It is Ladies’ Day at Beverley so all the East Yorkshire slappers will have been down to Primark for a new dress and the bookies will be taking pound bets all afternoon while they swill Pimms and try to pull their heals out of the lawns.
The seven races start with a Class 6 claimer, followed by Class 5 maiden and maiden auction for two year olds. In the Class 5 sprint handicap that is the fourth race, will course specialist (and favourite) Bondi Beach Boy get some of the housekeeping money back? The fifth race is a Class 4 handicap not sponsored by key sponsor The Journal but the last two Class 5 handicaps are sponsored by its affiliates.
Since the fixture is virtually always a sellout, why bother putting on any decent races as most of them will not know one end of a horse from the other? This is symptomatic of racing’s general problem: meetings like Royal Ascot and Glorious Goodwood are social events where there just happens to be racing, so most of those in attendance are not racegoers.
I expect that the attendance at Beverley on Thursday, with a similarly uninspiring card, will be quite meagre. It is a dreadful card, opening with a Class 6 selling handicap and concluding with two divisions of a Class 6 amateur riders’ handicap. In between there is a Class 5 fillies maiden, a Class 5 fillies handicap, a Class 5 nursery, a Class 5 three-year-old handicap and the feature race, a Class 4 two mile handicap.
Looking elsewhere for a decent race today, the Salisbury 3:20 looks made for punters. The favourite, Russian Realm is surely only leading the market thanks to his pedigree: Dansili ex Russian Rhythm. Although Monsieur Rieussec only won a four-runner event last time, his penultimate race victory was in quite a valuable nine-runner event so there is good reason to believe that Ted Durcan can bring up the hat-trick.
The Salisbury 3:55 looks like one for the favourite Rock Choir, which is clearly improving rapidly but is not a workable price.
