Ian Carnaby seeks another 50-1 winner…plus ca change

By Ian Carnaby

I have never been the best at getting over things.

Writing about them helps to a degree. Or, in the case of Abbotsbury Abbot, whom I missed at 50 to 1 - the better part of 50 years ago, come to think of it - naming my house after him acted as some small consolation. Sometimes I can round the bend in the road, and see my house with its nameplate, and walk up the garden path without once thinking of turning the Southampton Echo on its side, and looking at the stop press, and seeing ‘Abbotsbury Abbot 50-1’. The worst may be over.

It’s a good job I’m not famous because the tabloid press would call me ‘troubled’. I couldn’t stand that. I can just about handle a Proustian fixation with the past and all its self-inflicted sorrow and I don’t mind my hair going grey and falling out, but I’m not putting up with ‘troubled’.

‘Saudades’ is a Portuguese word, best translated as ‘a gentle longing for what has been but is not’. I shouldn’t think they use it very much, any more than the Germans shout ‘Donner und blitzen!’ when something really nasty falls out of the sky or the French murmur ‘Plus ca change’ when some sad human failing - war, genocide, ringing up a former lover when you’ve had a few - repeats itself a few years down the line.

They can’t really lose, of course, because they don’t mention all those things that never repeat themselves at all. It’s like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the moveable feast that is Armageddon. “According to our great expectation the stress of the great time of trouble will be on us soon, somewhere between 1910 and 1912” - the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 1911.

I don’t mind them being wrong, I just wish they’d admit it sometimes. Apart from a weakness for well-chilled Sancerre, that’s the main difference between the Witnesses. and me. I was wrong about Clan Royal in the Grand National and said so straightaway. All I’m asking for is something along the lines of: “Remember that prediction about the whole thing crashing down sometime around 1910 to 1912? Hey, we were way out there, buddy!”

It’s a strange thing, but we of the chattering classes seldom say ‘Plus ca change’ when things work out well. If Gary Moore digs us out of trouble in the claimer at Brighton with a horse previously unsighted in a modest handicap at Folkestone, just as he did five years ago, we don’t leap up and down in the Winning Post bar shouting ‘Plus ca change!’ at the bemused cockneys down for the day. But, just let a 7 to 1 chance (7 to 1 absolutely bloody everywhere, mark you) be returned at 13 to 2 and we look sideways at each other, nod wisely and leaven our schoolboy French with purely English cynicism.

I can’t remember what Abbotsbury Abbot paid on the Tote and I’m not sure I checked. There was something magical about SP’s in those days. 100 to 6 about a winner was rather good and 33 to 1 even better As for 50 to 1, well, you simply didn’t expect it to happen.

How did I manage to miss Creon?

These days the Tote odds are there in front of you on the screen. And so, quite apart from the ‘plus ca change’ aspect, when I missed Creon at 50 to 1 in the Pertemps Final at Cheltenham a few years back it was only a matter of seconds before 91 to 1 or thereabouts flashed up all around the course.

There was a slight difference between Abbotsbury Abbot and Creon. With the former, at least I’d been at school when it happened and I spent the afternoon in blissful ignorance. It was the evening that was the problem. But, with Creon, I could see Timmy Murphy winding him up on the run down the hill and I knew he’d pass the eight or nine who were still in front of him. When you haven’t backed something, it’s uncanny how you pick things up before the commentator. And then, shamefully, you’re in the rowing boat with the others at the end of Evelyn Waugh’s Officers And Gentlemen, without a prayer on the high seas, and out comes: “Only get me out of this, God, and I’ll live different, honest I will”.

But there is no escape. Sipping a pint later on, I reflected that I’d even interviewed J P McManus for the crowd before racing started but did not include Creon in the questions because he’d so completely lost his way - over hurdles, over fences and even when he went over to Ireland. I was the only one in the world who fancied him (apart from Jonjo O’Neill, perhaps) and I didn’t back him. I, who have lost thousands, could not walk twenty yards and scoop up a grand for a tenner. It’s a strange game.

A couple of years ago I made it 2-1 as far as 50 to 1 shots are concerned by backing Robert Stronge’s Water King in the conditional jockeys’ handicap hurdle at the Paddy Power meeting. It was good of him to tell me the plan a month beforehand and I passed it on to various friends and acquaintances as well as the listeners to BBC Radio Bristol’s morning programme, though how many racing people tune in at 6.45am might make an interesting spread market.

It would be nice to make it 2-2 sometime in mid-March. I suppose it will have to be Halcon Genelardais in the Gold Cup, although the 50 to 1 will disappear if Jonjo admits defeat with Exotic Dancer. It may be best to act quickly to avoid disappointment. We don’t want to end up sad or bitterly self-critical. And we certainly don’t want to end up ‘troubled’.