Wrecking Ball Paul was given a freebie at Dundalk© Photo Healy Racing
The Constitution Hill saga has been fascinating to follow over the last week. Thanks to Nicky Henderson’s candour and daily updates I now know far more about the medical condition of a horse in Lambourn than I necessarily would about a close relative in Tallaght Hospital.
It’s also been very positive that Henderson is no longer issuing statements through a bookmaker conduit and is instead engaging directly with the racing public on Social Media.
By the time you are reading this article you will most likely already know the final prognosis regarding the participation of the defending Champion in next Tuesday’s big race. This is a very positive development in an industry where insider trading is rife.
For a sport that is so closely aligned and wholly dependent on gambling, it’s crazy that the Constitution Hill situation is such an outlier to the normal cloak and dagger approach the industry adopts to the betting public.
With only a matter of days until the start of Cheltenham we are still in the dark as to which races Willie Mullins will run his top novices in. Obviously, the Champion Trainer is completely within his rights to make those decisions as late as he sees fit, but it can be very frustrating from a betting point of view.
Sticking to the subject of betting, people are always knocking the repetitive, and for the most part boring, nature of the Cheltenham Preview circuit, but yet those same people still appear to lap up every morsel of info that comes out of them.
Ante post markets, particularly the non-runner no bet versions, bear little resemblance to what they were twenty years ago, but they can still manage to spark into life this time of the year as rumours from the Preview evenings spread about some ex-jockey tipping one up for the Ultima in some obscure venue.
The racing public, and the media that serves them, have insatiable appetites for news and content relating to Cheltenham, which makes it rather surprising that only a week before the Festival begins a news story about an amateur riders’ handicap at Dundalk last Friday has become the most read piece of content on irishracing.com this year.
The victory of Wrecking Ball Paul had many punters in a flap as the outsider built up an unassailable lead in the first half of the two mile race before coasting home by fifteen lengths to give his teenage rider, Kevin Healy, a first racecourse success.
There can be no doubt that the other twelve riders in the race were caught napping and should never have allowed the winner to gain such an uncontested advantage. The Dundalk stewards rightly questioned the offending riders and suspended each of them for five days for their part in this farce.
The punishment in this instance represents little more than slaps on the wrist for the offenders, but considering the inexperience of the majority of riders involved - eight of the twelve riders were 7lbs claiming amateurs - it was relatively proportionate to the offence. It must also be stated that, despite the usual social media storm about ‘bent jockeys’ and ‘fixed races,’ this had nothing to do with any sort of premeditated collusion. It was simply jockey error on the part of the (non-) chasing group.
While the majority of the riders were very inexperienced - two of them admitted to the stewards that they weren’t even aware that the pace setter had gone into a long lead - I wonder if it is correct in these types of circumstances to have one size fits all penalties.
The more experienced riders definitely knew what was happening and offered a variety of excuses as to why they didn’t chase down Wrecking Ball Paul from an earlier stage. Perhaps the length of suspensions should have been related in some way to the relative experience of the individual riders involved.
