See It Again (Cape Racing).
See It Again Taking It Easy At Milnerton
The Grade 1 SplashOut Cape Derby winner See It Again will return to Summerveld at the end of the month.
Trainer Michael Roberts deliberately left him at Paddy Kruyer’s Milnerton yard because of the prevailing humidity in KZN.
Meanwhile, some sectional timing analysis has shown See It Again’s performance in the Cape Derby to have possibly been exceptional.
The 600m to finish time of Derby third-placed At My Command was identical in both the Hollywoodbets Cape Guineas and the Splashout Cape Derby i.e. 36.1 seconds, despite it being the fastest Cape Derby since 2012.
Yet See It Again beat At My Command by five lengths!
See It Again stopped the clock in 123,55 seconds, which was just 100th of a second slower than Jackson’s time of 123,54 seconds in 2012.
Roberts said the Twice Over colt would take a “traditional” route into the Hollywoodbets Durban July.
He is not sure which race he will make his comeback in, but said the Grade 1 Daily News 2000 would definitely be his final race before the July.
Roberts also revealed that See It Again’s connections have lodged an appeal against his 124 merit rating.
The Roberts’ yard are in flying form.
They landed a treble yesterday on the Hollywoodbets Greyville poly, which came in consecutive races.
That was in addition to three wins in the previous two KZN meetings.
All six winners were ridden by stable jockey Rachel Venniker.
Cousin Casey (Picture: Wayne Marks)
Recalling The Senor Santa/Northern Princess Match Race
Saturday at Turffontein sees the running of the Senor Santa Stakes, so it is a good time to reminisce about this great racehorse, with particular reference to the famous match race he took part in with his paternal half-sister Northern Princess.
Michael “Muis” Roberts, South Africa’s only Hall Of Fame jockey, was not only known for his peerless horsemanship but also as a master tactician. Such was his reputation for tactical nous that the opposition jockeys always tried to work out what he was going to do ahead of a big race. He, on the other hand, would, where possible, always try and do what they least expected … and he often succeeded.
His tactical mastery was never better illustrated than in that unforgettable match race between his mount Northern Princess and Senor Santa, who was ridden by Gavin Howes.
The race took place on a Saturday at Greyville in 1989 during the Christmas holidays in front of a jampacked atmosphere-charged grandstand.
Senor Santa was best known for his sprinting prowess but he was also good at a mile.
Among this Willie Pieters-trained gelding’s victories were the Grade 1 Gold Medallion, the Grade 1 Computaform Sprint X 2, the Grade 2 Star Sprint (1990), the Grade 2 Chairman’s Stakes, the Grade 1 Natal Flying Championship, the Grade 1 First National Bank 1600, the Grade 2 Keith Hepburn Stakes over 1400m and the Grade 1 Star Sprint (1993).
I recall being awestruck when watching his second Computaform Sprint victory at Gosforth Park. He was a strongly built horse with an action which could be likened to a hovercraft because his body hurtled above the ground with tremendous momentum and the hooves appeared to make minimal contact with the ground.
The match race was born of controversy.
The handicapper had omitted the four-year-old Senor Santa from the Grade 2 Germiston November Handicap on the grounds he would not stay the 1600m distance.
This seemed ridiculous to trainer Willie Pieters, because apart from Senor Santa’s sprint wins, the gelding had finished second in the Grade 2 SA Invitation Stakes over 1600m as a three-year-old.
Pieters had the support of virtually the entire race-going public, including Winning Form’s proprietor, Owen Heffer.
After the Paddy Lunn-trained Northern Princess had won the Germiston November, Heffer came forward to sponsor a R150 000 winner-take-all challenge at Greyville between the two chestnut paternal siblings of Northern Guest, thus giving Senor Santa the chance to prove a point.
The event, run on December 30 1989, captured the imagination of the public, who had not experienced a match-race for 20 years.
I was one of a few who temporarily abandoned my seat at a provincial cricket match at Kingsmead and made my way over to the racecourse just to witness this rare event.
Michael Roberts recalled the tremendous build up to the race.
Everybody was talking about it and by the time of the off the atmosphere above the packed grandstand was electric.
It is the closest to the July atmosphere I have experienced at Greyville and the ensuing race did full justice to it.
Michael recalls in the build up being asked over and over again by various media outlets what he was going to do in the race.
“Muis” of course was never going to give his tactics away … or at least not truthfully!
He gave varying answers and to some even said he was going to sit behind Senor Santa. However, his general answer was he was going to have to sit in the early stages because he felt his horse was at her best over 1400m.
However, everybody, including Senor Santa’s jockey, Gavin Howes, knew that Northern Princess would have to make stamina pay if she hoped to beat the proven speed-horse, Senor Santa.
Therefore, Roberts’ talk was dismissed as mere psychological warfare.
However, stating his intentions was a master-stroke by Roberts, because it got Howes second-guessing.
That tell-tale spine-tingling feeling, reserved usually for the July, arose in the packed grandstand as they loaded and what followed was dramatic.
Northern Princess fell out of the pens going at a mere hack canter … but Muis had a trick up his sleeve.
Howes eased his mount back to ensure that if Muis’s plan was indeed going to be to sit behind him, he was going to make it difficult for him.
However, at that precise moment Muis shot forward, leaving Senor Santa flat-footed.
It was another master-stroke, because going through the 1400m mark the filly had opened up a gap of some six lengths.
The first 400m was covered in 27,1 seconds but the second quarter was quicker. Bowling along well clear, Northern princess hit the 800m mark in 49,6 seconds.
Muis then gave Northern Princess a breather coming up the hill.
Roberts was sitting still as they approached the straight and Senor Santa had by now closed the gap.
However, as they came to the false rail, Muis dived for the inside, stealing a march.
This forced Howes to begin chasing his mount immediately.
However, as they approached the 200m mark it looked all over because Senor Santa was eating up the ground down the centre and he duly hit the front.
But the maestro had left a little in the tank.
With the grandstand roof almost being lifted off by the roaring crowd, Northern Princess fought back.
She got up by 0,5 lengths in 1:35,40.
Nevertheless, a point had been proven as Senor Santa was by no means disgraced.
In fact it was probably only Roberts’ mastery which had won the day.
Senor Santa proved the point emphatically about eleven months later when winning the Grade 1 First National Bank 1600.
Michael, recalling the match race today (Thursday), admitted, “To be honest with you if he had just sat behind me up until the 200m mark, I don’t think I could have beaten him … he panicked. It is what I always say to Rachel (Venniker) … don’t press the button too soon.”
Michael recalls Mick Goss summing up the event perfectly after the race.
Goss used his renowned linguistic skills to compare the build up of the event and the atmosphere on the day itself to the July.
The success of Goss’s multiple breeders championship-winning Summerhill Stud was built on the potency of Northern Guest as a stallion.
Why Ordinary Handicaps Are Killing Interest In The Sport
James Willoughby Has Devised A System That Will Enable Connections To Effectively Handicap Their Own Horse. Willoughby is the architect of the TRC Global Rankings and his newly devised system is explained below.
I think the system of non-heritage handicaps in British racing is killing interest and excitement in most races staged every day. I contend I have a far better alternative.
MY ALTERNATIVE to our current handicapping system involves a form of promotion and relegation which allows for much more strategy that incentivises running and winning at the highest grade possible; and removes the fear of a horse being flattered or stuck on a handicap mark that it cannot defy.
The reality of British racing for the horse is this: through handicap raises, penalties and restrictions, our system is geared up to prevent all but the greatest horses from cherry-picking prizes. A horse who starts at an artificially low ebb and rises to mediocrity will win more than one who is useful early and tries to become more useful still. On average, better horses win more races but there are many counter-examples each year. In addition to many other advantages, my system remedies this.
The process where a horse’s handicap mark can be more valuable than the horse is a vestige of the sport’s archaic foundations. The system is outmoded and unwieldy, and it is also downright unfair. The current handicap system offends an important principle: the expected value of prize-money won by a horse on its next start is higher for a 65 horse rated 60 than a 75 horse rated 80.
In other words, a handicap mark is more important than a horse’s intrinsic class!
Why is this so?
Because the handicap system of the present day is extant from a time when handicaps were needed: when the horse population was sparse in number and disparate in location, and races could not be framed unless the underdog was given the incentive of actually travelling to compete.
Head-to-head wagering added fuel to this fire.
The madness of a horse’s mark
AS SHOWN many times in these pages, some of the iniquities of the handicap system would be tolerable if handicaps actually succeeded in levelling the playing field. But they do not. Top weights win more often than bottom weights because the scale is too narrow to accommodate the true differences across the now-swollen continuum of talent. To the unscrupulous, handicaps are an opportunity to manipulate a horse’s form. And this continues to dog the sport’s headline news.
To this long-standing controversy is added the problem of whether British and Irish handicap marks line up.
Surely you could not invent a situation as ridiculous as having to ban lower-rated Irish-trained horses from British handicaps, just because handicapping has been allowed to descend into a pseudo-science, and individual interpretation – particularly over when and by how much to drop losing horses – has become too
influential.
How many openly campaigned two-year-olds race close up in a steadily run race and end up being rated 20lb too high?
This blights a functional horse’s career and can cost its connections tens of thousands of pounds. And bitter experience of the effect results in disgruntled owners leaving the game or, worse still, a nefarious solution to the problem being sought by those sufficiently desperate.
How non-heritage handicaps are killing interest in the game
ALL THE above factors – and more – create a competitive stramash for the sport, but they are not even the most deleterious effect of the system. Worst of all, they render competition in these races abstract from that which drives sport. Winning the races run every day has to mean more than it currently does.
This is the elephant in the room: outside of the horse’s connections, do enough people care who wins an ordinary handicap for reasons other than betting? In football, winning pushes a team up the league, into the next round of the Cup, or it saves face or staves off relegation. None of this has anything to do with the tribalism which some say makes football an irrelevant analogue for racing.
Imagine if a team scored a goal and over the TV replay the analyst could only think to say: “Stoke scoring a goal there is going to make things a lot tougher for them when reassessed.”
If this sounds ridiculous, then consider it happens at least every hour in racing broadcasts.
Why the system persists
THERE IS nothing traditional about 0-70s, 0-80s or 0-90s. Most followers of racing do not even notice the grade of middling races. The system persists partly for the reason that many things persist in racing: stasis. But also because some conflate the question of whether ordinary handicaps are a good thing with that of whether heritage handicaps are a good thing.
Heritage handicaps are a good thing which should not be drastically changed, so I repeat: a good thing. But there is no need for them to be based on handicap marks which are already published and which can be gamed. Instead, the weights could be published on entry. The biggest prizes in the sport should go to the best horses, wherever possible. Not the best horses considering the weights – that damnable phrase which is invoked when a narrowly beaten horse was carrying a lot more weight than the winner.
There would be far fewer cases of this happening if the basic system of racing competition were similar to football – promotion and relegation – with a heavily tiered prize-money structure and the opportunity for any horse to run at any level above its current certification, and one level below, if its connections so chose.
Let us flesh out this simple and flexible idea.
How an alternative system of promotion and relegation might work
FIRST, THERE are 10 grades. Maidens or novices can be staged, but maidens can run in any races except heritage handicaps. Every horse starts as class 5 certified. Every win gives a horse a certification one level higher, so a class 5 race win means a horse is now class 4. Three losses – however narrow – means an optional drop in certification. This eradicates the problem many hate of beaten horses being raised in the weights, rather than lowered or left alone.
That this is an optional drop is the key to injecting the strategy into the system.
Overall, there will be a net change in certification downwards. In a 10-runner race, the winner goes up one grade, while the other nine runners earn one of the three defeats needed to qualify for a drop.
Think of these as a 1/3 of a drop and the total drop is 9 x 1/3 = -3. So, the net drop is -2.
However, and here is the point: a drop in certification is optional. Take it and the horse is eligible for lower-grade races, but it will find it harder to get in higher-graded races in future for which runners are selected by certification. And a revised prize-money distribution, not only tiered but awarding a higher slice to placed runners, means there is a financial incentive to keep a horse’s certification as high as possible – unless it needs a drop to compete.
So, trainers and owners handicap their own horses, in effect. All ordinary races would then have the best advantages of claimers, without the risk of going home without your horse.
And in claimers, remember, those rich in resources have the greatest capacity to drop horses well below their level to win which is iniquitous.
Again, a horse can run at any level above its certification and also one level lower. But a horse certified as class 5 who is dropped to a class 6 and wins still earns class 4 certification without having earned class 5 money. If a horse with class 6 certification happens to win a class 3, say, it still only rises to class 5 certification. So, this provides yet another incentive for horses to run above their certification. Further, a horse could win its debut race, finish second in a Group 1 and still be eligible to win more races without being handicapped out of it forever.
In my system, a horse cannot be certified as above class 1, but heritage handicaps and pattern races are class zero and open to any horse. Heritage handicaps are based on weights published by the BHA at the entry stage and have a narrower weight range than in the past. A horse can therefore win any number of class 1 or class 0 races, though it will face a more difficult task for each win in heritage handicaps, as these races are the only ones for which handicap weights are used – in line with their heritage format. The sport must cap the value of these races and encourage sponsors to put more money into minor pattern races, thus making them more competitive and more interesting.
The benefits of my alternative system
IT MATTERS if a horse wins. It also matters if it loses. There is no point holding a horse back three times because it is relegated after three close losses anyway. Open campaigning is even more advantaged than is the case. A horse who is certified as class 3 but is really class 4 will earn prize-money trying in vain to win class 3s, but it only takes three losses before it gets another chance at its own level, if connections want to go that way. Run more and you win more, or else get more opportunities for a drop.
Equally, horses of poor ability can still win plenty of races over time, though it will take them a while to descend to lowly certification and three races for the chance to drop back each time they win.
Elegant Ice And Guy Gibson Impress At The Vaal
What A Winter is the leading sire of two-year-olds so far this season with five individual winners of six races and his filly Elegant Ice impressed at the Vaal Classic track today when stopping the clock in 57.17 seconds for 1000m to give Craig Zackey his first win since his return from New Zealand.
The Lucky Houdalakis-trained Hemel ‘N Aarde Stud-bred filly was a R400,000 purchase at the National Yearling Sale and she was backed in from 28/10 to 18/10.
She jumped straight into the lead and displaying a big action went along effortlessly in front.
She drew clear with ease in the closing stages to win by an eyecatching 4,25 lengths.
She looks to be one who will go places.
CLICK HERE to watch the replay
In the next race the late stallion Lancaster Bomber had his third individual winner.
The Varsfontein Stud-bred Roy Magner-trained colt Guy Gibson was steadily shuffled back in the running under Raymond Danielson.
However, he caught the eye finishing powerfully between runners to get up by a quarter-of-a-length Jerusaleema Rain, who had been backed in from 11/2 to 18/10.
Guy Gibson was backed from 10/1 to 5/1 and also looks worth following.
Jockey Great Photographed On The Train
Ordinary people often get to mix with stars on the U.K.’s fantastic network of Tube trains and railway lines.
Today legendary Cheltenham record-holding jockey Ruby Walsh and award-winning broadcaster Lydia Hislop were spotted on the Tube on their way to a live episode of Road To Cheltenham.
Walsh is the most successful jockey in Cheltenham Festival history with 59 wins from 1998 to 2019.
What A Winter First-Timer Double
The first two races on the card were both won by What A Winter first-timers.
The first, a workriders maiden over 1000 saw the Paul Matchett-trained three-year-old filly Western Wishes winning under Siyakholwa Myendeki.
In the next race the Lucky Houdalakis-trained Elegant Ice winning under Craig Zackey.
Picture: The subject of the question
Today’s Question
Which great National Hunt horse’s record at one stage read 19 wins from 21 starts, with his two defeats both being in the Cheltenham Gold Cup?
Answer at the bottom of the newsletter.
Picture: Pendil
In the 1974 Gold Cup he was unfortunately brought down three fences from home when travelling like a winner.
