Cheltenham 0-1 Lincoln: Festival fixation leaves me feeling flat

Ante-post / Timeform / 08 March 2010 / 2 Comments

The famous clock on Doncaster's stand is home to the real racing countdown

Irritated by the fanaticism surrounding Cheltenham, Jamie Lynch, Timeform's Flat Editor (please note Flat Editor), takes a cheap shot or two at the National Hunt game before offering up some ante-post advice for the first big event of the real racing season.

"You know as well as I do that, come 5.05pm on the first day, we’ll all be thankful for the apprentice handicap at Southwell and a chance to undo the damage done chasing the glamour girls at Cheltenham"

By the time 25th December eventually comes round, most people are just about sick of Christmas. Dare I say it, albeit tongue in cheek, but is Cheltenham in danger of going the same way? Of course not - not yet anyway - but, speaking on behalf of Flat racing, the jumps season does rather suffer from a preoccupation with the Festival. For the last three months, if not more, racing coverage has been dominated by the countdown to Cheltenham 2010, interspersed only by the even bigger annoyance of the unnecessary pomp and ceremony surrounding the announcement of the Grand National weights, including An Audience with Phil Smith.

Besides the Cheltenham overkill, here are three reasons why the Flat is better than National Hunt:

1) There is no potential financial heartbreak with horses failing to get from one side of an obstacle to the other (see Captain Cee Bee at Leopardstown or Court In Motion at Exeter)
2) There is no potential financial heartbreak with horses failing to run on the bit of track they're supposed to (see My Petra at Wetherby or that ridiculous Newcastle race where five took the wrong course)
3) That Cheltenham (Downtown) song. The word cringeworthy doesn't even begin to describe what's happening here.

The point is, amid all the Festival hysteria, please don't forget about the Flat. You know as well as I do that, come 5.05pm on the first day, we'll all be thankful for the apprentice handicap at Southwell and a chance to undo the damage done chasing the glamour girls at Cheltenham.

This isn't just a rant, though, and there is some instructive material to make for a brighter end to March. In the aftermath of the Grand National weights lunch, a free haute-cuisine lunch in a swanky London hotel for invited tweed-clad 'celebrities' from the jumping game, all orchestrated in front of the cameras, the handicap for the second part of the spring double, the Lincoln, was published without fuss or fanfare.

There is an ante-post edge in that half the horses currently quoted in the Lincoln market have little or no chance of getting a run, added to which it's not hard to put a line through many who are likely to make the cut. At this stage, three catch the eye, two of them in the unexposed mould of an archetypal Lincoln winner.

Penitent hasn't been missed, already favourite, but he deserves to be, and he has all the hallmarks of one who will be much shorter still on the day than the [9.0] currently available on Betfair. Lightly raced, with progressive and strong form, Penitent ticks all the right boxes for the Lincoln, and to top it all William Haggas, who's one of the best in the business, has issued a bullish statement of intent.

Likewise unraced at two and fast improving at three, Mull of Killough is another with an excellent profile for the race, and part of the reason he's trading at much longer odds is that he's from an unfashionable (but canny) stable, that of John Spearing. He won first time out (Betfair SP 113) in 2009 and went from strength to strength, all the time promising more for a well-run mile, something guaranteed at Doncaster.

Last but not least, from a different angle, we have Huzzah. A regular in these big handicaps over the years, fifth in the 2009 Lincoln, Huzzah had a low-key end to the season but returns on a favourable mark as a consequence, also gelded over the winter, and he always goes well when fresh. He's the sole entry by Barry Hills, who traditionally has his string fit and forward, targeting the Lincoln meeting, and if it is a wet spring then all the better as Huzzah revels in testing conditions, though he's just as adept on firmish ground.

There it is then: the entire National Hunt framework deconstructed, and the tricast for the Lincoln sorted, all in just a few paragraphs. If only racing was so simple. If only Cheltenham wasn't so compelling, even to a Flat snob like me.