This has to be one of the most frustrating results we have had all season, and we are not going to dress it up as anything other than what it is: a mistake from us.
Pierre Royal won the Cambridgeshire at Newmarket today at 33/1. We tipped him to win the Irish Cambridgeshire 28 days ago, said afterwards that he had run a really good race, and then did not put him up today.
What we said a month ago
On 29 August we put him up for the Irish Cambridgeshire at the Curragh, a mile handicap worth £45,071 to the winner. The line in the preview was simple enough: we were with Pierre Royal off 93, because he had won over a mile at that very track and had been dropped to 7f in between.
He was backed into 4/1 favourite and finished 3rd of 17. The form could not have worked out better on the day, either: the winner, Loughrea, was our Top Rated, winning for the third time in a row and a long way ahead of his mark. Manton Bay was 2nd and went straight onto our tracker.
And this is the bit that stings. We wrote at the time: Pierre Royal we will keep in the notebook rather than the tracker for now. The notebook is not a system. The tracker is.
Then we took him on
Two weeks later he turned up in the Northfields Handicap at the Curragh on Irish Champions Weekend. We were on Manton Bay that day and called Pierre Royal the one we are most wary of, a previous selection of ours.
He finished 14th of 22 at 10/1 in a messy race won by a 40/1 shot. Manton Bay, the one we preferred, was 5th. That run is what took Pierre Royal off everybody's list, ours included.
And then he won the English one
Today he lined up in the Cambridgeshire itself, 27 runners, £103,080 to the winner, and he won it at 33/1. He returned 46.0 on the exchange.
Here is the part we cannot get away from. He won it off 91. When we tipped him in the Irish version he ran off 93. He was 2lb lower today than the day we put him up, in the same kind of race, over the same trip, for the same yard.
What we got wrong
We will be straight about this rather than quietly move on.
- We had the horse. We found him at 93, backed him into favourite, and he ran to the level we said he would.
- We had the form line. The horse who beat him was our own Top Rated, winning his third in a row and clear of his mark.
- We let one bad run wipe it out. A 14th of 22 in a rough race at the Curragh is a run you are allowed to forgive, particularly from a horse who had just run to form off a higher mark.
- We put him in the notebook instead of the tracker. On the tracker he would have come back up in front of us this week, with his mark 2lb lower. In the notebook he did not.
For what it is worth, our ratings had him 13th of 27 today, so this is not a case of the figures hating him. It is a case of us having the right horse a month ago and not following him through.