Free Love Is Truly Exciting

Robert Cooper, Sky Sports Racing’s roving reporter, on the vagaries of racehorse ownership and the dilemmas of the handicapper

- Robert Cooper

Beggars can’t be choosers but the two jobs in racing I would least relish would to be a jockey’s agent or a handicapper. I’ve never been over fond of the telephone; I’d owned a mobile for a year before it rang, and the thought of ringing grumpy trainers at dawn fills me with dread and apprehension, let alone informing the jockeys I represent that they’ve got another day off. I am full of admiration for top agents Dave Roberts and Tony Hind, and how Racing TV presenter Niall Hannity can spend the morning booking rides for his entourage and then face the cameras at some far-flung outpost, leaves me speechless.

The handicapper faces an impossible task. How can you ever have a good day when the level of excellence you strive for is to see 15 horses in a handicap flash past the winning post separated by a whisker? It’s never going to happen. Also the phone comes into play here too, because the grouchy trainer who gave short shrift to an agent just minutes ago, is haranguing you for putting his horse up 7lbs for beating, for what he or she perceives, as a load of donkeys.

The actual process of handicapping is probably fascinating, studying and assessing form, and probably re-evaluating a race that you initially thought was better than it has turned out, and vice versa. It becomes a never-ending circle, and is your end game to give a horse a chance of victory by reducing its handicap rating, or to penalise a winning horse so severely that it may never win again? A horse can rocket up the ratings by, say a stone, after a couple of wins and then take the rest of its racing career to fall to a level where it can win again.