BHA announces changes to jumps handicapping after Cheltenham Festival drubbing

The domination of Irish-trained horses at the Cheltenham Festival has prompted the BHA to change the way British horses will be handicapped to correct a perceived imbalance in ratings.

Older horses will receive bigger drops after being beaten and the approach to handicapping novice hurdlers will be reassessed under changes which form part of the BHA's Quality Jumps Review.

In an interview in the Racing Post, the authority's head of handicapping, Dominic Gardiner-Hill, said his team had been "lulled into a false sense of security" by seeing British and Irish horses share the handicaps at the previous three Cheltenham Festivals.

However, that all changed in March when, among the 23-5 drubbing handed out to British-trained runners at the festival, seven of the nine handicaps went to Ireland, whose horses then filled ten of the first 11 home in the Grand National.

The subsequent review has revealed a significant shift in the distribution of ratings over the last ten years which the handicapping team will work to largely roll back by the end of the year, with the single rating held by the largest number of horses increasing by more than 20lb over fences from 2018 to 2021 compared to ten years earlier and around 10lb over hurdles in the same period.

The BHA said its handicapping team would now bid to redress the situation by making "subtle changes" to certain areas of their methodology to get the distribution of ratings close to where it had been between 2008 and 2011.

This option was preferred to other proposals which would have seen a manual review of ratings taking place during the quietest period of the jumps season every August or an automated review of ratings done by computer on a given date.

Gardiner-Hill added: "Perhaps we should have done this sort of in-depth analysis earlier. But we're doing something about it now, we're being proactive and we will get it done by January 1."

The BHA said there would not be a "seismic" alteration to how jumps horses are assessed, but its review has pinpointed specific areas in which changes would be made.

It promises "more generous drops" for older, regressive horses or those struggling to win; certain sections of the novice hurdle division starting on lower marks; horses who hadn't run for six months being automatically reassessed rather than the current nine; and "more rigorous" back handicapping.

BHA handicapper: 'No-one can say we're lazy buggers who did nothing' – read Keith Melrose's interview with Dominic Gardiner-Hill

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