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Monday 20 August 2018

Horse Trainers: Why DOES My Horse Keep Losing

Interesting headline. 

Most of us don't own a racehorse. However, we do like to bet and make an assessment to the given chance of a horse. When betting, it is important to have some measure of assessing whether a horse is likely to hit the jackpot. You fancy its chance and place a bet. How did it go?

Win, lose or stuck in the stalls, you take an interest and if you worked the oracle collected cash.

Betting on horses can be frustrating but imagine owning a horse. It is costly. You can buy  a horse quite cheaply but the training is a killer. Not only does the trainer collect training fees but they use their ''skills'' to place the horse to win. Well, that is how it should go. 

No one is perfect. Horses are not machines. They are all susceptible to many variants. As punter we know very little about the good, bad and ugly. Perhaps owners have a little more access because they pay the bills. I doubt many have too much input into the placing of horses which is understandable. Too many cooks and that. 

However, we have all seen times when horses are placed over a distance that doesn't look to suit, a change of tactics, or ridden wide to the point of being ridiculous and the horse tires out of contention. 

Is this simply a mistake, circumstance or is their a lack of knowledge?

Let's face it, trainers are busy. They have to manage lots of things, people, horses.They delegate, but they are responsible. I guess if you calculated the time it takes to get a horses ready to race it would be a surprising number of hours. All the admin, correspondence between owners, jockey, transport, declarations. The list goes on.

It makes me think that many trainers would benefit from an expert who could assess each horse and find the right race. When you consider how much it costs to get a horse to the race track, you really don't want to waste money. True, not ever horse can win. There's only one winner unless it is a dead heat. But would a trainer benefit from having an expert who places horses to win? It may well happen with trainers big and small. I imagine they wouldn't want to publish the fact because it could be viewed in varying ways. 

But would it help a trainer's win and place stats. 

Eric Winner studies sprint horses and the amount of times he questions the decisions of trainers does suggest that they often make wrong choices. Perhaps there is a hidden agenda, so it is actually the right decision (we will be unlikely to know). 

What do you think?  

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