When Poniros, trained by Willie Mullins, swept home in this year’s Triumph Hurdle as the first 100-1 Cheltenham Festival winner since Norton’s Coin won the Gold Cup in 1990, one of the very few people who had backed him was my regular racing companion Derek, known in this column as the Form Guru. His successes are normally a reward for rising before the dawn-chorus blackbirds have gulped their first worm and ploughing through the stats for a horse which had possibly shown a glimmer of form on a wet Thursday at Uttoxeter the April before last. But with Poniros there was no form. Not the merest trace.
The ex-inmate of Ralph Beckett’s Flat racing yard had never jumped a single hurdle in public. So how had Derek picked him? It turned out that the Guru’s fallback in such circumstances is to lob a few quid at the bookies first time out on horses which have cost significant sums to acquire – and Harold Kirk, Willie Mullins’s chief sourcer, had paid £200,000 for Poniros, a son of the Derby winner Golden Horn.
I guess there are worse strategies and I wouldn’t want to spoil the Guru’s fun (he got130-1 with Betfair), but in simple fairness to us ordinary punters, shouldn’t the regulations insist that before a horse can contest a championship event like the Triumph, it must have run at least once over jumps? Willie Mullins is a brilliant trainer, probably the best ever. All credit to him for equalling his own record by training ten Festival winners again this year – more than all the trainers in England, Wales and Scotland combined – but surely racing’s market economy has gone crazy when one trainer is able to play the numbers game to the extent Mullins did in fielding no fewer than 11 runners in the Triumph.
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