It is not often that you see the world’s best jockey James McDonald make a fatal error, but he did yesterday in the Newmarket.
J-Mac’s tactics were to go straight to the lead and stay there, way and bully his opposition from the front and crush them into the ground just like he did in the Coolmore and the Lightning.
It might have worked if they were running at weight-for-age, and the handicaps weren’t so much against him, but that wasn’t what brought him so badly unstuck.
The field splitting did.
James McDonald’s first error was that he went to the outside, which was slower than he had rated it.
His second was a compound of the first.
The bully boy speed strategy he rode to meant that J-Mac had to stay in front of the inside horses too.
Not having assessed the lanes right, he was using the inner runners – horse’s he considered inferior to Home Affairs – as his speed gauge, and revved Home Affairs up to run too fast in the first half of the race to stay in front of them.
You can see it clearly in the shots below.
Home Affairs is the horse leading the wide division, in the dark blue colours.
He leads them at the 400.
He is with them at the 300.
But at the 200 mark he starts to lose them.
At this point J-Mac must have had a terrible sinking feeling in his stomach.
He knew he had stuffed up.
At the 100 the inside trio bolt away and confirm it.
Even the greatest riders make mistakes.
J-Mac proved it.
So Craig Newitt shouldn’t feel all that bad about making a fatal error on Atorius too.
Newitt took the 3YO diagonally across behind the field from his 2 draw straight after the start, and made a beeline for the outside.
If he had stayed on the backs of the inside pack he would near certainly have won.
Instead he was the second best run in the race behind Levante, and like her a tragedy beaten.
That’s racing I guess.
It can happen to anyone.
Even James McDonald.