Back in November, 20 horses went to post in the Troytown Chase at Navan. Fourteen were trained in Co. Meath by Gordon Elliott, who provided the winner Coko Beach and four of the first five home. He broke no rules. To those who objected to his mass entry, Elliott retorted that he hadn’t stopped any horse running in the race by running the number he did. It had not filled to its capacity and his entrants had a range of owners.

Never before though have the authorities sought to handicap the people who own or train horses

Not long after that event, amid growing concerns about the domination of racing by a small band of ‘super-trainers’ whose yards contain an ever-growing proportion of the best horses, the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) announced that it would be ‘discussing with interested parties’ the idea of limiting trainers to declaring no more than four runners in any Class 1 or 2 handicap. In the interests of fairness and of a lively betting market outside the Classics and ‘conditions’ races, in which entrants compete on equal terms after allowances for age and sex, we have long handicapped horses to create a notional equality. Never before though have the authorities sought to handicap the people who own or train them by restricting how many they may run in a particular race.

Interfere with the market at your peril, say some. Why should limits be imposed on trainers who have earned the patronage of owners with pockets deep enough to buy the most expensive horses by demonstrating their supreme ability? But the excellent can drive out the good. My fear is that if we don’t interfere then slowly but surely British jump racing will die. When trainers like Fulke Walwyn, Fred Winter and Michael Dickinson (trainer extraordinarily of the first five home in the 1983 Gold Cup) were the big names they only had around 50 horses in their yards. Plenty of prizes were left for others to vie for. Now racing has become a numbers game. Last season Willie Mullins sent 293 different runners to a variety of tracks. The latest Horses In Training lists 177 horses in Paul Nicholls’s Ditcheat yard, 145 under Nicky Henderson’s care at Seven Barrows and 210 at Dan Skelton’s Warwickshire base. Theoretically at least trainers from such well-stocked yards can flood a race with entries and squeeze out competitors.

With Irish-trained horses so dominant at the Cheltenham Festival these days, the debate swiftly became framed by some as an England/Ireland issue, although if there were to be a numbers limit on any trainer’s runners it could just as easily be an Irish-trained entry taking up any extra space created among the bottom-weights as one trained in Lambourn or Somerset. Anyway by the end of January the BHA – normally not known for the speed of its discussions – found its hands too tender for handling such a hot potato. It announced that the discussions had been conducted ‘in the context of sustaining the sport’s ongoing appeal to customers’, but that it would not be taking any immediate action, merely keeping the matter under review.

They should have stuck with it and endured the storm. This year’s Grand National attracted 94 original entrants. The 61 of them from Ireland included 13 from Willie Mullins and 26 from Gordon Elliott (who has already won three Nationals including two with Tiger Roll). When last week the National weights were allotted, Gordon said he expected to be sending eight or ten runners to post. But since last year it has been decided, amid the latest series of changes designed to make the National a safer race for horses and riders, that the field will henceforth be cut from 40 to 34.

To me that is a retrograde step which unlike all the other sensible reforms – softening the core of fences, altering take-off and landing levels, starting the race further from the stands and raising the qualification levels for entrants – will significantly alter the essential character of the historic race. Fewer, better horses will probably go faster anyway at greater risk. But crucially in what possible way can one trainer supplying nearly a third of the Grand National field be ‘sustaining the appeal to customers’? Gordon is a brilliant trainer but whether he is Irish, English or Azerbaijani, that sort of domination can only detract from the glorious uncertainty that is part of the National’s appeal.

Moreover it will lessen the betting appeal of a race that puts more into racing’s kitty than any other. Already the domination of super-trainers and their super-rich clients is contributing to smaller field sizes overall, leading small-scale punters like me uninterested in backing odds-on favourites to bet less often and so reduce our contribution to the sport’s finances. The BHA and everybody else in racing is fighting to avert the threat to betting volumes and so to racing’s finances from affordability checks threatened in new gambling laws. It should look again at restricting handicap entries from a single yard. And if that encourages a few big owners to spread their wings more widely that can only be good for the health of our sport.