Jamie Lynch: Would you credit it?

Failure to accord credit to anyone for what he may have done is a great weakness in any man.

Not an excerpt from Ask The Handicapper but the words of William Howard Taft, the 27^th President of the United States. There used to be horse stables at the White House until Taft demolished them in 1911 to make way for a four-car garage. He takes credit for giving the horse no credit, and, not that he’d have wanted to, but Taft wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the modern racing world where the giving and taking of credit, speaking on behalf of the horse, is becoming a contentious issue, more than ever this year.

The purpose of these columns isn’t to let me vent my teeny, weeny spleen, but heading towards a weekend of seeing the good in bad rides at Ascot and seeing the very good in an otherwise bad field for the Phoenix at the Curragh, I think I’m allowed this once, so here goes.

It really irks me when somebody says that horse ‘X’ doesn’t get the credit it deserves.

It’s not a big thing, I know, but it is a bigger thing than before, the phrase seen and heard with increasing regularity this Flat season, and, before getting into its testimonial merit, let’s try to examine why it’s spreading like a contagious disease this year.

There hasn’t been a horse in Britain or Ireland that’s run to a Timeform rating of 130+ in 2016.

We’ve been spoilt in that regard recently, with Golden Horn and Muhaarar going big and bold in 2015, while Kingman and Australia often hit those heights in 2014, and there were as many as four formidable forces in 2013 (Toronado, Dawn Approach, Olympic Glory and Farhh), which takes us back to the era of Frankel and the age of Sea The Stars before him.

The ‘doesn’t get the credit it deserves’ line is more often than not used in the past tense, a credit score tending to be determined in racing’s rear-view mirror, after the event, as an explanation for an outcome where the pieces don’t quite fit. We’re forever seeking sense and science in racing, leaning towards laws of logic, and when something happens that is slightly out of kilter, like an overachieving horse, then the inclination is to look to the past for the present puzzle, to assume that it must have been undervalued beforehand, to say it didn’t get the credit it deserved.     

In a year with no European stars, these Group 1s aren’t taking the same winning, with a trickle-down effect on the whole pattern, hence we’re handing out back-credit like a noughties banker to explain away a general slip in standards, Highland Reel in the King George acting as Exhibit A.

That’s the reactive not getting the credit they deserved, but the pro-active not getting the credit it deserves is if anything even more rife and even more wrong. It can sometimes generate a headline on a quieter news day, with a bellyaching trainer or owner firing what’s termed as a warning shot ahead of an unrealistic Group 1 assignment.

It’s an opinion, a biased one maybe, but an opinion all the same, and that is, of course, the beauty of racing, but the basis of racing is a system that pinpoints credit like no other sport in the world, the times and weights and measures making for precise poundage evaluations, expressed as a rating.

Like credit, ratings are rarely given, at least not at Timeform, and it’s far more a case of the horses putting themselves on a ratings chart rich in data and history, with practiced standards and standard practices that mean ratings are achieved rather than arrived at for any given horse in any given race.

Even we at Timeform aren’t quite so one-eyed as to not understand that credit comes in many forms, through many qualities, including consistency, durability, versatility and attitude, none of which could or should be factored into a rating, else an objective process becomes a subjective survey. It may not be the only barometer for credit, but the rating – the expression of a horse’s ability – is undoubtedly the big one. Credit and rating go together like, well, credit rating, which we’ve all got.

How about less is more? If a horse can get less credit than it deserves, as the saying goes, then surely it follows that a horse can get more credit than it deserves. It’s rare, but there are certainly occasions where the myth overtakes the reality, and we’re almost in that territory with the glamour girl of 2016.

If CVs were handed in now to determine the top job of top horse of the year, then Minding’s would blow all others out of the water, needing extra room in the key achievements segment to list all of her Group 1s. But in the personal qualities category, while there are double ticks let alone single ones in the boxes marked consistency, versatility and durability, the pen hovers slightly when it comes to the big rating section, because she hasn’t yet got one.

Her Timeform figure of 122 is sufficiently weighty for her to deal with all the fillies put in front of her this season, bar when banging heads with Jet Setting and the stalls in the Irish Guineas, but in historical terms her rating doesn’t qualify her as a great, not by a long chalk.

Greatness is like credit in that it’s largely in the eye of the beholder, with its pick ‘n’ mix criteria, but greatness is also like credit in that the rating is the single biggest factor and the chief means of comparing one horse to the next and one generation to another.

Ratings can be as much about opportunity as ability, and, for Minding, it may be that the opportunity to race against better horses in the autumn only then reveals the full extent of her ability, but for now, and for the future, the ratings world is one she’s yet to conquer, albeit the only one.

It’s one thing for the purists and another for the punters, whose assessment of due credit involves a collection of horses within the framework of the market, and that’s another article entirely, but it’s the pertinent point for Minding if and when she faces a Postponed or a Harzand or even a Qemah, in a match-up of myth versus reality, where two credit lines merge; the one of ability, and the one to your bookmaker, where you really don’t get the credit you deserve.