Flat Stayers £1 million bonus

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Ardross

Senior Jockey
Joined
Aug 8, 2007
Messages
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Apparently if you win one of 4 preps in May, the Gold Cup , Goodwood Cup and Lonsdale Cup - it seems the sponsors of the Lonsdale Cup may be behind the idea - it is a great incentive but surely it should end with the Doncaster Cup but they just don't have the pull of York .
 
I like the idea and I hope they will be open to tweaking it. Races like the Champion Hurdle and Chester Cup could also feed into it
 
Yes will be hard to win - I suspect Le Moss and Ardross would have done it but difficult to think of a stayer since who could have done - Yeats was great at Ascot and Goodwood but beatable elsewhere.
 
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I beg to differ..Yeats would have won it hands down IMO. He was always trained to the minute when coming to England and was never beaten, winning all his races at Ascot Goodwood and Epsom.

This is an obvious effort by the sponsor to try and bring their Group 2 race in line with the other two as it has never attracted the best stayers around. They might be better served if they ran it in September as it's a bit too close for comfort to the Goodwood Cup

Quest For More is one of the few who ran in all 3 winning their race almost winning the Gold Cup but unplaces at Goodwood...as you say there are a few from the past that Could Have but Would Have tried? that's a different story..even with that Million Pounds as we saw recently with Might Bite it doesn't always work.
 
Tanlic said:
I beg to differ..Yeats would have won it hands down IMO. He was always trained to the minute when coming to England and was never beaten, winning all his races at Ascot Goodwood and Epsom.

This is an obvious effort by the sponsor to try and bring their Group 2 race in line with the other two as it has never attracted the best stayers around. They might be better served if they ran it in September as it's a bit too close for comfort to the Goodwood Cup

Quest For More is one of the few who ran in all 3 winning their race almost winning the Gold Cup but unplaces at Goodwood...as you say there are a few from the past that Could Have but Would Have tried? that's a different story..even with that Million Pounds as we saw recently with Might Bite it doesn't always work.
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True but somehow I suspect the ground conditions at York in August might be more acceptable than Haydock in November .

Yeats was beaten at the Curragh and Longchamp in his favour was the fact that the other stayers around in the UK at that time were terrible .
 
Have to admit I'm torn when it comes to these bonuses.

It's the sponsors money so on one hand they should be applauded by offering up the cash and providing new incentives but on the other, any horse that wins all those races will have already made a bundle of prize money so pumping another million into race meetings filled with top class horses while the gaff tracks continue to be filled with low grade fodder doesn't strike me as the way forward.

and did it make any difference to the NH season? Bristol De Mai went off a very short priced in the first leg because connections of other horses elected to swerve it. Though maybe that's just the fact the first leg is run at Haydock on typically attritional ground which can't be the best way to start a horse's campaign.
 
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