General / Simon Rowlands / 20 August 2009 / Leave a comment Free £25 Bet View Market

Simon Rowlands considers Sea The Stars' claim to greatness, how to survive a heatwave, the advantage to two-year-olds in Friday's Nunthorpe Stakes and the perils of "bad science".

I am just back from a couple of days at York, and what a splendid occasion it was on the whole, despite my having more near misses in that period than I would normally expect in a month of action.

Star of the show was undoubtedly Sea The Stars, winner of the Juddmonte International on Tuesday. He got the job done, but only after hitting [4.0] in running, and his margin of victory was, for the second time running, just a length over an Aidan O'Brien-trained rival, in this case Mastercraftsman.

"He does just enough" and "can only beat what is in front of him" we are told. But the fact of the matter is that Sea The Stars is in danger of riding off into the sunset with a string of very good performances but no single effort that clearly identifies him as a great.

Perhaps things will change when he locks horns with another O'Brien horse, the Irish Derby winner Fame And Glory, in the Irish Champion Stakes at Leopardstown on September 5th. Sea The Stars ([1.7] to back at Leopardstown) beat Fame And Glory ([2.78]) by one and three quarter lengths in the Derby at Epsom and a doubling of that margin or more might finally propel him into the high 130s.

* * *

It might seem churlish to be critical of aspects of the Ebor meeting, which in many respects represents all that is good about racing. However, the more extreme restrictions on dress at the meeting are outdated and arguably even dangerous.

The instruction in the official racecard was that "Gentlemen are required to wear a jacket, collared shirt & tie in the County Stand" and this was not waived even when temperatures soared to 28C (it felt hotter) on Wednesday.

Do the course management need a serious incident, or even a fatality, before they remove the rod from their back and allow racegoers to remove the jackets from theirs? I voted with my feet and left before the last so that I could "slip into something more comfortable". I was not alone.

* * *

Friday's highlight is the Nunthorpe Stakes, one of Europe's top sprint races. It is also a rarity in that it is a race which allows 2-y-os to run against their elders on weight-for-age terms. This would be little more than a novelty were it not for the fact that a large body of evidence suggests that the weight-for-age scale is badly wrong in this area.

The official weight-for-age scale allows 24 lb for 2-y-os at 5f in the second half of August. Timeform allows only 17 lb, and my own research came up with a figure of just 16 lb. In other words, 2-y-os are either 7 lb or 8 lb "well in" in the race if you believe Timeform or me. That equates to something in the region of two lengths, which is a sizeable margin in a sprint race.

Oddly, very few horses from the age group have run in the race over the years - just ten of them since 1990, including three in the rearranged running at Newmarket in 2008 - but they have produced two winners (Lyric Fantasy in 1992 and Kingsgate Native in 2007) and a second (Paris House in 1991).

Radiohead is the only juvenile among 17 runners in this year's race, and he figures at second favourite at [5.9] on Betfair to win. He can be expected to outperform his previous efforts, at least on the face of it, but is he a good bet to win?

I think not. Whereas Lyric Fantasy went into the 1992 Nunthorpe having won her four previous starts, including at a pretty high level, and Kingsgate Native had put up a decidedly smart performance both on the book and on the clock when running Fleeting Spirit to a neck in the Betfair Molecomb on his previous start, Radiohead has operated at a lesser level.

Radiohead won the Group 2 Norfolk Stakes at Royal Ascot, it's true, but that form has not worked out and the race was run in a poor time. Even with a theoretical two-length advantage, you need a pretty good youngster even to get in the shake-up in a race like this, and I am not at all convinced that Radiohead fits that description. I will be place-laying him accordingly.

* * *

I like to make book recommendations from time to time, usually for work from outside horseracing, which has a particularly poor body of publication overall. This week's offering is "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre, which I finally got round to reading recently.

Racing and betting enthusiasts could probably skip the first 200 pages of the book, which deals largely with the debunking of various medical scams, without missing much. But they would be well advised to pay close attention to the later chapters on proper scientific process, the correct use of statistics and of the many avoidable pitfalls associated with both.

Chapter 13 ("Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things"), with its sub-headings of "randomness", "regression to the mean", "the bias towards positive evidence" and "biased by our prior beliefs", applies every bit as much to horseracing and betting as it does to medical research.

Chapter 12 ("How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science") could easily have been written specifically about the racing media instead.

Tags: Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, Fame And Glory, Irish Champion Stakes, Juddmonte International, Kingsgate Native, Mastercraftsman, Nunthorpe Stakes, Radiohead, Sea The Stars, Timeform, weight-for-age