Horses will carry an extra pound over and above the top weight of 12 stone for every pound
by admin
Horses will carry an extra pound, over and above the top weight of 12 stone, for every pound by which their offical rating exceeds 170.In practice, this may simply deter the Champion Hurdle contenders from running in the Newbury race, but in the run-up to the Festival they have plenty of alternatives. The remainder of Ladbrokes odds are: 10-1 Val D'Alene, Rough Quest, 12-1 Cogent, Earth Summit, Jodami, Young Hustler, 14-1 Monsieur Le Cure, Morgan's Harbour, Unholy Alliance, 16-1 bar.The racing at Newbury yesterday was of a rather more modest nature, with just 26 runners in the six races, but the course could at least announce plans to revitalise its other major National Hunt event, the Tote Gold Trophy Handicap Hurdle in February.Some might feel that with horses of the calibre of Deep Sensation and Large Action among its recent winners, the race is in reasonable health, but the course clearly believes that the high quality of entries is taking the contest away from its roots as a rough-and-tumble handicap.Added prize-money for next year's renewal will be raised to pounds 80,000 from pounds 50,000, but a new system, devised by the the British Horseracing Board's race-planning department, will attempt to prevent top-class hurdlers from compressing the handicap. The ante-post favourite for the Hennessy with Ladbrokes is One Man, last year's winner, despite the fact that his jumping deteriorated towards the end of last season and that he is now asked to race from a 25lb higher mark than 12 months ago.The 7-2 on offer about One Man can hardly be called good value, but with the betting then 10-1 bar, there should be interesting prices further down the list. I took her out of the Hennessy as I wouldn't want her to run over three and a quarter miles without getting a run into her first."Another significant absentee when the latest declarations for the Hennessy Gold Cup were released yesterday was Barton Bank, who will run next in the King George VI Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day rather than the Newbury race on 25 November. Despite that burden, however, Josh Gifford's mare remains a possible runner in the race."If we get some rain Ascot might be the right place for her," Gifford said yesterday, "as she would only have to give away a stone and a half, but she will not run anywhere until we get some rain.
Ladbrokes cut him to 9-2 from 6-1 yesterday, behind only Alderbrook (3-1 with a run from 4-1) and Montelado (4-1 from 7-2).Large Action will now miss the First National Bank Chase at Ascot on Saturday week, in which he would have been asked to carry top weight of 12 stone along with Brief Gale, last year's Sun Alliance Chase winner. Alderbrook, the current champion, is still quoted in all the ante-post lists, although Large Action is now closing in on favouritism. The Champion Hurdle has really opened up now with Relkeel, Danoli and Alderbrook all sidelined."Only two of those horses, however, are definitely out for the season. Sherwood commented immediately afterwards that "10-1 with a run for the Champion Hurdle" would be a useful bet, and yesterday a spokesman for the stable said: "Large Action jumped adequately at Uttoxeter but Mr Sherwood feels that he will be happier over hurdles. After just one successful but unconvincing outing over the larger obstacles, Oliver Sherwood's stable announced yesterday that the gelding, who has been placed in the last two runnings of the Champion Hurdle, is now expected to revert to timber in the hope that he can make it third time lucky.Large Action's chasing debut at Uttoxeter was an eventful race, with three horses departing at the first and Large Action himself, despite starting at long odds-on, rarely fluent at his fences. Racing GREG WOOD As experiments go, the attempt to introduce Large Action to a new career over fences seems unlikely to attract the attention of the Nobel Prize committee. The old industries are much more competitive; the new out on their own, unmatched by Japan, the country that many people five years ago saw as the world-beater.
Above all, it is an economy that creates new jobs, including many highly paid ones, something at which Europe continues to be spectacularly unsuccessful.. The new jobs are not necessarily in the same places, or for the same people, as the old.But there is no doubt that US Inc has lifted its game Everyone here talks of it. The restructuring of American industry of the past decade - the cutbacks in manufacturing but also the development of whole new service industries, particularly in software, and the explosive growth of others, particularly in entertainment - has been very painful in human terms. We should be concerned if US finance loses interest, for it is a signal that this might indeed happen.Maybe the message for Europe from New York is more useful than the message from Washington. What worries me about America's lack of interest in Europe is less that it is a sign of growing isolationism, more that it is justified.
You would not expect US politicians to be particularly worried about slow growth in Europe, for it is not their problem if we grow so slowly that our living standards hardly rise for a generation. If the markets signal that it is too early for a single European currency, then that deserves attention, too.Leave aside the grand political threat of isolationism on both sides of the Atlantic and note the economic threat of a slow-growing, rigid, unsuccessful Europe. The world becomes much more dangerous if Europe and America both withdraw into themselves.So what is to be done? There is no magic wand, but to understand why American finance has become less interested in Europe is a point at which dialogue can continue. If the politicians won't talk to each other, at least the markets can.Financial markets are utterly international, and the signals they give deserve attention. If, for example, the bond market distrusts the securities issued by major European governments and pushes up interest rates on these, that is a signal that policies are probably misguided. The same sort of political forces that led to the Republican landslide will show themselves across Europe, which may well react in a similar manner. Faced with much greater international competitive pressures, the reaction of Republican politicians has been to hack back the role of the state at home, and to start to step back from international commitments, too.The impact of a truly global market economy will put just as great pressures on European countries as it has on the US, maybe greater because they carry the costs of more extensive welfare systems.
The gist of his argument is that this revolution goes far beyond Reaganism and Thatcherism in the 1980s and will have a profound impact on Western European democracies. So naturally he would be concerned at the right-wing social agenda of the Republicans since the landslide victories of a year ago. The danger is that the gulf between America and Europe becomes so wide that they cease to co-operate in providing political and economic stability to the world.By coincidence some of those dangers will be spelt out today in a speech in Vienna by the prominent New York financier Felix Rohatyn, who warns of growing isolationism within America.Mr Rohatyn, managing director of Lazard Freres, but best known for his role in saving New York from bankruptcy in the late 1970s, is a Democrat. There are better fish to fry.Does that matter? Well yes, it matters desperately. A weak or ill-tempered relationship between Europe and North America is damaging in purely economic terms, given the mutual interdependence of the two most mature economic zones, but the potential damage goes far beyond that. But understand the import of the question: in the eyes of Europe's thoughtful friends on Wall Street, the EU has embarked on a course of action that will end in tears, and that diverts it from much more pressing issues of economic and social policy.
