Ryan Moore heading out to ride Savethelastdance in Irish Oaks on Saturday© Photo Healy Racing
Irish horse racing really could be doing far more to promote its premier fixtures. One of the chief reasons that Cheltenham gets so much media coverage so far in advance of the Festival is the early entry system that British racing has in place.
From the first week in January the entries for the big races at Cheltenham March start to be published and this helps build the narrative with news stories and ante post markets around the festival.
Punchestown doesn’t get anything like this level of build up to their festival and that is largely because we have no idea what horses will be entered for the races until a week before. There are no ante post markets on the vast majority of their races.
Galway is another prime example of a missed opportunity. Last Wednesday the preliminary entries closed for the feature races on all seven days at Galway, but as of the time of writing Horse Racing Ireland still hasn’t released these to the media. Later today (Monday) the Tote Galway Plate entries will appear on this site and we have to wait until Tuesday for the Guinness Galway Hurdle entries. In this day and age those entries for the seven feature races at Galway should have been available since the middle of last week at the latest.
It’s not as if HRI can’t do early entries for races in Ireland, you can already view on this site the entries for a 2-y-o sales race and a Group 3 taking place at Naas on the Bank Holiday Monday after Galway ends and advance entries have also been published for six of the races at Irish Champions Weekend which doesn’t take place until mid-September.
With the weather we’ve been having lately I suppose we should just be thankful if Galway goes ahead regardless of the entries. Seeing the track at the Curragh waterlogged in the middle of July doesn’t bode well for seven days of action in one of the wettest parts of the country.
I understand weather forecasting is not an exact science, but lately they appear to be about as reliable as a bookie’s tips which would make you wonder why the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board’s (IHRB) clerks of the courses put so much faith in what Met Éireann tells them.
On Saturday morning Curragh clerk of the course Brendan Sheridan gave his standard going briefing from the track and said: “Speaking with Met Éireann the forecast is for the possibility of passing showers today, not too much, 2mm to 3mm, a couple of mills overnight and the same again tomorrow.”
By mid-afternoon the heavens opened and following the conclusion of Saturday’s racing Sherdian again updated us on his interactions with Met Éireann as he announced a precautionary inspection for Sunday morning: “I was chatting to Met Éireann and they are a bit unsure as to how much rain we’re going to get tonight, we could get 8mm, we could get 10mm, we could get 15mm in this area, they are not 100% sure.”
On Sunday morning Brendan Sheridan gave another update from the now waterlogged track which, according to the clerk of the course, had received 23mm of rain since Saturday afternoon. You could understand him being a little irked with the Met Éireann forecasters, who had been about as accurate as a blind sniper, but he was unwavering in his belief that they might eventually hit the mark: “chatting to Met Éireann earlier on, they’re giving another 5mm to 10mm through today.”
Lastly, IHRB last week issued their latest figures detailing their equine anti-doping efforts. The numbers contained in the report relate to the first six months of 2023, covering race meetings, point-to-points and out of competition testing, and it looks like we may be heading for the cleanest year since they began issuing these reports in 2021.
In 2021 the testing of horses, both in and out of competition, resulted in 35 adverse analytical findings. In 2022 that number dropped to 11 and in the first half of 2023 there were only 5.
There have actually been zero adverse analytical findings in samples taken from horses during out of competition testing in the first half of this year, which is certainly worth a mention considering that the number of these tests carried out is more than ever before.
The one caveat to this zero figure is that when IHRB issued the figures for 2021 there was only 1 recorded adverse analytical finding for that year from out of competition testing, but on their website that number was subsequently amended to 12 with the following note: “This figure has been updated to reflect further Adverse Analytical Findings related to samples taken during this period which were confirmed in 2022.”
