Dry As A Desert

Courtesy JLH Racing

Talk about dry spells. Irish Harp started well, fighting for second or third with two furlongs to go, but the gas ran out, and she fell back to a very disappointing tenth. Time to retire? No good in Oz either, although to be fair 'Rosie' (pictured) did start as rank outsider, which shows she was in a class field - having the gap she was going for closed didn't help either. There's another race coming up soon, at least, which is the difference - in England and Australia, you keep them racing until you get a result (as long as the horse is fit) or confirm you've got a no-hoper, whereas JRA trainers run them once in a blue moon and then have the cheek to blame race rust for the kind of bad performance one expects from a horse that hasn't ran for a while!

PS. The trainer report clarifies the jockey's statement that Irish Harp was pulling to the right, and Tanaka feels this cost us a top five finish. Sounds fair to me, and I'm no big fan of Tanaka after the Tenshinramman disaster. But what's not fair is the trainer saying it was his first run with the horse and you can put it down to experience. I'm sorry, but five minutes watching a horse in training can tell you it pulls to the right - after three months away from the track, there's been plenty of time for a faultless preparation, with race rust being the only problem that could or should be an issue. It's no good having paper qualifications galore if you can't pick up simple things that a decent stablehand would spot with ease. Typical JRA! Now, what you should do - with experience in the bag - is race the horse on an anti-clockwise track (like Nakayama) within the next two weeks at the most. But no, it will go a training centre (or, worse still, what amounts to a holiday camp), away from the racing stables, and once again the communication and hands-on fine-tuning needed won't be there. Even if the trainer did decide to race, the chances of finding a suitable berth in a gate in JRA racing is remote, and almost impossible to find one on the right track over the right surface and distance - nowhere near enough meetings, hence the long holidays, hence the poor preparation, hence the bad result, hence another pointless holiday, and the cycle goes on... Pathetic.