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Stall Start for Jump Racing

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  • Stall Start for Jump Racing

    Mordin's Latest

    FOR STARTERS THIS HAS TO CHANGE.

    The start of this year's Victor Chandler Chase at Cheltenham was extraordinary. Mad Moose was given an enormous head start on his rivals. The other runners by my estimate from the video took 3.39 seconds to get to the point where he started the race. And they landed over the first fence (which comes up very quickly) 3.33 seconds behind him.

    In other words the starter allowed Mad Moose to begin the race slightly more than a fifth of a furlong ahead of the other runners.

    I recognise that the jockeys and the starter were taken by surprise in this race when the normally tearaway Sanctuaire was dropped in behind the other runners at the start, signalling his rider's intention to change tactics and hold him up for a late run. But surely the starter's primary task is still to ensure the horses form a line behind the starting tape and begin a race on level terms - even if none of their riders want to make the running and are happy to let some huge long shot like Mad Moose do so. The starter surely also has a duty to call a false start when a horse begins a race as far ahead of the others as Mad Moose did.

    I hate to say it but it seems that at a lot of jumps tracks in both Britain and Ireland it is the jockeys and not the starter who decide where each horse starts the race.

    What makes this incident particularly upsetting is that Mad Moose was able to beat Somersby two and a quarter lengths (0.56 of a second) for second place. There can be no question whatsoever that Somersby would have finished second, many lengths ahead of Mad Moose if the start had been fair and level.

    In a race where the favourite was long odds on a lot of punters must have been betting purely on what was going to finish second to Sprinter Sacre, either with the bookies who were offering odds for that possibility or through the exacta or straight forecast. Those who bet Somersby to run second were robbed by the starter.

    The obvious solution is for starting stalls to be used in jumps races just as they are on the flat.

    You might think I'm crazy for suggesting such a thing and say that national hunt horses are just too big to fit into starting stalls. My counter to that is to invite you to watch the video of the Grand Annual steeplechase at Warrnambool in Australia. You can do so by surfing to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Z4H_CIAw0

    As you can see if you watch the video there was no problem loading and starting thirteen steeplechasers into starting stalls for a race over nearly three and a half miles. This in a country where they have the biggest racehorses in the world according to the body weights of horses recorded in Hong Kong. The average Australian horse to race in Hong Kong over a recent eight year period weighed 1086 pounds compared with 1056 pounds for British and 1059 pounds for Irish horses.

    It's also worth noting that in French Bumper races restricted to AQPS runners (non-thoroughbred jump bred horses) they do use starting stalls.

    At the very least HRI and the BHA need to take some sort of action to re-train starters to ensure this sort of thing does not happen again. They should also make some kind of announcement to assure the betting public that starters will in future be heavily sanctioned or fired if they fail to produce a level start - and that horses will be demoted to the finishing position they would otherwise have filled if they hadn't been given a head start.

    I think this is an important issue because in Australia animal rights activists were able to co-opt the support or at least acquiescence of punters in their very successful efforts to curtail jump racing by pointing to incidents which (they claim) make the sport less predictable and therefore less of a worthwhile betting medium than flat racing. Bad starts are one type of incident the sport's organisers can do something about.
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