PETER THOMAS

Weblog: Wandering the world wide web

Lark that left me feeling sick as a parrot

DO you ever have one of those horrible days when a seemingly random occurrence crops up out of nowhere to remind you of a terrible moment in your past thatyou thought your unconscious had managed to bury for the duration of your existence.

You were perhaps aware, deep down, that you might have to face that particular demon again on your death bed, when your short and undistinguished life flashed before your eyes in its grim entirety, but you weren't expecting it to rear its ugly head before then.

You were reckoning, however, without the twin terrors of coincidence and the instinctive human need to relive suffering.

My random moment came at the weekend, when the Pierse Hurdle stirred up a humming hornets' nest of controversy due to the 'alternative' handicap system that allowed the weights to rise substantially once topweight Newmill was pulled out, leaving the winner to run off a sensible mark, rather than languishing forlornly in the raggedy pile labelled 'way out of the handicap'.

There has been a lot of heat generated under a lot of collars about perceived unfairness to the poor old punter, but that heat was as nothing compared to the spontaneous combustion that went on in the Thomas household when the lightning bolt from Leopardstown illuminated a race I hoped had been condemned to the shadows forever: the 1996 Coral Cup atCheltenham.

For some of you, this may be the race in which Trainglot covered himself in Festival glory. For me, it was the race in which The Latvian Lark was forced to run from a stone out of the handicap because the topweight - a classy beast whose name the shadows have as yet refused to yield up to me, but who I believe had run the day before - was left in at the final declaration stage, if memory serves me well, but then removed at the 11th hour, forcing 13 of the 20 runners to compete while 'wrong' at the weights.

The eventual favourite for the race ended up as topweight off a paltry 10st 10lb, leading me to believe that the withdrawn horse may have been in the same ownership. If my capacity for conspiracy theorising doesn't deceive me, I seem to recall the SP jolly being heavily backed in the morning, while the rest of us were left to sit and gawp, open-mouthed, waiting for the inevitable announcement of the withdrawal.

Then again, the mists of time may be playing tricks with my rear vision.

All I know for sure is that The Latvian Lark - whom, you will not be surprised to hear, I had lumped on at 33-1, expecting the final field not to include our unnamed topweight - was beaten a smidge more than six lengths by horses he would, by any traditional reading of the form book, have stuffed regally had he been competing off his correct mark. The first three home were in the weights proper, although I'm glad to say theydidn't include the fav.

As a punter, I would have been well served by the alternative system in operation last Sunday. To suggest that as an ante-post backer I either deserved what I got or should learn to expect such eventualities, is no less daft than to conclude that a day-of-race punter should brace himself for post-bet bombshells such as occurred with Newmill.

I placed my bet in the belief that everybody would be playing by the rules, or at least in the spirit, of the game, but ended up believing otherwise.

The suggestion has been made that the alternative system should be discarded and the old system reinstated, with the proviso that anybody abusing it should be dealt with in the severest possible manner, via swingeing punishments and brutal retribution. Sadly, anybody capable of hatching and brazenly executing such a plot in the first place is likely to be untroubled by the firm-but-fair justice of racing's authorities.

As for the notion that independent veterinary examinations might be used to verify the veracity, or otherwise, of the reasons given for late withdrawals, all the precedents suggest this may be the plan whose lack of cunning and workability caused Baldrick to leave Blackadder and go to work for the Time Team.

I'm not saying either system is significantly better than the other, just that both have painfully obvious flaws, and presently I'm leaningaway from the one that let me down 13 years ago.

Yes, I know it was a long time ago, but then I haven't forgiven Maradona yet, either, or the boy who threw my plimsoll up on the gym roof at primary school. I'm just a wronged punter, and a wronged punter, like an elephant, never forgets.