Rajan Bala, one of a rare kind

  

Racing handicapped by addiction to betting

 

By Rolf Johnson

 

The Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board has just handed out a record ban to trainer Ronan McNally – 12 years for “running horses in order to obtain handicap marks not reflective of their ability”. This crime has always been ‘part of the game’ because addiction to handicaps and the betting on them is all that ensures survival of many. Here are some reflections on what some call an ‘art’; others call a ‘science’; and others call the besetting sin of the sport of horseracing - handicapping.

 

Admiral Rous (1795-1877) held inflexible and rarely questioned opinions. Through strength of character and selfless study of all matters racing he was anointed ‘Dictator of the Turf’ formulating the principles on which handicapping racehorses is based. Yet he himself insisted: “Handicaps are a boon to bad horses with no other prospect of success.”

 

Before taking up the position of official handicapper in 1855 he would bet – if in a minute way for his time: he bred and raced horses and managed those of the Duke of Bedford – not very successfully. His industry and insight elevated him above contemporaries despite his dictatorship becoming increasingly vinegary and intransigent. At the same time owners and trainers were being told to cease clouting their jockeys! Yet we were still in the era of public hangings and duels – the latter sometimes provoked by disagreements in racing!

 

Rous’s reputation has stood the test of time and his masterful handling of Jockey Club finances ensured Newmarket Heath’s place as the thoroughbred’s world centre. Rous insisted the racehorse was improving and the value of a good horse quadrupled during his reign. But he didn’t alter his weight for age scale, adhered to with only minor amendments, ever since.

 

“I am sufficient of an egotist (or conceited enough if you like) to believe my judgement is, in the main, sound and I am certainly not going to creep about in an atmosphere of vague indecision (usually taken for modesty) in the vain hope of concealing my fallibility.” How Rous might have wished he’d written these words - actually those of Phil Bull, the Twentieth Century (unofficial) Rous. Both were ‘forces of nature’ and both took infinite pains in their work. They shared the trait of irascibility – seemingly a constant among those who attempt to define the racehorse in terms of figures. And their common ambition, to quell racing’s internecine warfare, was unfulfilled.

 

Towards the end of his reign Rous nodded – mistaking a German invader in the 42-runner 1870 Cambridgeshire for a horse of the same name, Adonis trained at Epsom. The German won in a canter. Likewise, Silvanus, ‘handed’ the 1872 Cesarewitch by the allotment of 5-7 – most of which was a tyro Fred Archer. He probably handicapped a dead-heat for the most famous match (mid-nineteenth century they proliferated) of his or any other day – in 1851, The Flying Dutchman against the year younger four-year-old Voltigeur, setting the latter to receive 8 1/2lb over two miles in May (today the weight for age would be 4lb). Voltigeur’s jockey Flatman dropped his whip. Rous’s opinion of jockeys was that “any man who follows the advice of his jockey is sure to be ruined” and his contempt for gambling was expressed in his opinion on losing bettors, “They had always much sooner make out the rest of the world to be rogues than themselves fools.”

 

His contemporary, William Henry Day of the Danebury, Hampshire dynasty which begat Lester Piggott, was a critical admirer of Rous. How reliable a witness Day was in his chapter on Rous in ‘Turf Celebrities I Have Known’ (1891) must be judged in the light his being warned off – twice - including for trying to nobble his father John Barham Day’s Derby favourite (1845) Old England. 

 

Day mixed spleen with adulation. “His (Rous’s) manner was dictatorial; having once formed an opinion he would stand by it, ‘nailing his colours to the mast’.” But then the Admiral’s title was hard-earned, navigating his leaking vessel, the Pique, across the North Atlantic. And he got court martialled for it!

 

Rous, before his appointment as public handicapper had determined, “We want a man like Caesar’s wife above suspicion”. He accepted the post in 1855. His perpetual adversary was Sir Joseph Henry Hawley devoutly opposed to racing two-year-olds and formidable too -associated with four Derby winners. Then as now two-year-olds could race on the first day of the season at the end of February. In 1869 Hawley attempted to have that date put back to July 1^st: and to exclude juveniles from handicaps. Hawley’s measures concealed a comprehensive challenge to the Jockey Club’s authority. Rous came from the opposite corner, fighting for racing as a sport as opposed to a business. He had his way.

 

A century and a half on, the Racing Post, trumpeted successive columns entitled “2023 a Year to Save Racing” echoing The Times’s (who supported Hawley) headline of 1869, “Racing on its last legs”. Hawley and The Times, newspaper of record, were obviously premature; in 2023 some may be forgiven for being less sanguine about the future.

 

Rous considered that racing over four miles (commonplace), was “barbarous” and sprints were detrimental to young riders. “It encourages them to…ride like chimney sweeps on donkeys.” But then they were exceedingly different times – Voltigeur, the day after his defeat by The Flying Dutchman, raced again over two miles (he lost).

 

At least racing was then a national passion due in no small part to Rous’s industry. Our world, day in day out, exhibits a lost infatuation for a sport consumed by peripheral issues such as use of the whip and moral questions about betting. Rous, the nineteenth century saviour, redoubled his efforts. His word became law.  “He noted everything in a book thought too important to trust to even the strongest memory,” said Day.

 

We have longed for and would forgive the foibles of such a man as Rous today, one whose passions matched their acumen – a benevolent dictator indeed. The first handicap took place at Ascot in 1790 but it was Rous who established a form of racing which dominates, through betting, the sport. Various trainers are awarded the title ‘handicap kings’. Class trumps handicap ratings for most observers but class is a matter of questionable opinion. Few racing folk express their opinions on the topic as forcibly or as forensically as Mark Johnston. Already way ahead of any other trainer in achievement when his five thousandth winner weighed in last year, in recent editions of his Kingsley Klarion house magazine Mark stripped handicapping of its mystique – or did he?

 

Elected for a second time in 1959 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced: “The class war is over” - and proceeded to appoint four Lords to his Cabinet. In 1997 new PM Tony Blair, net worth £50.3m, proclaimed, “We are all middle class now.”

The indefinable ‘class’ word, as in ‘class acts’, is used as promiscuously in sport as in politics. Admitting you’ve failed to recognise ‘pure class’ is like saying you couldn’t pick your wife out from an identity parade of loose women. ‘Class’ is the crutch of many a cliché: “Class is permanent, form is transitory”: “greatness is earned, class bestowed”.

In their empirical study ‘Guide to the Classics’ (1939) sub-titled ‘How to Pick the Derby Winner’ the laudable aim of Oxbridge philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Guy Griffith was to take abstractions, class the most notorious, out of calculations.  And yet even this distinguished academic duo can’t detach themselves saying, “The student who leaps to the conclusion that any high-class handicapper can get a Derby winner will have to repent of his folly and mend his ways.”

Frankel was ‘different class’, beyond any handicapper’s reach. On his two-year-old debut in August 2010 Nathaniel gave him a fright from which Frankel emerged 1lb superior. Nathaniel was then rated 91. The next year, in their St James’s Palace clash at Royal Ascot, Frankel just held Zoffany, who achieved a top rating of 115. Frankel never dipped below 123 ascending to 140. Neither class nor form sheds light on those scares by good but lesser rivals.

American phenomenon Flightline has just been rated Frankel’s equal. Official international ratings began in 1977, designed to assess current performers and compare them with champions of the past. Bizarre examples abound: Three Troikas (137) rated 1lb superior to Sea The Stars? I think not and there has been much gerrymandering since Dancing Brave’s 141, and the 140s of Alleged and Shergar. If the thoroughbred is improving do the aforementioned deserve to rank alongside Frankel and Flightline? The latter won all his six races by six lengths and more, on dirt: Frankel’s were on turf. Those surfaces are as foreign to one another as those on which human athletes stamp their greatness – post Second World War ‘cinder’ tracks were made from London debris created by German bombs; nowadays rubber crumb and polyurethane provide a much more user friendly surface. Can we compare the athletes of such different eras?

So class means what the perpetrator wants it to mean. Mark Johnston aims to demystify handicapping and the class element. The fabled all-time winning-most trainer before handing over this year to his son Charlie, discusses handicapping in successive editions of his house magazine Kingsley Klarion under the headings “The Weight Myth” (issue 327, Dec 2022) and “The Science of Handicapping?” (328, Jan 2023). That whopping question mark is a giveaway – Mark has little time for the claims of ‘science’.

Mark states (327): “It seems to me that the class of opposition is far more important than the actual slowing effect of any weight burden...why would weight have the same effect on all horses?”  The self-confessed provocateur and contrarian concedes: “I am a great believer in using official handicap ratings to assess the strength of races…Handicapping is important because the majority of horses…will be stuck in the handicap system…If I am to place horses well I must always be very conscious of their handicap rating.”

Admiral Rous must take the blame for the omnipotent handicap structure which buttresses our racing to an extent common to few racing nations. But our partiality in Britain is waning. Bettor’s appetites are insatiable for ubiquitous football and wham bam cricket. Studying racing form by contrast is a Timeless Test (they were terminated in 1939 in South Africa – just in time for the England team to catch the last boat home). 

The Admiral’s imperious reputation provokes Mark. “Amazingly his theories and calculations have hardly been questioned, never mind changed” and he denies handicapping outright the title “science”. Indeed, he regards Rous’s calculations as no more than “a bit of basic arithmetic” citing the example of Trojan Spirit clobbered by the handicapper on his first run for Charlie Johnston. “If the arithmetical rules of handicapping (were applied to Trojan Spirit) it would expose the whole system for the dog’s dinner that it is.”

But it’s a dog’s dinner that the trainer, in his time, lapped up. Mark’s iconoclasm is written across his default countenance – wry amusement – laminated with intimidating opinions. And Charlie is obviously a chip off the block – take his immediate New Year victory with Timewave, a three-year-old, bottom weight in his first handicap, Class 5, having previously beaten one horse in three outings to earn a meagre handicap mark of 59.  Longer trip, gelded, he ‘made all’ at Kempton. Sir Mark Prescott, virtuoso manipulator of the handicap system, had best look to his laurels. Sir Mark might have coughed at Mark Johnston’s assertion, “The handicap system…commonly results in horses which are lucky enough to enter on a low mark or, dare I say, had their entry rating manipulated.” (Is that Sir Mark spluttering?). 

Although Johnston Snr would surely have swapped some of his handicap triumphs for more regular Classic victories his argument that handicapping is “an anarchic anachronism” is well illustrated indeed by his own mare Scatter Dice. Beaten twenty times in 2012-13, off only a 1lb higher mark than in her previous, distant victory, she landed her swansong, the ultra-competitive Cesarewitch, at 66-1, in a canter: Richter scale tremors were recorded in London’s Kensal Green cemetery where Admiral Rous is buried. Yet my own, late, official handicapper chum’s brief, in the UK and in Hong Kong, was not to produce triple dead-heats – so called ‘triumphs for the handicapper’ - but to adjust ratings so that the betting market remained as wide open as humanly possible.

The scientific properties of slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibres, the former characteristic of stayers, the latter contracting more quickly to aid sprinting arouse the interest of veterinary-trained Mark Johnston though he pays at least as much attention to the “fuel consumption gauge in my father-in-law’s BMW” to establish what is left in a horse’s ‘tank’. Mark’s conviction is that constant speed in the course of a race, as in a car journey, is the route to maximum performance. He wasn’t original in using the titillating analogy ‘more pistons, more power’ but until we have plug-in racehorses (or hybrids!) I’ll remain a dedicated disciple of Martin Pipe’s sacerdotal powers.

Pre-Johnston, Pipe’s winning totals, mainly over jumps, looked unassailable. Who can forget his Unsinkable Boxer destroying the handicap for the 24-runner Pertemps Hurdle at the 1998 Cheltenham Festival? Champion jockey Tony McCoy on the favourite had his irrefutable instructions from Pipe: “This is the biggest certainty that will ever walk out onto this racecourse”: bigger than Scatter Dice of course. 

An award winning sportswriter wrote the acclaimed, The Meaning of Sport (2006), without mentioning class: an oversight, possibly, but the word was not in Rous’s vocabulary nor in that of arguably the greatest of all breeders, Federico Tesio (1869-1954) who insisted, “There is no way of measuring a certain distance at which speed ends and staying power begins.”

In Kingsley Klarion issue 328 Mark demands a rethink. “Surely it is long past time for someone to question the principles of handicapping horses by adding weight. The handicapping system is mostly about grouping horses into races with others of similar ability” – and he might have added ‘purely for betting purposes’. Putting words in his mouth is akin to placing one’s head in the lion’s jaw but such thinking would bond him with my handicapper chum. Was class the deciding factor when Trueshan started favourite for the Northumberland Plate, and confounded the handicapper (and nineteen rivals) under the welter weight of 10-8? Not in my book. Trueshan did win Group races – though not off as high a rating as he was raised, 4lb to 124, consequent on Newcastle.

If you can’t aggregate, you can’t quantify and you’re left with conjecture. Better to study The Art of Always Being Right (1896) by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. It can’t have been the intransigent Admiral Rous’s bedside reading because he died twenty years before publication, but he would surely have concurred with Schopenhauer’s sentiments - worth a glance before you argue the merits of handicapping. I’ll stick with the Form Book, according to Marks Johnston and Prescott – and of course, Martin Pipe.