The July Handicap takes place on the first Saturday in July and given that I own a few horses, it is the one time of the year that people suddenly express an interest and asks me if I have a horse running in the July. Very few seem to appreciate that there are approximately 4000 horses in training in South Africa at any given time, and only 20 of them run in the July.

Your horse may not be running for a number of reasons, including the fact that it is not good enough to have qualified for the July, but there are other reasons such as that the July is run over 2 200 m and maybe your horse is a sprinter (1 000 m) or a middle distance horse (1 600 – 1 800 m). At the end of the day, the July Handicap is not necessarily won by the best horse in the country at all. Once you get into the July, it is then a handicap where the better horse is carrying more weight and so being the best horse in the country could cost you a lot more weight on your back. They then have a draw to determine which box you jump from and if you draw too much on the inside you can be squashed by other horses as the race starts and if you draw too much on the outside, you will end up running 4 or 5 lengths more than any other horse in the race – which is a huge distance and typically the race is won by one length or less.

In other words, factors like the handicap, as well as absolute luck in terms of which draw you are allocated, play a huge role in what your chances are in the race, and then once you are in the race you have to hope for luck, and a clear break in the traffic – your jockey can be sitting on the best horse in the world, but if he has 4 horses in front of him and no gap between them, he cannot get through and win the race.