Statistics

By Ian Carnaby

Well, it’s all over for another year and I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you over the four days although things were, shall we say, fairly hectic. Apart from Wednesday, of course, which was almost surreal, with queues outside the betting shops in Cheltenham and thwarted Festival-goers trying to work out if Huntingdon was reachable in a day - which it was, and still is.

The course executive at Prestbury Park deserves the highest praise for rescheduling so promptly and efficiently. I wonder what price you could have got, a year ago, about the National Hunt Chase not only carrying Sir Peter O’Sullevan’s name but also starting at 12.30pm?

I shall remember many things from this year’s meeting, and also from the days leading up to it. I shall be in a small minority here, and the charge of curmudgeon will no doubt be laid at my door, but I think the preview evenings have become a little tired and repetitive. Not all of them, of course - I’m sure there are some riotous nights in Dublin hotels, and any panel including Mark ‘Couch’ Winstanley, or Mick Fitzgerald, or the professional punter Alan Potts, to name but three, would not know how to be dull. But there are too many races to be dealt with in detail and too many impenetrable handicaps. And, in recent years, there has been an increasing reliance upon statistics.

Now, I am not crabbing diligent research. Ever since one of the stats men for whom I have the highest regard took the trouble to inform me of Ukraine’s outstanding chance in the Eurovision Song Contest - it was all about tactical voting in what we used to call the Eastern bloc, and he’d been back through several years, and they won in a hack canter, backed from 8 to 1 to something like 9 to 4 - I have paid strict attention.

But the trouble is, the stats will sometimes tell you that something very nearly CAN’T happen. Five-year olds don’t win the Champion Hurdle unless they’re as good as Persian War or See You Then. Well, Katchit isn’t, but he did. And the real killer was Inglis Drever, who claimed his third World Hurdle at nine - an age at which no previous horse had ever prevailed. Similar comments apply to Master Minded in the Queen Mother Champion Chase; five-year olds simply don’t win it, but he bolted in even though the weight allowance had been scrapped.

Like pollsters, interviewers and newspaper columnists, statisticians are soon over the worst - minutes, rather than hours or days. ‘All we’re doing is citing the trends’, they will say, which is fair enough. Next year it won’t be almost impossible for a five-year old to win the Champion Hurdle or a nine-year old to lift the World Hurdle, it’ll just be highly unlikely, and so on.

Maybe a hectoring tone or a strident prediction (I’m moving on from statisticians now) makes for a better evening, but I’m not sure it always works. Poor old Inglis Drever not only couldn’t win at nine, but his stable was out of form and there had been that worrying interview with Howard Johnson in the Racing Post. And so (oh dear, oh dear), the dread phrase ‘lay of the meeting ‘was uttered here and there.

Poor Logic 1 Common Sense 0. Inglis Drever was easily the best horse, with easily the best record, in an otherwise modest staying hurdle. Would Johnson send them down if they were amiss? How did the pundits feel when Tidal Bay came home in splendid isolation in the Arkle? A trifle worried? Not at all, presumably. Sometimes I think I’m the only one with an unforgiving sea of regret lapping at the 3am shore.

It wasn't a ridiculous question to put to Walsh

I added a couple more regrets on Friday, as a matter of fact, because I was not quite at my best when interviewing people for the crowd in the parade ring. But after the Gold Cup I wandered round to the interview room to await Paul Nicholls, Paul Barber and Harry Findlay and there was a Channel 4 post-race interview taking place between the station’s most indestructible (just as well) interviewer and Ruby Walsh. When asked if he’d chosen the wrong one, Walsh said it was the most ridiculous question he’d ever been asked. I thought he was going to storm off.

Now, I point microphones at people and I’m not always proud of the results. One day at Sandown, many years ago, I was interviewing the Page 3 girl Linda Lusardi on Royal Variety Club Day. Not my sort of thing, really, and much more the most indestructible man’s area of expertise. Anyway, she was coming to the end of an answer and my mind just went completely blank. And you’ve got to say something, so I said: “But don’t people ever get tired of them?” Ah, the unforgiving sea…

Leaving schadenfreude out of it, and who wouldn’t, I thought hard about the brief Gold Cup interview and I can’t see that there’s very much wrong with the question at all.

The correct answer is: “It looks that way, I suppose. But no jockey is going to give up a Gold Cup winner and turn his back on an owner who has supported him all the way. Kauto Star simply wasn’t himself. It’s unfortunate but I’d do the same thing again”. (Then the bit about it only being a horse race and no one dying and so on and so forth.)

It may have been an unfeeling question and an unsympathetic one. No one doubts that it was poorly timed. Bit it ISN’T ridiculous. Walsh had the choice of rides. He might have worried after Kauto Star’s setback at Ascot, or he might have pondered the possibility of soft ground. He is more than capable of going his own way, as we know from the Ballymore Properties Hurdle, where he rode the winner for Willie Mullins even though Nicholls had a runner in the race. He is a free agent in that respect and the arrangement suits everyone. Strictly speaking, he did actually choose the wrong one in the Gold Cup.

He once flashed me a look when I was asking him something about a handicap hurdle and a horse being left in to give Sporazene a big chance. The stats will say that neither the indestructible one nor I will ever be among his favourites. I think the stats may be right.