Richard Hoiles: The first 13 recruits to my tracked stable

28 Jun

Richard Hoiles

The racing broadcaster reflects on what he learned from a difficult Royal Ascot and reveals the first additions to his tracked stable of horses to follow.

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Closing my eyes on Saturday night, I could still see waves of horses running towards me. All except my selections, which seemed to be heading in the opposite direction!

With my only collects on the first and final days, Ascot 2023 was a chastening experience but, as always, you can learn far more when things go wrong than when they go right, so here are a few thoughts on the week after trawling through the tapes.

There are lots of different variables at play in horse racing and weighting their relative importance in the various circumstances is key. We all have ones that we value more than others and, just because of a missed cut, it doesn’t mean you have to spend years remodelling your swing. There are, however, tweaks that can always be made to improve things.

There was no draw bias all week. Having watched all the straight-course races back-to-back, although there were clearly races where a group was favoured by the way the race developed, this was not due to any significant going difference. The first and last two-year-old races of the week were fought out between two horses on different sides. The Hunt Cup was won by a horse clear of his group on the far side and the Britannia by a horse clear of their group on the stands side.

The lack of an advantage meant virtually every large field on the straight course split into at least two groups, in three cases three and, in one, four. Each of those became little mini races with their own tempos and abilities. A bit like in cycling, when a group stayed together rather than fragmented, there was often a benefit for those who were able to get good leads into the race – Khaadem being the best example off Sacred. If you were in the wrong group, you were not beaten by slower ground but by how the race developed, which is not an easy factor to predict accurately in advance.

On the round course, there were very few evenly run races. There were some falsely run ones, like the King Edward VII and, to a lesser degree, the Coronation, where class told but they were scrappy affairs both involving interference. There were also some very strongly run races, especially the King George V Handicap, where hold-up horses were confronted by a wall of spent forces in front of them up the shortish straight and chaos ensued.

Remember steadily run races favour those at the front and strongly run races favour those at the back. So, in the King George V, for example, you will not see those that were hampered being included in my stable of tracked horses, but those close to the speed who lasted longest.

The difference at Royal Ascot is that a high proportion of horses are capable of taking advantage of circumstances to win the race, even if they are big prices. On more mundane days’ racing this is not the case and, even if presented with golden opportunities, those of less talent or resolution will still contrive to lose.

Royal Ascot this year had a high chaos factor, and it would be wrong to overreact to the results if they didn’t go your way. Personally, with the very notable exception of Rogue Millennium, I could have had five goes in some races and never been warm. Even the thought of trying to justify tipping some of the winners after the fact was challenging.

Mostahdaf was already auditioning for his future stud career even on the way to post and Villanova Queen was melting from the moment she set foot in the paddock, yet both still won well. It is both the beauty and frustration of our sport that it doesn’t always conform to pre-set rules.

STABLE

Beyond recommending a few selections each weekend, one of the aims of this blog is to provide some thoughts on various themes and interest on a daily basis. To help with this, I have created a stable of horses based on performances I have seen on my travels up and down the country.

Initially, it will be restricted to 25 to ensure I am ruthless in culling and each time one runs it will be flagged on Betway’s Twitter account with a comment as to the suitability of the day’s race along with the reason for their inclusion.

Here is a list of the first 13 recruits: