Golden Horn © Photo Healy Racing
Racing is home to a lot of flannel but the hoary old line about a good horse being able to go on any ground must rank high amongst its most inane pieces of supposed wisdom. Any horse can go on any ground: it's just a question of how fast. Good horses go faster on most any ground but that doesn't mean they go as fast on everything. Rare is the animal that doesn't have optimum ground conditions for showing its best. Even rarer is the likelihood of those conditions all of the time.
This has been a touchy subject this summer. You would think if there's any showpiece race guaranteed to have fast going it is Ascot's King George in late July. But a deluge the day before turned things so soft the Derby winner Golden Horn was taken out. Some clock experts subsequently argued the race time indicated conditions weren't as bog-like as suggested but the horse was tucked up at home by then, the risk of running deemed too great.
Four days later the Sussex Stakes at Goodwood was run without Gleneagles. He won an Irish Guineas on officially "good to yielding" after which it was revealed how running at the Curragh had been touch and go since Coolmore's star three year old ideally has to have fast going. And that probably is the colt's ideal. Gleneagles was brilliant at Newmarket in the Guineas and at Ascot in the St James's Palace Stakes when conditions were quick. So Gleneagles skipped the Sussex, waiting for his ideal surface to turn up elsewhere.
The problem is waiting for lightening fast ground in Northern Europe, with all its unpredictable weather, can involve waiting a lot. Sure enough Gleneagles also skipped the Marois in favour of this week's Juddmonte International, the run-up to which has altered between eager anticipation of a Golden Horn-Gleneagles clash and doubts as to whether or not one or maybe both of the superstar three year olds might not show up at all due to ground conditions being less than perfect. Happily it looks set to happen with the fates, including the weather fates, playing ball.
Of course the reality is that flat racing is as much business as sport and when reputations are worth millions there is an automatic impulse to cosset them. But no matter how reputations are manipulated, the racing public usually draw their own conclusions when it comes to how horses are campaigned and looking back it's hard for a lot of us not to suspect the connections of Golden Horn and Gleneagles have used ground as an excuse to wimp-out this season.
Whatever happened to adaptability being a factor when establishing a reputation, or versatility, not to mention toughness and resilience? Whatever happened to giving horses an opportunity to prove they possess such attributes?
Running Golden Horn in the King George would have involved some kind of risk but how much stronger would his reputation now be if he'd successfully overcome adversity and shown grit to match his undoubted class. And the fact is Solow's Sussex Stakes was run on officially good ground: what kind of champion isn't up to running on going that generally represents optimum conditions for every horse.
Sometimes it seems an awful lot of flannel is employed not just in saying something for the sake of it but to lag reputations.
However clichés are clichés only through overuse, not because there isn't something to them, and the 'When In Rome' line about employing local jockeys on venturing abroad got a credibility boost on the back of Secret Gesture's Beverly D demotion in Chicago at the weekend.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the disqualification - and it's hardly surprising so many professionals on this side of the pond went 'tonto' in their indignation since they're used to, and by definition thrive in, the system that applies in Britain and Ireland - there's no arguing that Secret Gesture would now be a top-flight winner if she'd kept straight. Or maybe more correctly, if Jamie Spencer had kept her straight; and perhaps most correctly of all, if Spencer remembered where he was.
The Irishman knows all about reputations and how hard it is to shake them. Much of the criticism he receives is off-beam in terms of the nuance involved in his race-riding, particularly in relation to judging pace. Much more relevant though is the charge regularly levelled against him that he can let horses hang when going for maximum effort.
Yes, the American jockey, Irad Ortiz, made the most of Secret Gesture's drift: and if he hadn't, the owner would have been entitled to ask why he hadn't. And yes that's cheating, but since there can hardly be a jockey alive anywhere who hasn't tried it on at some stage, either on the track or in the stewards room, there is more than a whiff of sanctimony among some of the more hysterical charges being made in relation to this case.
The real question is why did Ortiz get the opportunity to indulge his inner diva? Joe Bravo on the ultimate winner looked like he'd summed it up in a split-second as they were passing the post. He knew the score immediately because he was on his turf. But Spencer should have known too. It is eleven years since Powerscourt got thrown out of the Million for hanging, and then too, just like Bravo, the American jocks on that occasion twigged it all in seconds.
Spencer's propensity for letting horses hang is perhaps overstated, and he's hardly alone in it, but it is indulged to an extent by a home regulatory system that is lax, too open to individual interpretation and indulgent of a chance-your-arm riding culture which contains the ingredients for disaster someday. The Arlington system may be accused of being too rigid but it's noticeable how the locals manage to race just fine within its parameters. Spencer was on their patch and rode like he was still on his own. Maybe Ortiz will look similarly out of his comfort zone at York in the Nunthorpe this week.
One jockey who never looks out of depth anywhere continues to be Pat Smullen and it looks significant the Juddmonte team have turned to him for their star prospect Time Test in their own race at the Ebor meeting. A lot of people in Ireland have been banging the Smullen drum for quite a while: is the world finally waking up?
