16th March 2015

It is purely coincidence that I wrote about the jockeys championship yesterday. I had no idea whatsoever that changes were going to be announced this morning and, if previous changes to the trainers championship are anything to go by, the same probably applies to most jockeys.
The Racing Post doesn’t say whether or not there is a significant prize to go along with this new championship but, as they mention that there ‘will also be a prize for the most wins in a calendar year’, I think we can take it that there is.

So you can now brace yourself for the departure of our top jockeys, to sunnier, more lucrative, climes in early October. They may, or may not, return for the Craven meeting but you can take it that the majority will only ride in Britain for six months of the year. Another great idea from the folks at Racing For No Change.

Thankfully, they haven’t yet changed the trainers or owners championship to a similar format but you couldn’t even guess what idiotic idea they might come up with next. The trainers championship runs from November to November which, as Andrew Scutts says in the Racing Post, ‘is curious’ but he goes on to say that ‘if it is to be on a full-year basis it might just as well be as it is than change it to January to December’. He, as a journalist working for the Racing Post, should know better. The Racing Post website currently posts four different sets of statistics for trainers: Championship, Calendar Year, AW Championship, and Turf (which, bizarrely, includes a large number of races run on all-weather surfaces) and the only one which makes any real sense is the Calendar Year as two of the others include horses of different ‘generations’ (two-year-olds become three-year-olds on January 1st) and, as I say above, the ‘Turf’ table includes all-weather races. Nonsensical.