EXCUSES – EXCUSES …

The Trainers Book of Excuses

This is not a great time of year. Seemingly, without warning everything has changed – principally that applies to the weather, which has a knock-on effect on our metabolisms. Whereas a month ago I leapt out of bed with the first shafts of morning light, ready and eager to work from about 7.00am onwards, now I am struggling to surface before lunchtime.

Is it me? The answer to that is probably. But it is my experience that this seasonal change results in an unwelcome dose of sluggishness.

After all, in the true spirit invoked by all gamblers (dress it up how you like, but that is what those us that follow this game are at heart) this was supposed to be a life-changing year. Of course it ended up like all the others and now the dream is running down in true Tom Petty-style. It is a shame but a reminder that nothing changes.

Racing rumbles on relentlessly. Day in, day out, up to and in excess of one hundred horses journey to each racetrack in order to supply a minimum of seven winners on each card. (Whatever happened to the six-race card by the way? Anyone know?)

Mathematically that means we should get the old fraction of 100/7 about picking one of these winners. But of course it does not work that way. The men that fix the odds decide that some horses have a greater chance than others do, tweaking the true odds of any one horse running across a field and reaching the finishing point ahead of the rest. Evidently, we have form to go on and that changes everything. At least it does before the races start. However, it often appears irrelevant. The one that Aunty Dot picked out because she liked the name seems to win just as often as the most carefully analysed selection.

Sometimes the task of backing winners seems too great. Seismic changes in the ground create a new and unforeseen draw-emphasis. Then there is a late jockey substitution (the stable jockey stuck on the motorway doing a mile every ten minutes in his Audi that is capable of doing 175 MPH), the horse all but doing a backward flip in its horsebox or in the paddock – the list of excuses for failure seems endless.

I often suspect, once they embark on their chosen career, in addition to the usual essential accoutrements, trainers are issued with a manual in which there is a section containing feasible reasons why the 6/4 chance that represented them has been beaten out of sight.

Listed alphabetically to avoid repetition, these excuses (forget left-handed/right-handed preferences, lost a racing shoe – this elevates mitigation to a different level) are to be used in rotation. A brief cross-section – taken at random – is included below:

Under ‘A’ we have agoraphobia – the fear of open spaces – handy for those hundred-yard defeats at Newmarket. Phobias are good because nobody can dispute their impact on a so-called sufferer, particularly in the case of horses who, you may have noticed, have not yet mastered the art of speech. At least if they have they are keeping it quiet. So arachnophobia – fear of spiders – is sure to be included. After all, if horses can be ‘gay’, why can’t they be afraid of little eight-legged insects crawling across their beds of straw, sending them into fits of anxiety that last the duration of a journey to the races and the race itself.

‘B’: Black Bess-factor: Believed to be a relative of Dick Turpin’s famous mare, so assuming she may have another 199 miles to cover, filly was merely pacing herself in race at York. Bird: One flew too close to horse, distracting it – relevant for Ayr with all those seagulls skittering across the course.

‘C’: Curse: This smacks of desperation, but if cornered and unable to locate said manual, this is such an outlandish never-to-be-forgotten excuse that it can be used just the once as a standby to dig trainer out of the deepest hole. A soothsayer foretold the horse would never win a race on a Tuesday/Friday or in Wales, Scotland or within sight of Wembley stadium (any or all conveniently rule out Chepstow, Ffos Las, all the Scottish courses and, in the shape of the last feeble excuse, Epsom and Sandown – not to mention any given day of the week). Only to be used in the direst of circumstances!

‘D’: Dusk: Runs all his best races at night. Note to trainer: make sure you can back this up with a record that shows he has performed creditably at Wolverhampton and Kempton.

‘E’: Earplugs: Forgot to put them in/take them out. Got stirred-up by noise of fairground (good one for Epsom or Yarmouth); lacklustre performance explained as horse thought it had died when mistakenly inserted.

‘F’: Floodlights: Their dazzle proved off-putting for horse (might sound obvious – but only applicable during all-weather night meetings). Flyover: Distracted by traffic travelling across flyover – ideal for Pontefract.

‘G’: Gum: Swallowed a piece of chewing-gum that appears to have lodged in throat, affecting breathing. Grand Theft Auto: Horse unnerved by the computer game played in the horsebox by stable staff on the way to the races.

‘J’: Jekyll and Hyde: As in has two personalities. Those assuming they were backing ‘Jekyll’ to run to his best form, discovering they had in fact backed the reluctant and bad-tempered ‘Hyde’.

‘K’: Knacker Yard: In a reversal of most excuses, used to explain vastly improved form, in that horse overheard an ominous conversation between trainer and owner of said beast, stating this would be his next destination if he failed to show a semblance of ability at Catterick.

‘L’: Lunatic: Influenced by the movements of the moon – a new moon therefore responsible for poor/improved showing. Useful for those winter evening meetings when trainer has supplied a big-priced winner inexplicably backed from 20’s to 10’s in the last few minutes before the ‘off’.

‘P’: Pacemaker: Has been used as one on a regular basis and assumed his role in racing was to make the running for a mile then drop away and finish tailed-off.

‘R’: Rumpy-Pumpy: Distracted by pretty secretary, trainer entered horse wrongly in error. The decorative culprit, on secondment from university where she studied ancient cultures, later decided to make her placement permanent, deciding she wanted to work for a horserace trainer – meaning her academia was not entirely wasted.

‘S’: Shakespeare influence. Horse overhead the call, “My Kingdom For A Horse,” and was hesitant at obstacles, awaiting a better offer than jumping eight flights at Stratford.

‘W’: The horse lost all concentration, apparently consumed by an impulse to throw itself into the nearest river. Effective at Windsor.

That’s enough already. I must conclude this. Why, I do believe a spaceship is about to land in my back garden.