LAST month, I expressed my disdain for BHA Head of Handicapping Phil Smith’s justification for the elimination system in important flat handicaps, in which horses are balloted out in order of weight carried rather than official rating.

Smith justified the policy on the basis of the Weight-For-Age (WFA) Scale, which he claimed was designed to compensate certain horses for lack of maturity, as well as lack of experience and ability. The WFA Scale does indeed cater for expected physical maturity, affording concessions to three-year-olds and occasionally four-year-olds against fully mature racehorses to produce a level playing field, with the weight received decreasing over time, but increasing with race distances; it certainly makes no claim to equalise the claims of horses of different levels of ability or experience, a task very much in the hands of the BHA’s own assessors.

To illustrate, a three-year-old colt racing against an older horse over the Ebor trip in August (at York, let’s say, just for argument), would be set to receive 12lb under current guidelines if they had the same official rating, and on a sliding scale thereafter.

Of course, the decision to eliminate according to weight carried rather than rating means there are a huge number of potential Ebor runners denied a run who would get one if the opposite criterion was applied instead.

This has been a point of rancour, and Smith’s argument that it’s correct to proceed with the current rule on the basis that a 100-rated three-year-old is an “inferior animal” to a four-year-old with the same rating has been met with ridicule.

Smith implies that allowing younger horses with similar official ratings into handicaps instead of older rivals, is tantamount to diluting the quality of the field with inferior horses, but the argument reads like the words of a man who wanted to say “the system is broken” but was forced instead to use that broken instrument as the crux of a very unconvincing argument.

Changing the elimination system to allow the “inferior” generation more chance of a run would make races like the Ebor weaker, runs the logic, but there isn’t a judge of handicapping in the British Isles who doesn’t believe that a change in policy would lead to greater dominance of the classic generation.

The problem with three-year-old handicappers in high-class staying races is that if you let them all in, they’d show how uneven the playing field really is under the current scale, and that would discourage owners and trainers of high-class older horses to keep them in training.

It’s long been unofficially held that the WFA Scale used by the BHA and the EPC is inappropriate for the current climate, with younger horses faring noticeably better in middle-distance handicaps from midsummer onwards, and organisations like Timeform have been using different numbers for some time based on an analysis of the racehorse population as a whole.

REVISED SCALE

It was welcome news on Thursday, then, to hear the BHA trumpet a revised scale which will come into force in 2017 (or 2018 for those races in which four-year-olds receive an allowance from their elders).

It’s the culmination of analysis into almost 9,000 races over six years, including both handicaps and conditions races which have been open to three-year-olds and older horses, and the research deals not only with the strike rate of each generation over time and distance, but measures the generic level of dominance through measures like average winning margin and percentage of rivals beaten. As a result, it seems to have been met with almost universal approval, even if there has been a hint of “about bloody time” sarkiness in that welcome.

INTERESTING QUESTION

The interesting question for me is that with the weight received by three-year-olds in the Ebor next year set to fall to 10lb, what does this mean for the BHA’s stance on elimination by weight over rating?

There was only one three-year-old in the 2015 Ebor, and none at all this year, and while that pleases some, it certainly doesn’t mollify the majority.

It’s true that the differential in the scale may let one or two youngsters into York’s highlight, but if the world agrees that there is no glaring advantage for them any more, why not eliminate by rating instead? That would involve something of a volte face by Mr Smith, but it’s not a lost cause by any means. Here’s hoping.