The first cuckoo, daffodils in full bloom and the Craven meeting at Newmarket. For racing fans, it was always hardy to say which of the three was the most compelling sign that spring had finally arrived.
But times change, the daffs have usually been and gone before Cheltenham these days, and Guineas trials now seem to have been consigned to history too. Four of the 11 runners in Saturday’s Greenham Stakes, including Esquire, the winner, were geldings, and therefore unable to run in any British Classics. As for the Craven meeting at Newmarket last week, Haatem, who took the main 2,000 Guineas trial, is 25-1 for the Classic on 4 May, while Pretty Crystal, the Nell Gwyn Stakes winner, will need to be supplemented to run in the 1,000 Guineas the following day.
As things stand, in fact, Dance Sequence, the Nell Gwyn runner-up, is the only likely runner at shorter than 16-1 for either of the Newmarket Classics to have run in what used to be described as a “recognised” Guineas trial.
That is perhaps skewed a little by the fact that the 2,000 Guineas market is dominated by City Of Troy, the odds-on favourite, and he, like the great majority of Aidan O’Brien’s runners in the Newmarket Classics, was always expected to head straight to the Guineas without a prep. It is also true that Ramatuelle, who was touched off by Charlie Appleby’s Romantic Style in the Prix Imprudence in April, will be an interesting runner in the 1,000 Guineas if Christopher Head decides to send her across the Channel.
Modern training methods, though, have effectively rendered trials redundant as far as most of the top yards are concerned. All but four of the 2,000 Guineas winners since 2004 – Frankel, Night Of Thunder, Poetic Flare and Makfi – were effectively making their seasonal debut in the Classic, although Chaldean, successful last year, went into the stalls for the Greenham, unshipped Frankie Dettori shortly after the start and then galloped free to the line.
The Craven Stakes and the Nell Gwyn still have Group Three status, though that could well come under pressure if current trends continue. The European Free Handicap, meanwhile, in which two 1990s Guineas winners made their seasonal debut, was scrapped after the 2022 renewal.
The extent to which the steady decline of Guineas trials really matters in the grand scheme is arguable.
Prestige and prize money has been growing steadily at the other end of the campaign for many years, and since trainers are now entirely confident in their ability to get horses race-fit at home, a trip to the track in early-to-mid April – for anything other than a racecourse gallop, at least – is never likely to be Plan A for the best of the previous year’s juveniles. Slower-maturing types, meanwhile, have an all-weather programme where they can stake a late claim for a place at Newmarket.
But it only adds to the sense these days of a Flat season that shuffles apologetically into view and hopes that someone will notice.
Once, the annual gripe that the Lincoln at Doncaster in mid-March was an underwhelming way to launch the turf campaign could be countered by the argument that the Craven, with Classic prospects emerging from winter quarters and all the geese still swans, was always where the season really kicked off in spirit.
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Now, though, even the diehard fans seem to be swerving the Craven meeting. Attendance over the three days dropped by nearly 50% between 2019 and 2023, from 16,562 to just 7,564 last year.
Even in its relative pomp, though, the Craven meeting was never a money-spinner to match the upcoming Festival meetings at Chester and York. Attendance at Chester’s May Festival in particular is still well below its pre-Covid level, however, and had it not been for Aidan O’Brien’s willingness to run serious Epsom Classic prospects in trials like the Chester Vase, Cheshire Oaks and Dee Stakes, all three races would have struggled to maintain their status in recent years. As it is, the Pattern Committee warned in February that the Chester Vase’s Group Three status could be under threat in 2025.
The Guineas meeting at Newmarket followed by two weeks of Derby and Oaks trials at Chester, Lingfield, York and elsewhere still seems as good a way as any to get a modern British Flat season fully up and running. It has the potential, in fact, to be one of the most exciting and eagerly-anticipated fortnights of the Flat racing year – but if owners and trainers increasingly steer their best horses around the trials, it could yet head the same way as the Craven.