Irish racing grinds to a halt - why?
Here we are literally on the eve of Cheltenham, facing into the final two months of what has been a disastrous National Hunt campaign, and Horse Racing Ireland thinks it’s fine that the game should basically grind to a halt.
We had one offering this week, a modest meeting at Downpatrick on Wednesday, which was, frankly, an irrelevancy.
Horse Racing Ireland, an extensive and expensive government-sponsored quango, can obviously see little wrong with Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday lying idle.
This is a season which has lost meeting after meeting to the weather and, one would have thought, no chance of slotting in replacement fixtures would be missed. But we cod ourselves. The past week has produced ideal racing weather, cool, crisp and dry, but almost the entire industry has been sitting on its collective hands with no place to go.
The rot set in a week ago at Navan. Saturday used to be the big day for racing in Ireland, but that has long since changed to Sunday.
But Saturday should still be of vital importance, should continue to be respected. After all, it is a day when most people are off.
But what was on offer at Navan was about as low as you can go. Only six races and three of them were those awful necessary evil handicaps.
The three contests were supported, for the want of a better word, by as bad a beginners’ chase as you could get at this time of the year, and two three-horse affairs.
Leopardstown on Sunday was better, but way below what we have come to expect from this magnificent track.
And following on a really dreadful weekend of racing, we were then told to “enjoy” Downpatrick on Wednesday and we’ll see you all in six days time at Gowran Park!
It is a fact that HRI has moved throughout the season to save all of the major races and have to be commended for that. But one trainer recently opined that they had saved only some of the lesser races, and he has a fair point.
And most of the horses in the country are middle to low-grade and need somewhere to go in an attempt to earn a few shillings.
We may be in the middle of a massive recession, but the evidence of Navan yesterday week is that buckets of horses remain in the system. Navan ran seven races and housed huge fields throughout.
Later this month we will again see big gaps in the fixture list, with no racing between Sunday and Thursday on three occasions.
Is it any wonder that seven of our National Hunt jockeys have either left, or are in the process of leaving, on six-month contracts to Australia?
When you talk about extra fixtures, the popular response is often “but the money isn’t there to fund them and where are we going to hold the meetings?”
Take such utterances with the proverbial grain of salt. There is no such shortage of funding, for instance, for some of the dross that will be on offer in the months of July and August.
There are 41 meetings scheduled for July and 38 in August. Those are put into perspective when you look at what has happened so far this year.
We raced only 17 times in January and a paltry 15 times in February. Now, we’re not stupid and realise that the lack of courses which can race in winter is a major drawback and it is so much easier to plan for the summer.
Surely, however, there has to be some outside-the-box thinking. There is a savage appetite for National Hunt racing in Ireland, with Cheltenham looming, but to leave patrons with nowhere to go, and with nothing to look at, for some six days is plainly ridiculous.
There are surely a number of tracks which would have been well capable of holding a meeting or two this week?
For instance why is Leopardstown, arguably the finest course in Ireland, now closed to National Hunt racing? It’s astounding that we will not see another hurdle or chase at Leopardstown until St. Stephen’s Day. Seriously, how is that in any way justified?
