Evening, Bluesky. I've been watching the rerun of this afternoon's events at Wolverhampton, and the first thing that springs to mind is that if you'd backed Full of Speed (surely on the shortlist for least appropriately-named horse) I think you'd be entitled to have a serious word with your jockey. I've said my piece about Queally before during the Frankel era, so I won't go over it again. The second thing is to reinforce the idea that taking form from amateur races - particularly when they've been won very easily - won't improve your bank balance.
That was a moderate race on a moderate day, and won't stand too much analysis, but I'd like to use this thread to put up the view that there seems to be a growing number of ill-judged rides from experienced jockeys in the fairly big group that sits just behind the elite set (Moore, SDS, Smullen, a couple of others). I'm not talking of considerate introductions for expensive maidens, or fairly gentle runs for unfancied animals seeking to get dropped a few pounds; I mean injudicious rides, on horses that were entitled to win their race, and whom the market suggests were fancied.
My working theory is that journeyman flat jockeys are finding it harder and harder to judge pace accurately. That may sound absurd, and I'm willing to be shot down, but my first guess is that their problems are largely due to the rising proportion of artificial-surface racing in the calendar. I'll keep it short (the idea will be developed at more length in a forthcoming piece on How To Make Money from AW Racing, due out on this site in the next couple of months) but I'm starting to think that horses adopt different stride-patterns and use different muscles to push themselves through sand/tapeta/poly than they do for turf. Add to that the facts that AW courses are smaller - so you're entering, negotiating, or exiting a bend much more often than at Newbury, Newmarket or York - and that the five AW courses themselves all have varying surfaces, and you get a situation where decent jockeys can make genuine mistakes. At its most basic, any quick-learning apprentice can be taught the clock-in-the-head stuff about doing two furlongs in 28 seconds on their own home gallops. Under race-riding conditions, with a multiplicity of surfaces, it's starting to look (to me) as if a number of jockeys are being presented with pace-problems that they can't solve. Any views ?
