A few nights before Cheltenham, I dreamed about the Gold Cup. I've never undergone Freudian analysis, perhaps because my own dreams are usually so banal as not to be worth interpreting, and they are never sporting. But this time I saw very clearly the colours of Kauto Star and Denman battling up the hill. What I couldn't for the life of me remember the next morning was which of them had won, and so I couldn't follow those, from Jacob and Laban onward, who have acted on the basis of preternatural information.
The head to head between Kauto Star, last year's winner, and the contender Denman meant that this year's Gold Cup attracted more attention than any horse race for years. But that only emphasised the sad truth that racing remains a minority sport. At a time when every football club, mighty or meagre, has a sponsor (even Newcastle, who have been condemned to play through this season with "Northern Rock" emblazoned across their shirts), there has been a painfully long search for a new sponsor for the Derby.
Another wave of excitement really ought to sweep the country as the Two Thousand Guineas approaches on 3rd May. I'm reminded of that by the arrival of Racehorses of 2007 (Timeform, £75). As someone who has written about the great new editions of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I can confidently say that this series, published by Timeform for 60 years, constitutes one of the great reference works of our time. It is, if you like, an equine DNB, comprising entries on every horse that ran on the Flat last year, ranging from a few sentences to long, detailed and learned essays. It was founded by the late Phil Bull, one of the more remarkable people I have ever met, a former maths teacher, a militant radical atheist, a cantankerous minor genius, who made a fortune backing horses based on scientifically accurate timing, and then shared his expertise with other punters.
As Racehorses says, no other two-year-old performance last year took the breath away like Raven's Pass annihilating victory in the Solario at Sandown, installing him as favourite for the Guineas—until the Dewhurst at Newmarket, when he was beaten by Fast Company and New Approach. Among the glories of Racehorses are the discursive essays pegged to one horse or another, most of them now written by Geoff Greetham. And so in the entry for New Approach, Racehorses reflects on the circumstances surrounding the end of the career of Teofilo, also trained in Ireland by Jim Bolger.
Teofilo was favourite for the Guineas last spring when he was scratched almost at the last moment, losing a great deal of money for ante-post backers, though not necessarily for everyone: Bolger admitted that some of his stable staff had been laying Teofilo on betting exchanges before his withdrawal. It's characteristic of Racehorses slyly to cite Milton Friedman who, it said, "believed insider trading in financial markets should not be a criminal offence."
As I write, New Approach is a short-priced favourite for the Guineas at 2-1, with Raven's Pass at 7-1 and Fast Company 8-1. But that doesn't tally with the ratings in Racehorses, whose idiosyncratic rating system puts only two "pounds" between the three of them, and moreover assesses Raven's Pass as "likely to improve." Then again, the companion volume to Racehorses, Chasers and Hurdlers 2006-07, published last autumn, had put Kauto Star more than 20 pounds ahead of Denman. Even the deep-thinking pundits of Timeform didn't foresee Denman's stunning improvement this season, culminating in his awe-inspiring victory in the Gold Cup. But then which of us did foresee that? Not me, alas, despite my dream.
No one cares about the cup
If someone learned the results of Saturday 8th March in a dream beforehand, he should have done very well. I reckoned after the event that a modest £25 accumulator on Portsmouth to beat Manchester United and Barnsley to beat Chelsea in the FA Cup, and Wales to beat Ireland and Scotland to beat England in the Six Nations, would have paid around £10,000.
With only one Premier League team in the semi-finals, a widespread suspicion that the big clubs no longer take the FA Cup seriously has been strengthened. It seemed all the more plausible in view of the feeble way Arsenal had already capitulated, especially since Arsène Wenger had made it clear that the domestic cup was the least of his priorities (although when Arsenal subsequently dropped points against Birmingham, Aston Villa and Wigan, it was scarcely because they didn't want to win the league).
But since such suspicions had already been voiced before that Saturday, anyone who shared them was free to back Portsmouth at 10-1 and Barnsley at 11-1. As Friedman might have said, bookies' prices are valuable not because they say what will happen, but precisely because they give a continual snapshot of market sentiment—for politics as well as sport. See the way that the odds on Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain have shifted so drastically over the past four months: wagers on all of them at the right moment would have guaranteed a profit come November (alas again, my dreams didn't tell me to do that, either).
