Typical end of season result an Donny. Herculean can't be any great shakes if incapable of winning from 90. No Group horse in a handicap , just an 85 horse running off 90 in a handicap. Rise Hall drifted in the betting, travelled well enough but when asked, he drifted over to the rail and weakened. Martyn Meade is 0/20 going back to 7th September and maybe this is not a horse to give up on entirely. He looked green still today and will probably get a drop in the weights for this effort.
I thought I was hard done by when the jockey fell of Goohar at the first fence. But crikey, commiserations to any poor bastard who was on Oighear Dubh. Suffering!
that's the second leader who's done that today , surely a stewards have to look at that thin white tape
I didn't see the Skelton house do the same thing earlier. If that's the case they'll have to take a look at it. Carnage!
err , usually you'd expect a rail , i'm sure if tape was used in lots more cases we'd get the same scenario , must be a reason rails are used ?
I thought that with the horse in the amateur race not realising that Harry Skelton had done similar earlier. Plenty have got up there before with the same set up. They'll have to review it after today though surely.
I guess they've got about 2 minutes from when the horses go out into the country to when they are coming back towards the finish line so they would need to be pretty quick putting in a rail. maybe some sort of automated extendable / retractable type affair, but what would it cost? I saw the first one and thought it might have been avoidable through the jockey? A few years ago at the Cheltenham Festival one of the Whateley's runners basically ran through the rail up the home straight - need to look for the replay, might have been Wishfull Thinking or Menorah - so a rail is no guarantee that the horse won't suddenly duck out. More alertness from the jockey required IMHO
It was Wishfull Thinking but that was more of a fall. But there was the horse who jumped through the rail when Simonsig won the Neptune.
Anything possible with the amateurs aboard (although I can state with 100% certainty that it wasn't the lovely Victoria )
an extendable rail wouldn't be the hardest thing to install surely ,it's a solid guide as opposed to thin tape that looked as if they hadn't seen it , the horses i mean
Thomas Darby posted a very decent time in winning the Maiden Hurdle - 3m 49.9s fast by 1.1 seconds (on admittedly fast ground but all the other races on the card were slower than standard, some by quite a margin) is pretty much Champion Hurdle pace. Looked very green when hitting the front but I am sure there will be much more to come from him. Impressive, notebook material
