Barretta (minus tongue strap) provided Colin Keane with his 100th winner of the season© Photo Healy Racing
The government is due to issue new guidelines on attendances at race meetings later this week and it’s widely anticipated that at least next month’s Irish Champions Weekend and Listowel's Harvest Festival will get the 5,000 a day allocation they have requested.
One would presume with over 80% of the population now fully vaccinated that the time has come to end all restrictions on outdoor gatherings but if NPHET and this pandemic have taught us anything it’s that we may have to wear the hair shirt a little while longer.
Bellewstown will certainly be hoping for a broad relaxation of restrictions as it prepares for it’s Barney Curley commemoration day on 30 September. The racecourse has certainly embraced Barney’s 1975 Yellow Sam coup at the course and is running a race in his honour at their fixture at the end of September when it is expected some big names, possibly including Frankie Dettori, will turn up to ride.
Even an allocation of 5,000 mightn’t suffice for Bellewstown that day but at least they have ‘common land’ adjacent to the course which can accommodate many thousands more and there is nothing the Covid police can do about that.
Stewards Reports issued by the IHRB after each race meeting make for fascinating reading, at least for nerds like me, but the inconsistencies in the content can be very frustrating.
Last Saturday at Navan three separate trainers were fined €65 each for infringements relating to gear worn by their horses. One trainer forgot to fit a visor to a horse that was declared to wear one, a rare enough offence which might be reported a couple of times a year in stewards reports. But the other two infringements at Navan were extremely unusual ones to see in a stewards report and both related to horses that had been fitted with tongue straps when this equipment had not been declared for either horse.
If it’s possible to put a saddle on a horse that’s not even running in the race, as happened in Galway, it must be even more common to put the wrong equipment on horses but this is the first time I've ever noticed three similar errors being reported at the one race meeting.
The three Navan fines were for trivial offences in the greater scheme of things but highlight the a la carte nature of stewards reports. If three such errors can be found on one day it surely follows that these errors are relatively commonplace but yet that’s not supported by the official reports. You would wonder if it had been raining at Navan would they have been looked for or spotted at all?
A couple of years ago an IHRB Vet covering the tracks in the Tipperary area started reporting that horses were missing shoes after their races. They were reporting three or four missing shoes per meeting - important information - but it was only being reported at a small number of courses where presumably that particular Vet was operating and it only lasted for a short period of time. Now it’s rare to read that a horse lost a shoe in one of these daily reports. How much more of this type of vital information is simply going unreported?
In the case of missing shoes the onus is probably on the Trainers rather than the Vets to report this information but the whole area of reporting in general would benefit from a review. The level of detail contained in BHA stewards reports far exceeds the IHRB versions and both jurisdictions trail a long way behind the likes of Hong Kong when it comes to providing detailed and consistent information to the public.
Lastly, it was refreshing to see Neve Bennett become the eighth individual female apprentice to ride a winner this season when she broke her duck at the Curragh on Friday evening. The girls on the Flat are beginning to become as commonplace as their National Hunt counterparts but it may still be some way off before we see a girl challenge for the Flat Jockeys’ Championship as Rachael Blackmore has managed over jumps.
In fact it could be a while before anyone not named Colin challenges for the Flat Jockeys’ Championship in Ireland. The reigning Champion notched his 100th winner of the season at Navan on the last Saturday in August and to think that on all three previous occasions he managed to hit the magical ton he did so in the month of November.
