For those who have not noticed yet, the turf Flat season starts on Saturday.
It is easy enough to miss. Like a speeding juggernaut forced into an emergency stop, the Cheltenham Festival may have hit the brakes on Friday evening but it was still cannoning into the news agenda all through the weekend, thus pushing into the background the message that the summer game kicks off at Doncaster.
The highlight is the Lincoln Handicap but this race has lost much of its prominence for two reasons. Firstly, the race has become almost obscured by the sheer magnitude of Cheltenham. Twenty-five years ago the only Cheltenham Festival races that had any sort ante-post markets were the Cheltenham Gold Cup, Champion Hurdle and Triumph Hurdle. Now, from late autumn onwards, virtually all races at the meeting, bar the handicaps, have vibrant markets which mean that the Lincoln has lost almost all its pre-race publicity until the week of the race.
The second blow to its stature comes from Dubai. Since its inception in 1996 the Dubai World Cup meeting has steadily grown to the point where now many of the top jockeys and trainers will be there on Saturday. Lester Piggott may never have won the Lincoln but he rode in the race plenty of times; Frankie Dettori has ridden in the race just once in the last 10 years.
As the Lincoln has clearly lost its grip on even the racing audience then it can hardly be excepted to have the sort of drawing power that the Racing For Change group have been briefed to generate. RFC are close to unveiling plans for what is likely to be billed as a premier season for Flat racing in 2011.
The smart money appears to be that the season will begin with the Guineas meeting at Newmarket in early May and then build up to a mid-October finale. Another aspect of this new structure will be the repositioning of many key events away from traditional mid-week slots to more customer-friendly - and, hopefully, revenue-friendly – Saturdays. All sounds good enough but is there a point when a break from the past becomes the discarding of tradition just to look trendy?
No-one would want to go back to the days when the Grand National was run on a Friday – even if a few diehards would wish to see the Derby returned to being run on a Wednesday – but in between the Lincoln and the Guineas there does appear to be room for something of a compromise.
One of the most obvious faults of the current Flat season has always been the diet of dross that links the Lincoln meeting to the Guineas trails at Newmarket and Newbury in mid-April.
However, to also drop those fixtures from the premier season has the potential for racing’s bold new story at chapter two. It is true that many trainers now prefer to bring horses to both the 2000 or 1000 Guineas without a previous run but that does not mean that all Classic trials have been rendered meaningless.
Last season Delegator started as favourite for the 2000 Guineas having won the Craven Stakes two weeks before. Imagine trying to explain to this newly acquired audience that the horse that is being backed for the big race on the first day of the Premier season has already won a big race that does not actually count as part of the season.
So why not try something that makes the most of what the sport already has? Instead of starting the season at Doncaster, hold back two weeks and begin with a weekend Craven meeting at Newmarket. This fixture would also include the Lincoln which had had a few homes since it was first run as the Lincoln Spring Handicap in 1849. Aside from Lincoln racecourse - which closed in 1964 - and Doncaster, the race has been run at Lingfield (1916) and Pontefract (1942-1944) during war time while Redcar (2006) and Newcastle (2007) stepped in during the recent redevelopment of Doncaster.
It can probably survive another transplant and would provide another focal point for the new season.
The current buzzword for the RFC project is the need for racing to have a “narrative”. All good stories require three simple elements – a beginning, middle and an end. Get the first right and the other two may well write themselves.
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