The British handicapper finds it harder to get a grip on the Irish handicap hurdlers turning out at the Festival than he does the chasers....
Perhaps it is because the average handicap hurdler has raced fewer times than the average handicap chaser and the handicapper doesn’t have so much evidence to base his rating on....
Maybe the hurdlers are simply improving quicker than the handicapper can handle and tune into....
Maybe on the night he is supposed to be rating the Irish hurdlers, the handicapper’s wife insists he attends the ballroom dancing lessons that hold a rickety marriage together....
Who knows? Who cares? You can theorize until the end of time. Racing is great for that....
All you really need to understand is this: if the handicapper has struggled to properly rate Irish handicap hurdlers at the Festival in previous years, he is a good thing to struggle again this time around....
That is something worth knowing....
The dominant double act....
The other thing I would mention is that 14 of the 20 wins produced by Irish-trained horses in handicap hurdle events across the last decade were trained by either Gordon Elliott or Willie Mullins....
Over the period Elliott has produced 6 winners and 14 placers (rising to 17 if you include 5th places which most of the bookies will be paying out on in these big Festival handicaps) from 55 runners in total....
That’s a 42% place strike rate –: an astounding figure when you consider that the races in question are some of the hottest on the racing calendar and that
20+ runners go to post as a matter of course....
Mullins has produced 8 winners and 13 placers (rising to 16 if you include 5th place finishes) from 83 qualifying runners....
That’s a place strike rate of 28.9%. Not quite so prolific as Elliott, but certainly more than acceptable given the nature of the races....
And it is worth being aware of the fact that 4 of the Mullins-trained winners were sent off at SPs of 20s and bigger – so, the market wasn’t properly onto them....