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Why the Dubai Carnival is little more than an exercise in large numbers

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Jack Houghton tells us why he'll be watching the racing from Dubai rather than the boat race but still can't get massively excited about it

A friend, feeling that three months of moping and mourning was ample to get over any relationship, no matter how long-term, organised a blind-date for me.

Amid the oft-repeated joke that the girl would have to be blind, the friend made it clear she had relaxed moral standards: "No fourth date rule with this one mate!"

And so I went. And tried to enjoy it. But something wasn't right, and we both knew it. If something is fake, no matter how much you tell yourself you should savour it, you just can't, because it doesn't live up to the real thing.

The Dubai Carnival and World Cup invoke similar emotions. I know I should be grateful for a US$31m one-day spectacular, culminating in the world's richest race, but the whole thing always leaves me feeling cheap; a bit used and deflated.

Beyond the obvious significance of a glittering price tag, as a race meeting, it just means so little. Money can't by you love and neither, for me, it seems, can it buy you substance.

Coming just a few weeks after the Cheltenham Festival doesn't help. Jump racing's behemoth epitomises heartfelt emotion, engendering a passion and fervency amongst it fanatical pilgrims. Finding the source of its standing is difficult, but it's clear it came slowly, built up organically over the years from its humble inception in 1902 to become a single focus for the sport. The Cheltenham Festival is everything the Dubai Carnival is not.

The latter has no history, no heritage, no lovable quirks; it's a manufactured model of what a racing carnival should be. Cheltenham is loved, as is the Melbourne Cup, as is the Pardubice, because they started small and built a following based on a shared experience of those who took part, not based on the riffling of a gigantic cheque-book.

The Dubai Carnival partly reminds me of the fantasy hotels of Las Vegas, minus the gambling. The other difference lies in the intent which motivates the building of those hotel desert replicas of New York, Ancient Egypt and Paris. It's all tongue-in-cheek. The people that tried to recreate Venice on The Strip know that it is only a postcard to La Serenissima herself. And that's the joke that everyone shares openly: what crazy fool tried to build this thing in the middle of nowhere? Who cares? Let's get drunk and play roulette.

Dubai fails because no one is laughing - not openly at least - amidst the earnestness and grabbing urgency with which the event is staged and promoted. Rather than staging a magnificent circus and calling it just that, we're pressured to view it with a status it has not yet earned.

But perhaps this is all just snobbery; the wearying groan of elitist old-money faced with a parvenu.

Why can't a rich nation decide to spend its money on a horserace? Why does it need to start small, when it can, so self-evidently, start as big as it wants? And how ungrateful can someone in the industry sound? At least they're spending it on racing and not on a football team.

So I should probably get over myself and start supporting it. After all, it's better than watching the boat-race.

What supporters of the carnival will hope for though is a more fruitful post-Dubai career for whoever wins the big race today, which will help its stature and status grow.

Because to date it's been a bit of graveyard. Recent World Cup winners have a poor record post-Dubai. The last nine have won only three races in 24 attempts. Is that what you'd expect from alumni of the richest race in the world?

Almutawakal does skew things somewhat. He failed to win in eight subsequent attempts. But with him out of the equation, the record is still an unimpressive three out of 16. And it is the lack of runs, as well as the low strike-rate, that concerns. Roses of May didn't run again. Neither did Invasor. Dubai Milennium once. Street Cry and Electrocutionist twice.

Many US-based trainers eschew the Dubai World Cup as a target for their horses. D Wayne Lukas, for example, has never had a runner, despite having had a number of potential contenders.

Presumably the distance US-based horses have to travel is a contributing factor, but the record of winners post-Dubai suggests it might be a good decision for another reason: asking a horse to peak in March and then compete in the big races of the summer and autumn looks to be too much.

If, by the time you have read this, Curlin has added the Dubai World Cup to his Preakness and Breeders' Cup Classic wins, he would have also doubled his career earnings to date, by winning just one, comparatively uncompetitive race. So perhaps it's a calculated risk taken by connections: make the (presumably heavily subsidised) trip to Dubai to try and win a race for which you are heavily odds-on, knowing, that should the horse fail to win, or even run again, that the original prize was worth it.

But should this be the thought process undergone before entering the world's richest race? Is it in the interests of the sport?

When asked to comment on Captain Steve's win in the 2001 Dubai World Cup, Bob Baffert bastardised a line originally delivered by Sean Connery in The Untouchables: "It was like taking a gun to a knife fight."

Nice line. And given that Godolphin's Best Of The Bests was 7-4 joint-favourite that day, it seemed fairly accurate: little in the field compared to the competition that Captain Steve had faced, and beaten in America, in much lesser-billed races.

And 2001 was indicative of a familiar World Cup pattern: largely lop-sided affairs that fail to excite as anything other than an exercise in large numbers.