 109 back on good ground at Ascot.
He was ‘officially’ the worst horse in the race, just behind the other 100/1 shot, Exactly, and had finished seventh in the Balmoral Handicap on the same card 12 months earlier. Only hindsight would have suggested him to me as the horse who would pass the post first, ahead of horses who had won the Queen Anne, Irish 2000 Guineas, St James’s Palace, City Of York, Prix Rothschild, Matron and Sun Chariot Stakes this season, all of which are Group 1s.
So why does a horse have to demonstrate form of a certain level to run in the Triumph Hurdle, so it can’t beat ‘well-fancied horses’ but can run and show no form or run and show that they are a level below the required, yet still turn up and beat ‘well-fancied horses’ at Ascot?
Customer engagement was cited as one of the key determining factors in the BHA’s decision to implement the ‘Poniros rule’ for the upcoming National Hunt season because the customer “never had a chance to engage with that race in a fair way.”
I’d love to know what ‘fair’ is because when you looked hard enough, the one Irish winner in that trio could be found much quicker than the two British ones. Still, if the BHA are big enough, they will reverse the ‘Poniros rule’ rather than reacting to last weekend, because allowing owners to roll the dice is part of playing the game that horse racing is. There really is no such thing as a certainty in sport.
The busiest racing month of the year is coming to a close just after wintertime kicks in, and the racing community will cross the Shannon for the final time this weekend as Galway brings down the curtain on the western season for 2025.
Wincanton was abandoned on Sunday because the ground was firm, and Wexford was watering for Sunday and Monday's cards. However, Ballybrit is forecast to be heavy by Monday as the final week of the Flat season begins, where some of those galloping into the Atlantic winds will be thinking of the Pacific breeze next weekend at Del Mar.
Doncaster this afternoon hosts the final Group 1 of the British season when six will jump from the stalls on the sodden turf, where Aiden O’Brien holds all the aces.
His trio top the market and makes up half the field in the Futurity at 2.05, where his jockey bookings have confused me. Ronan Whelan would ordinarily be on the third choice, Wayne on the second and Christophe (normally Ryan) on the first string.
Ballydoyle know their own horses better than any of us ever will, but I think Ronan has been given a fair shot at glory here, and I am willing to side with his mount, Hawk Mountain.
Many miles south in central Gloucestershire, Cheltenham will be hosting the second day of its Showcase meeting, where the William Hill Best Odds Handicap Chase is the feature at 2.20.
Irish trainers are well represented across the whole card and hold a strong hand here, and last year's runner-up, The Short Go, can continue the fine run of form for the on-fire Henry De Bromhead-Darragh O'Keefe combination. Outside of him, Winning Smut should be worth siding with in the Pertemps Qualifier at 2.55.
