April fools day at Folkstone
Ahh, you can tell the flat season is back. How? Well, when you get days like the one we had this week at Folkstone!
As flat races are over shorter distances all horses have to be loaded into stalls. Well I say all horses, sometimes a horse just wont go into that big metal thing in front of them. Typically it is a small percentage of races, maybe about 1 in 20 where a horse refuses to load and gets withdrawn. On some days however it seems that the nervousness of horses seems to spread through the field and you end up with some unlikely chain of events unfolding. That’s what happened at Folkstone.
We had the unusual situation where three of the previous five races at Folkstone had horses that failed to run. However that couldn’t happen in the last as the stalls were taken out of use with a previous incident and there was a flagged start. I commented to the guys that at least we couldn’t have a withdrawn runner in the next race as they didn’t have to load. A few minutes later I was completely eating my words when the fourth horse in six races was withdrawn, this time for planting itself at the start and refusing to race. I couldn’t believe it!
It’s pretty rare to see this, but I think the accolade of bizarre must go to Leicester last May when five runners were withdrawn from just one race! According to the stats, five in one race as independent events, is somewhere in the 320m-1 range. It was this race that convinced me that horses obviously infect each other with their own sentiment just before the off. Another angle to understand in this fascinating game.
Category: Using Bet Angel
