Successful Steeplechase Sires.
A steeplechasing season somewhat lacking in interesting features has
just about concluded at the time of writing. After the Liverpool Grand
National the average racegoer says farewell to National Hunt racing with
no poignant feelings of regret; but the season is by no means ended at
that point for owners and others immediately concerned in steeplechase
horses. The multitudinous Easter gatherings keep them tolerably busy,
and jumpers which have gone the dreary round of the small winter
meetings are brought out again in April and May in the hope of adding
another race or two to the winning record. For the better-class horses
there is the Manchester Meeting, with a stake second only in importance
to the Grand National, while in Ireland steeplechasing cannot be counted
as finished until the Punchestown Races have been run.
This season there was a fairly satisfactory influx of good-class
flat-racers to the National Hunt arena, among them being Sandboy, Rydal
Head, Amersham, Prince Royal, Vril, Lancashire, Therapia, and
Crepuscule. In the long run, the action of the National Hunt Committee
rather more than a year ago in raising the value of stakes at meetings
claiming several dates on the fixture list, is bound to assist the
progress of winter racing. Those who have read previous articles in
these pages by the present writer will remember that he has invariably
joined sides with those who advocate that no event under National Hunt
Rules—with the exception of races at the genuine hunt meetings, claiming
only a single day each season—should be of smaller value than £100. The
suggestion has invariably encountered a great deal of opposition, the
chief objection usually being that only the best enclosure meetings
could afford to frame their programmes on these lines, and,
consequently, sundry country gatherings that provide sport for many
people would be obliged, figuratively speaking, to put up their shutters
owing to lack of funds.
In reply to this argument, one can only urge that the steeplechase
fixture list is greatly overcrowded, and if some of the less substantial
meetings did go to the wall, so much the better for sport. This, I must
grant, is a ruthless line of reasoning, but I hold that, if
steeplechasing is to prosper, it is necessary to maintain the public
interest, and that can never be done by a lot of twopenny-halfpenny
meetings, whose importance—such as it is—is purely local. More quality,
and fewer leather-flapping meetings, should be the object of all
interested in the future of steeplechasing. It is only reasonable to
assume that the more races there were worth running for, the more would
high-class horses be put to jumping. New owners would take up winter
racing with the knowledge that there were plenty of good stakes to be
won, and the public would be attracted, in far greater numbers than at
present, to see an improved type of steeplechaser and hurdle-racer. The
National Hunt Committee have gone some way towards bringing about this
improvement by the introduction of the rule regulating the amount of
stake-money at certain meetings, and I hope for further legislation in
the same direction within the next few years.
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