ROLF’s Ramblings

AFTER TIMERS KNOW ALL

by Rolf Johnson

Sherlock Holmes was no ‘after-timer’ no, the super sleuth was ahead of the game. Nobody loves the after timer, crowing after the event, that he (not so many she’s) was ‘all over’ the winner.

The ‘Plod’ were always off the pace. Sherlock’s ‘gambles’ came from “observation, logic, science, deduction” - tools honed for an over-sized brain by his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The butt of the sans pareil sleuth’s over-inflated ego, Dr Watson, was just an everyday punter. When Holmes says, “You know something of racing?” Watson replies. “I ought to. I pay for it with about half my wound pension”. “Then I’ll make you my ‘Handy Guide to the Turf’ responds Holmes, sardonically.

We never get to the nitty gritty of Sherlock Holme’s betting account. “The Unlucky Gambler” is about boxing and his verdict on horses was “Dangerous at both ends and crafty in the middle”. Yet the tale of abducted racehorse Silver Blaze (1892) is among the best-loved of his sixty or so cases. (Where was he when we and Shergar needed him?).

‘Brigadier Gerard’, another of Conan Doyle’s cast-list, had nothing to do with racing – he was a French army officer.

From the Silver Blaze tale we got the famous line, “The curious incident of the dog who didn’t bark”. The horse, favourite for a big race disappears, his trainer murdered. The stable’s guard dog neglected his duties.

Hapless copper: “The dog did nothing”.

Holmes: “That was the curious incident”.

In ‘The Adventure of Shocombe Old Place’, a Lambourn stable, is another canine major player - an over-excited spaniel. The horse in this case, Shocombe Prince, survives to win the Derby and eases the owner’s debts what time Conan Doyle could have, but didn’t, turn his man, “The most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” into the Barney Curley of his day: “Elementary my dear Watson”.

Disappointingly, when Sherlock says: “The clever forecast of coming events, the triumphant vindication of bold theories - are these not the pride and the justification of our life's work?” he’s not referring to tipping. Other paradigms, Vincent O’Brien and Sir Peter O’Sullevan, kept meticulous betting records. Surely Conan Doyle missed a trick here because he had Sherlock keeping exhaustive records of his investigations.

If German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer hadn’t already written ‘The Art of Always Being Right’ (1831) Holmes might have done. Schopenhauer offered warnings rather than precepts and if this sounds like an apology for his sharp sophistry, the thirty-eight steps to success in debate aren’t so much tips on how to win arguments as how to avoid getting enmeshed in them. 

Schopenhauer was a pessimist and if you need thirty-eight ways of winning an argument you’ll be trading rhetoric when your nose should be in the Form Book. Simon Nott, man about racing (one of the last of the racecourse ‘faces’) told me: “I used to follow this bookmaker in, but one time the horse got beat yet he’s waving a winning ticket. I’d done my dough and I was peeved when he came up with ‘I had a saviour!’ (Saver). Not definitive after timing – but you get the drift.”

Opium was Sherlock Holmes’s AI. He often turns to the drug, which plays a big part in Silver Blaze. Gregory is the policeman in the affair.  Holmes observes, “The only quality he (Gregory) lacks is imagination – to imagine what might have happened and to act on this intuition.” For aspiring after-timers, craving to be ‘part of the action’ ‘and happenings’, tiresome isn’t the word, you want to strangle them.

So garrotte me –  the Arc weekend was, for once lucrative as well as uplifting, the one not necessarily incumbent on the other – blotting out, to a degree, the absences of Merchant and Centigrade. The French declare the £5million Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe “le plus grand course de la Monde” – a headline that hardly needs translation. There was no Derby runner in the Arc.

My Paris weekend was spent with a friend as close as, well, Holmes to Watson.  (My friend would regard me as a ‘Watson’). And though I couldn’t persuade him to back Daryz in the Arc – his words: “Remember the Juddmonte”; or on Ralph Beckett’s juvenile Cape Orator “impossible draw” in the Criterium d’Automne, he conceded, afterwards, that I wasn’t yet in need of mental Botox. The downside? When you win the argument you foot the bills.

Before the event (nb) I gave my companion chapter and verse why he should put his faith in Daryz despite his last of six at York; beaten (just) by a Japanese rival in his prep race; and whose first ever run came only in April. The balance was evidential: Daryz was trained by the phenomenon that is the new French champion Francis-Henri Graffard; and Daryz was running, for the first time, over the trip for which he was bred.

Holmes berated Watson. “How often have I told you, exclude the impossible and what is left, however improbable, must be the truth?”  150-1 Qirat at Goodwood; Cicero’s Gift, 100-1, Powerful Glory 200-1 both on Champions Day at Ascot, were in the ‘impossible’ category but were meat and drink for after-timers. Daryz (166/10) fell merely into the ‘improbable’ category.

Then there was the ‘truth’: I pointed out to my friend that Cape Orator (41/10), drawn 17 of sixteen, nearly in the woods of the Bois du Boulogne, had won from 12 of ten at Kempton. Added to which the same Gewan who had finished a place behind Cape Orator in Doncaster’s Champagne Stakes went on to win the Dewhurst. Gewan at 25-1 at Newmarket? Neither impossible nor improbable.

If Conan Doyle had given Holmes an eye for a horse rather than for a criminal he would surely have homed in on Daryz, the outstanding colt in the ParisLongchamp paddock. One mystery was why Daryz wasn’t a bigger price on the Pari Mutuel than his starting price back in the UK? Sour grapes? But after all he had been so comprehensively beaten at York: one for Sherlock.

You never forget the first: in 1965 I witnessed the best performance by a thoroughbred I’ve ever seen (Frankel and Secretariat notwithstanding). The surge that took Sea Bird away from one of the strongest – if not the strongest – field ever to contest France’s (now the world’s) signature horserace, was incroyable. Would I ever see the like again? Well I’d seen him beaten at two in the Prix de la Salamandre by stable companion Grey Dawn, who at the time looked the better prospect, even taking into account the questionable ride of Sea Bird’s then jockey, Larraun, promptly replaced by Pat Glennon.

Reliance and Diatome, second and third, would have won most Arcs and had won the big races that Sea Bird, the first to do the Epsom Derby-Arc double, didn’t participate. Since Sea Bird days I’ve twice been in Paris involved with Arc favourites – Bruni (‘76) and Motivator (2005). Both were Classic winners, both finished fifth. Daryz is already favourite for next year.

But still there are ‘unknowns’. Thanks to Paris-Turf I discovered Oisin Murphy, William Buick and Tom Marquand have, between them, yet to reach a place in the Arc in sixteen attempts!  More ‘failures’ than the Japanese!

Asfoora established a record being the first Australian winner of the Group One Prix de l’Abbaye sprint. A Uber driver beat all records - Chantilly to ParisLongchamp as, heroically, he drove the mare’s passport, left behind in stables, breakneck across the city. Asfoora was first since Lochsong, 1993 another mare, to win the Abbaye and Nunthorpe. Should you come across the question in a pub quiz, or indeed wish to exercise your inner Schopenhauer, find some innocent to take you on as to which Balding held the track sprint record at Longchamp? Ian with Lochsong? No. Ian’s son Andrew with Lochsong’s offspring, no. It was Ian’s brother, Andrew’s uncle, my mentor, Toby with Regal Scintilla in the Prix d’Arenberg, 1991. Even Sherlock Holmes would have had to look that one up.