Kauto Star still gets handicapper’s vote
He may have missed out on the popularity poll but Kauto Star is still the jumper by which all others are measured.
He finished third behind Big Buck’s and Imperial Commander in a public vote for the jump racing’s Horse of the Year title however, it may be impossible to accurately measure him against the horse by whom all other chasers have been measured and found wanting for the past 40 years. Kauto Star was last seen taking a crashing fall in the Cheltenham Gold Cup but his stock rose to new heights last season and he was awarded a rating of 190 in the 2009-10 Anglo Irish National Hunt Classification.
Phil Smith, the BHA’s head of handicapping had spent much of his spare time working on an analysis of Arkle’s form to try and produce a rating for that horse using the guiding principles on which modern-day handicapping is based. At present the only benchmark available is that of Timeform, which rated Arkle at 212 and stable companion Flyingbolt 210, with every other chaser at least 19lbs their inferior.
Smith admits that even comparing horses like Desert Orchid and Burrough Hill Lad is difficult given the changes in the handicapping mechanism. What is not difficult is appreciating Kauto Star’s sheer consistency over the last four seasons. “Sixteen performances, in his British career of 170-plus, a standout performance in the King George where he beat some very good yardsticks by 30 lengths – he’s an absolute stunner and a credit to connections,” Smith said.
“I always felt he was capable, given the right circumstances, of producing a performance of something similar to that. Everything went right for him on the day, they went a h**l of a pace and he put a big distance between himself and the other horses who were just blown away.”
The distance between Kauto Star, Imperial Commander and Denman – all rated in excess of 180 – and the rest is almost as wide and looking hard for any of last season’s novices to bridge. “There’s a whole host who are much of a muchness,” Smith said. “If you go back two or three years, Denman was the standout three-mile novice and there ain’t a Denman this year. But something will progress.
“We look regularly at what happens to the horses when they come out of their novice year and lots of horses progress 10, 12 and 14lbs. And there’s so many of them in the high 150s that some of them will go into the low 170s. The trick is to find which one.”
Weapons Amnesty, the winner of the RSA Chase at the Cheltenham Festival could be a candidate but it was sobering to find that What A Friend, who began the season being beaten three-and-a-half lengths by stable companion Denman, when receiving 22lbs in the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury is now rated at 23lbs below Denman, despite winning two Grade One races in the interim.
Smith lauded what he sees as the “golden age of staying chasers” but admitted that it was impossible to assess the horses from the bygone age. “I managed to do one of the Arkle seasons and it was just a nightmare,” Smith explained. “The system then was just completely different. In those days there was no centralised handicapping and there were a load of guys who hardly ever spoke to each other and they did very much their own thing.
“For example, in the big freeze of 1963, the same people – even though there was no racing taking place – would suddenly say ‘I think I’ll change my mind on that one, I’m going to have that conceding 7lbs to that whereas as last week I had him conceding 10lbs’. It was just a different way of working.”
Perhaps a degree of separation is due. In cricket Sir Donald Bradman's Test batting average of 99.94 is nearly 40 runs ahead of any other player in the game's history, but it is acknowledged as coming from another time and no-one really tries to measure a modern master like Sachin Tendulkar in that way. Cricket has moved on but racing clings on to its past even though it is a distant land.
The upside down thinking of jump racing invests an inverted status to the handicap, the sport's version of communism that attempts to make all horses equal. It is the antithesis of the essence of sport because the best competitor is penalised for his very talent. The only way for Kauto Star to match Arkle's feats would be to take on such tasks and, with so many valuable conditions' races on offer, that will never happen.
“I do think Kauto Star, had the trainer wanted to, could have given weight in big handicaps the same way as Denman has,” Smith said. “I think the best way to get a fantastically high rating would be in a handicap. I think that would be the methodology of achieving a hugely high figure. You’re giving 20lbs so you’re already 20lbs better than these horses before you beat them by 20 lengths. The average handicapper in Britain goes up 8lbs. So, if he was an average winner of the race in terms of the distances etc etc, you’d be looking at around the 198 mark.”
Perhaps we should just enjoy Kauto Star for what he is and while he is here – a champion.
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