IT'S NOT THE NEW ICE AGE... IT'S THE RACING COVER-AGE

Happy New Year to all That Racing Blog readers. I hope the festive period treated you well and you face 2010 suitably refreshed. I got an early, and pretty unwanted, present at the start of December in the form of the 'flu - I think would have preferred socks. A / the / any God willing, I'm back on top of matters now.

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One professional racegoing friend of mine was moved to write in a Facebook update last weekend words to the effect that travelling to so many racecourses recently whose meetings remained in the balance right up until racetime hasn’t been good for his nerves. Or, for that matter, for the pocket.

It’s hard not to sympathise. For those of us living in or close to London (to say nothing of further afield), a return trip to Chepstow for Welsh National day, for example, would have required an investment of at least six hours’ driving time and at least 250-odd miles’ worth of petrol, but above all else an investment in the belief that what racecourse officials were regarding as “touch and go” conditions would have become rather more “all systems go” by the time destination had been reached.

Quite a commitment in the throes of a stingingly cold winter period, and a very long, despondent trudge back along the M4 were it to have been met with an abandonment.

Fortunately, both his trip to Chepstow and an only slightly shorter one to Cheltenham for both of us four days later rewarded our own powers of perseverance... and those of the respective racecourse executives all the more so.

Clear skies in particular – and clear they were on these two racedays - can be cruel tormentors of embattled clerks of courses in the midwinter months. Overcast, cloudy, damp conditions provide a drab backdrop to December and January meetings, but frequently at least halfway workable temperatures, too. If a cold winter’s day is clear enough to let the sun work on the ground, however, chances are that it was clear enough to let the frost get into it first as well.

Ah, but surely the threat posed by these clear skies is no threat at all if the sainted covers employed increasingly often by racecourses do their job properly, yes? Well, no.

The covers do not represent a global panacea, and shouldn’t be assumed to do so. What they will always do is allow a racecourse to steal a bit of a march on the elements, and hopefully a decisive one; but those covers still have to come off enough hours before racing (usually up to three, though opinion varies) to allow even a frost-free racing surface to recover from its incarceration; to breathe, to all intents and purposes.

And anyone who still remembers the ritual torture of cross-country runs during their schooling will know just how hard it is to breathe on a freezing cold day without seizing up.

Seizing up is precisely what the ground did when Haydock’s mid-December card was called off in unfortunate and well-documented circumstances. Yet later that same afternoon Barney Clifford admitted during an interview with us on Timeform Radio that even with the deployment of covers, at least one Kempton jumps meeting last winter came perilously close to meeting the same fate, and with that the same tirades as directed at the likes of Kirkland Tellwright and Fiona Needham in the recent past were only narrowly avoided.

On such small margins as maybe just one degree’s variance in temperature either way can the difference between inspired perseverance and public relations disaster rest – who’d be a clerk of the course sometimes.

Of course, by simple expedient of calling an inspection, and then another, a realistic degree of caution was being exercised by all at Cheltenham on New Years Day, covers notwithstanding. Hope still sprang eternal, but not recklessly so - I got to the course just before 10am, and the messages to have been conveyed to my already present Cheltenham Radio / Timeform Radio colleagues so far that morning placed the chances of racing at “70-30” – certainly nothing more bullish than that.

The rest you know. Racing survived, albeit with recourse to a further inspection after the opening race, and race times were condensed to ensure the entire racing programme could be squeezed into the remaining, finite daylight hours. Ironically, though, when I left the course at 5.45pm, the air temperature felt as warm as it had at any time during the day and the racing surface had yet to crisp over.

The vagaries of the British weather reinforced once again. What price a set of Kempton-style floodlights, anyone?

And what of the racing itself? All told 30 horses were pulled out due to the going, but in several cases were as much on account of either the racing surface riding faster than the projected, or else the whim of individual owners of horses whose stablemates did in many cases still take their chances.

What was left was undeniably a smaller total of runners than is usually the case for a Cheltenham meeting, but there will be plenty of fixtures at other courses this winter that will fail to attract as many runners as the eventual 56 on far less (real or imagined) marginal going.

And although it won't have been the most informative meeting for Festival pointers, it's not as if we didn't learn a thing or two - Wolf Moon has the potential to remain a horse the assessor has problems nailing; Radium proved he can handle undulating courses and has increased his options accordingly; Sentry Duty remains an irresistible force caught fresh; and Pigeon Island's appetite for chasing is looking on the wane.

Finally, and returning to the theme of perseverance and effort, massive kudos should go the way of Richard Hoiles for showing, during Seven Is My Number and Pigeon Island’s match for the Dipper Chase, just how expansively and compellingly even a two-runner race can be commentated on.

Not for him the “Horse A leads from Horse B” every 10 seconds and nothing else – instead, not a single tick, quirk and / or shift in the two runners' respective balances of power during the race went unnoticed; and his comment three fences into the race of "There are seven places in the world called Pigeon Island... and already the bottom of the barrel has been reached" had plenty in stitches.

Trainers of aspiring racecourse commentators – add this masterclass to your prescribed curriculum of races to watch forthwith.