End of season

We've made it to the end of another Flat season. The season, of course, actually ends on 31st December and the new one will start on 1st January (which the keepers of statistics seem unable to take on board) but we still think of the season as being the traditional one. We haven't got much to show for having reached the end, other than the fact that reached it we have: we're still here - and that's the main thing. And the sun's shining. Doncaster today is usually run on a heavy track, but today it's merely soft, which is sure sign of a relatively benign autumn.
Watching the blue skies over Santa Anita on the television last night, while the rain beat down on our roof, prompted the thought that, while it might never rain in southern California, it frequently rains in western Suffolk, but happily today dawned bright and sunny. And the day has remained thus, which is very pleasant. This was particularly fortunate because our friend Ebonie Macleod, who has been over here on secondment from Darley Australia for a month, was due to head home (she'll now be in the air as I write)
so this morning was the last chance for her to get a good view of Newmarket Heath. Ebonie had to leave for the airport at 7.30, but there was time for her to come out to watch a few horses before she went, so she and I headed up the Bury Road in her car while Aisling and Gemma headed up there on Kadouchski and his two-year-old half-brother Frankieandcharlie. Heading up there at dawn in the summer would mean that one saw horses everywhere,
but at this time of year there aren't many horses galloping, the majority of horses going out instead to do routine canters up Warren or Long Hill. The Limekilns weren't being used, of course (although they were in use up to the end of last week, which was another sign of a dry autumn) but we had a look at them anyway (as the photograph at the head of this chapter illustrates) while waiting for our pair to arrive. There were a few other horses and people down there.
William Haggas appeared there to watch two of his charges whom we saw heading towards the gallop (picture number two) while two Jeff Pearce's team were heading away. Luca and Sara Cumani, the latter fresh back from her trip to Melbourne, were there, accompanied by Luca's very good assistant Ed Walker, to see three of their horses work (picture number three), and our pair arrived just after that trio (picture number four). Jimmy Quinn was also up there (picture number five), waiting for some of Henry Cecil's in-form string
(and we can particularly say 'in-form' after last night's Breeders' Cup victory of Midday) to arrive, which they did as we were leaving, as did some of William Jarvis' horses, followed by a solitary horse from Michael Stoute's stable. There must also have been some of John Ryan's horses up there too: we didn't see any, but Mick, John's father, drove out of the wood, stopping only to remind me that there is a dress code on the Heath. (I've made it to the end of the season without jettisoning the shorts; whether we get beyond today with them remains to be seen).
We just about had time to watch our two come up Railway Land (picture number six) and Luca's horses come up the Al Bahathri (picture number seven) before heading back towards town. By this time the sun was starting to peek over the top of Warren Hill (picture number eight) - but it was also time for Ebonie to head off to begin the long journey home. The New South Welsh weather over the next few months is almost certain to be considerably more pleasant than the British, but even so she can take some picturesque final memories away with her.
And I hope that this little photo-essay might be of interest to some people for whom the splendours of morning work on Newmarket Heath are a rare treat, rather than a daily occurrence. It's good to have a visitor to appreciate them with, because otherwise it is easy to take them for granted and thus fail to appreciate them as fully as we ought.

I made it through to the end of the Breeders' Cup races last night. Just about. For the last couple of races, I realised in advance that I was likely to have nodded off before post-time, so I set the alarm on my phone for a minute before the off time for each race. Thus I was able more or less to see all the action - and I felt less bad about my lack of wakefulness when, this morning, Adam was asking me about the results and, on my asking him why he hadn't seen the races, he admitted that he had fallen asleep on the sofa before the first race and slept through the lot! This evening might be similarly testing, if not more so. At least I did have a semi-decent amount of sleep last night, because I didn't watch the Australian racing live, instead taping it to watch later in the day. Ebonie appeared here at 3 am to watch it, and bizarrely I happened to be out in the yard walking the dogs when she arrived. I'd just got up to check that the video and television were working properly, and as the dogs stirred when I did so it seemed prudent to take them for a walk: they tend to subscribe to the lavatorial version of the old polling day dictum of 'Vote early and vote often'! Happily, my pre-emptive strike ensured that the house remained an Edgar-free zone while I enjoyed my final bout of sleep of the night.

Love is in the air!

It's terribly exciting: love is in the air! Gemma's Facebook page this week has borne the announcement of her changed status: no longer "in a relationship", but now "engaged". There'll be a few broken hearts when word of this gets out, not least because she is engaged to Simon Waterhouse, as there will surely be as many female hearts shattered by the news of Sexy Simon's engagement as male hearts smashed by the news of Gemma's. (By the way, for the benefit of anyone who doesn't know them, in this picture Simon is the one who looks uncannily like Bear Grylls, while Gemma is the one who does't look much like Bear Grylls at all). And we'll be able to toast the happy couple tomorrow evening when they host a joint party, which actually wasn't planned to celebrate this piece of news at all, but to mark the fact that each has recently had a 'significant birthday'. These milestones might have been the prompting which they had been requiring, with the realisation that time and tide wait for no man: mind you, they haven't yet named the day, so perhaps a bit more prompting will be necessary.


Tomorrow's party might be tricky enough. I'm not merely talking about the risk that I might enjoy myself - which, of course, is a major danger - but also about the fact that the Saturday closest to Guy Fawkes night is Bonfire Night, so there will be fireworks above Newmarket all evening; and greyhounds hate fireworks. So I'm not sure whether it will be appropriate to leave the unhappy and frightened greyhounds alone: I might have to wait until the fireworks have all exploded before heading partywards.
The cats and horses don't seem at all bothered by the pyrotechnics, thankfully, with the cats quite happy to look after themselves, as these two pictures of the sisters Giant and Alamshar, taken this week, illustrate. Now that the weather is getting bad, it's hard to get these two cats out of the house, so there's plenty of this type of inaction going on. Natagora is bold enough, but even she isn't to be found outside much when it's cold and wet. Of course the Breeders' Cup is another complicating factor in planning the evening, but Gemma's assurances that there will be a big screen there showing the racing has partially assuaged my misgivings. A more pertinent concern, though, has been raised by David, who has been hired to provide the disco: David has tipped me the wink that someone whose idea of the perfect disco is one which plays such old favourites as 'The Time Warp', 'Dancing Queen', 'Sugar Baby Love', 'Love Really Hurts Without You', 'Gloria' and 'Disco 2000' might be in for a big disappointment. Surely the sprightly 40-year-old Simon won't allow this party to be dragged into the 20th century, will he?


Dragging this chapter back to something approaching sense, I'm pleased to report that the two yearlings who came from the October Sale were both ridden today (and not by me, I'm even more pleased to report). They both seem very sensible (as these two photographs, of the Tobougg filly on her own in the yard and then of her and the Bertolini walking along the Watercourse together, show) so all went very smoothly.
There's not a huge amount going on here at present, so it's nice to have these youngsters starting to make some progress because it gives everyone something to look forward to. More immediately we have a couple of entries next week: Ireland Dancer at Southwell on Thursday and Stardust Memories at Lingfield on Friday. Both are currently intended runners, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they will run. I hope that they will, though. The plan is that Stardust Memories has that run and then goes off for a spell, while the aim for Ireland Dancer (aka Magners) is that this is the (belated - he's been here over a year) start of a campaign for him.

High horse!

As we know, there seems to be a big push towards steering trainers into running horses against their better judgement. The Racing Post is particularly keen on this, and I don't know why. As we know, the Racing Post is in favour of making it harder and more expensive for trainers to scratch horses which they think ought not to be running. I'd have thought that it's in everyone's interests to ensure that horses which the trainer thinks shouldn't run shouldn't run (if that's gramatically sound). It's certainly in the horses' interests. I can't see that it's in punters' interests to have a load of horses running round which the trainers think shouldn't be running - and you've got to remember that trainers are desperate to win races, so you can be sure that they'd be running the horse if they thought that he had a (safe) chance. I can't see that it's in jockeys' interests to have their regular rides running on occasions when they oughtn't: far better to wait until the horse is right than risk mucking him up, just for the sake of a losing riding fee. Dale Gibson, whom as you know I admire greatly, has made the mistake of allowing himself to be dragged into the Post's campaign, and I was disappointed to see him, for once, confusing the issue: he appeared more vexed by trainers taking the horses out without telling him, and thus making him have pointless journeys to the races, than the fact that the horses were coming out, so his complaints, which were basically about lack of courtesy shown by trainers, were allowed to cloud the issue.

Anyway, what's brought this on was a telephone call from Weatherbys trying to persuade me to run Ethics Girl at Wolverhampton tomorrow. This really annoyed me. Re-opening races after the entries or declarations have closed is wrong. If a race closes at noon tomorrow, it should close at noon tomorrow, full stop. And if the declarations close at 10am tomorrow, that's when they should close. The people who have done the right thing by getting their entries/declarations in on time should not be disadvantaged by the people who haven't being rewarded for their failure to do so by being given a second chance. It's clearly wrong, but it's not that aspect of the wrongness which pissed me off yesterday. If I enter a horse (or declare him), it is because I want to run him. Most of the times when I enter a horse and then do not declare him, it is because, come declaration time, I deem him not fit to run. (Otherwise it is usually because I think that the ground is not suitable for him). This is not usually an open-and-shut decision, ie the horse is not usually clearly lame, blatantly sick, or dead. Usually it is a case of suspecting that the horse isn't quite right to run, rather than him definitely being incapable of doing so. So, when having rather unhappily made the unwelcome and uncertain decision that it would not be right to run the horse, it is bloody irritating to have Weatherbys ring me up to try to twist my arm into running by telling me that there will be a small field. This happened yesterday. Ethics Girl ran at Lingfield on Sunday. On Saturday morning I had entered her for Wolverhampton tomorrow, thinking that if she came out of Sunday's race all right I'd probably like to back her up. Anyway, the entries came out for Wolverhampton and I would love to run her in the race, but unfortunately she had a very hard race on Sunday and seemed like a tired and rather stressed horse after it, so - reluctantly - I reached the decision that it would not be in her interests (and hence the interests of her owners) to run on Friday. So it was then really annoying to have Weatherbys ring me up 20 minutes after declaration time to tell me that only four horses had been declared and that I could belatedly declare her. As with the previous occasion (from an earlier chapter) of the potential for changing the jockey, this was clearly trying to tempt me into doing something which I felt to be wrong. It's a valuable race tomorrow and I'd love to run her in it - but it would be wrong. If I'd thought it would be right to run, I'd have declared her prior to 10am. So why wave the carrot in front of me? The answer, of course, is that we are supposed to be paranoid about small fields. But, in the great scheme of things, does it really matter whether there are four runners or five in the 8.50 at Wolverhampton tomorrow night? Of course it doesn't. But it does matter that the whole system seems to be being geared towards steering trainers towards running horses whom they feel should not run. That's just plain wrong. The horse is meant to be the king in this sport, but contemporary thinking seems to be that he's just an expendable pawn to be used to make the machine run smoothly supposedly for the humans' benefit - only it's not for the humans benefit at all, because if we do the wrong thing by the horse, we all suffer: owners, trainers, jockeys and punters. Here endeth the lesson.


To a happier topic, this time of year sees many of the horses go off for a holiday. We've always been lucky enough to be able to spell horses at Kerry Oldfield's lovely farm in Norfolk and I hope that we'll send some up there shortly, but today we had Batgirl head off to spend ten weeks or so at the home of her owners, Tony and Becca Fordham. They have a lovely field and Batgirl thought all her birthdays had come at once today when she arrived there
(along with a mate - Rhythm Stick - because it wouldn't be much fun being there on her own). She should have a lovely break, and if Tony and Becca enjoy having her there as much as she'll enjoy being there, it'll be a very successful spell all round. The only problem, of course, is that Batgirl's not the easiest to coax into a truck, so if she gets her feet as well under the table as I think she will, getting her back here next January might be a very lengthy procedure!

Cup week

Melbourne Cup night was really good fun. I found it easy to stay awake and (reasonably) on the ball, and the racing was really enjoyable, even if history probably won't remember it as one of the more special Cups. Before Cup night, though, we had had a couple of race-days of our own, as Batgirl ran at Newmarket on Saturday and then Ethics Girl ran at Lingfield on Sunday.
Both performed creditably. Batgirl is still very big and leggy (as this photograph of her and Micky Fenton in the parade ring shows) and as such her run was pleasing: admittedly she was beaten a long way in the end, but she showed plenty of speed, which was very encouraging. Ethics Girl's run was very different: whereas Batgirl showed plenty of dash in the early stages before being beaten a long way, Ethics Girl showed none before finishing very close up. But that's the difference between a filly who is just starting out on the racing road and one who is nearing the end of a long and rigorous campaign:
Ethics Girl (seen in the Lingfield parade ring on Sunday with Alan Munro) still ran right up to her best form in being beaten a head and a length (with the fourth horse FIFTEEN lengths farther back), but she raced sluggishly, as horses do when all the freshness is out of them. However, the clock and the form-book both say that she is running as well as ever so, while she'll clearly need a spell before too long, it's not unrealistic to think that it might be worth having one more go with her this preparation: it takes long enough to get a horse to his or her peak, so while they are still sound and still running well, there's every reason to keep running. She's so genuine, though, that we won't overtax her and, as she came home from the race quite tired, I'll wait for her to tell me when she's ready to run again. So no firm plans have been made as yet - unlike for Batgirl, who will start her winter holiday tomorrow, leaving us to dream of her three-year-old season while she eats grass unaware.

Cup night with Matt Chapman was, as I've already said, a pleasure. I hope it was for the audience too, even if one viewer emailed in to complain that the programme was taking the spot of the usual Stateside racing action, which presents a punting opportunity, from a wide spread of tracks ranging from the exalted to the obscure, every few minutes. Compared to that, one race from Flemington every 40 minutes - with Matt and I waffling away in between times from this end and Bruce McAvenny, Simon Marshall, Richard Freedman and Francesca Cumani waffling away at the other end - was indeed very different. However, most of the other emails sent in seemed to suggest that the senders were finding the show at least tolerable.
I'd feared in advance that my opportunities to speak might be restricted by Matt's famed loquacity, but happily the conversational ball bounced back and forth between us very freely. What might have helped was the fact that early in the show a viewer emailed in to ask if Matt could make his signature noise (I can't remember exactly what it is - it used to be "YEEEE-HAAAAAA!!!!!" and it's still something along those lines) and he duly obliged with such gusto that he must have had a sore throat for the rest of the night!

Before ending this chapter, I must thank Problemwalrus for another good response. We're still no nearer, however, to coming up with a father-and-son team competing against each other as professional jumps jockeys. It must have happened somewhere at some stage prior to the O'Briens doing it recently - any clues?
I was thinking a bit more about it happening on the Flat and I presume that there were occasions when Alan Mackay rode against both his sons (Jamie and Nicky) in the same race. It came to mind again on Cup day, when the secondary TAB meeting in Victoria was up at Echuca; there was a 5-runner race there in which Garry Murphy (pictured, at his home track, Ballarat, earlier this year) rode against his son Sebastian. Garry won it with Sebastian (who had at least one winner on the card) third, so that would have been a race to enjoy.
And the next race for us to enjoy comes up at 3.55 tomorrow morning when our guest from the summer Clare Lindop (pictured on the top of Long Hill on Cape Roberto) rides Miss With Attitude in the VRC Oaks. I'm looking forward to watching that. Bart Cummings' Shamardal filly Faint Perfume looks pretty much a certainty, but you'd have thought that the Galileo (second dam by Mill Reef, third dam by St Paddy, which must help too) ought to stay well, so let's hope that she runs well. That would be a lovely start to the day.

Stars

Outside of our own little corner of it, the biggest news in the European racing world (if that's not too paradoxical) has been the news that Sea The Stars (pictured, pre-Derby) is to stand at the Aga Khan's Giltown Stud. His mating with Zarkava is one to savour, even more than was that great mare's first mating this year with Dalakhani. However, before we fall over ourselves too much in the excitement over Sea The Stars' stud career, it is worth reflecting that, when our forefathers invented racing, the idea wasn't that the best sound horses would finish their careers aged three. I very much endorse Brough Scott's article in the Racing Post, in which he argued that the weight-for-age scale, which was initially devised to promote competition between the various age-groups, now serves to discourage it because, in an era in which the best horses can earn far more with significantly less (financial) risk at stud than on the course, it provides a very good reason for connections of successful three-year-olds to draw stumps on their charges' careers before they reach maturity. It also enables the fools who peddle the idea that a great three-year-old "has nothing more to prove" to keep spouting this nonsense: if nothing else, such horses have yet to prove that they are sound enough to race for three (or more) seasons without going amiss (and that has to be an important trait), and they have also yet to prove that they are capable of winning weight-for-age races with top-weight, rather than with bottom-weight.

Anyway, I think that it is sad that racing, at a time when we are all scratching our heads about how to make our sport more appealing, hasn't moved on from the stage which it reached in the 1970s whereby the stars cease racing has as soon as they have proved themselves stars. It is too much to rely on the sportsmanship of the horses' owners, because people like the Pakenhams, who sadly received scant reward for their sporting decision to keep Sir Percy in training, aren't ubiquitous. Like Brough, I really think that this is a subject which, if we are serious about trying to boost racing's appeal, should be tackled. Unfortunately there is minimal interest among the press on the subject, but just to show that Brough isn't swimming against the tide on his own I here reproduce the first part of my Winning Post column this week, which was written before the announcement about where Sea The Stars would be standing and before Brough's Racing Post article was published:-

"With the 2009 European Flat racing season nearing its conclusion, a reflection that Sea The Stars has been the undisputed star of the year is, of course, tempered by regret of the fact that he has run his last race: despite being sound and still clearly an outstanding racing prospect, he will be covering mares in 2010 rather than racing. This, of course, is a fact of modern-day racing life, when a stallion can earn far more in the breeding shed than on the racecourse, without running the risk of injury or devaluation by loss of form. Very few people are rich enough to act as if money is no object when the stakes are really high, and keeping a champion such as Sea The Stars in training as a four-year-old would cost his owners an eight-figure sum (in loss of earnings, rather than actual money lost) were he to stay in training and lose his form: rich though the Tsui family might be, they clearly are not rich enough to ignore that risk.

However, within a week of the announcement to retire Sea The Stars it has become clear just what a bad decision, from racing’s point of view, such a decision is. Europe’s champion of 2008, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe-winning filly Zarkava, was retired to stud immediately after her Arc victory because she supposedly had “nothing more to prove” – and the fallacy in that theory has already been demonstrated: she is now no longer viewed as an all-time great, because few observers believe that she would have proved able to beat Sea The Stars had she remained in training to run against him. It is now a similar scenario with Sea The Stars: following last Saturday’s Racing Post Trophy at Doncaster, it is now clear that the current batch of juveniles contains a colt who, assuming that he remains uninjured, is likely to prove that he would have been a very worthy rival for Sea The Stars were the latter still in a position to have rivals.

The name of this colt is St Nicholas Abbey, and his victory last Saturday in Britain’s final Group One race of the year was as good a performance by a two-year-old as one could ever wish to see. This horse was highlighted in this column four weeks ago after his hugely impressive victory in Ireland in the Group Two Beresford Stakes (a race which Sea The Stars had won last year) and the praise heaped on him in that report has now to be redoubled. His performance on Saturday was outstanding. In advance, the Racing Post Trophy, up the straight mile at Doncaster, was billed as containing the best collection of two-year-olds mustered for any race in Europe this season. Even so, Johnny Murtagh rode St Nicholas Abbey with maximum confidence. He still had the horse in last position under a hold 400m from home – and when he asked his mount to go forward, the response was electrifying. St Nicholas Abbey weaved his way between rivals effortlessly before Murtagh briefly began to push him at the furlong pole. He shot clear and hit the line full of running 3.75 lengths in front of the runner-up Elusive Pimpernel. As Elusive Pimpernel had gone into the race unbeaten and had broken the juvenile track record at York when winning the Group Three Acomb Stakes on his most recent run – and as the third-placed Al Zir, reputed to be Godolphin’s best two-year-old, had also gone into the race unbeaten – the form is clearly rock-solid. And as St Nicholas Abbey made these good horses look third-rate, the son of Montjeu can be regarded as being as exciting a prospect as were any of the champions which Aidan O’Brien has already trained. He is now generally the 3/1 favourite for next year’s Derby, which is an exciting thought. The only sad thing is that he and Sea The Stars, despite being born in the same country and only a year apart, will never race against each other, which really does make one wonder whether European racing has, to use an Irish phrase, “lost the run of itself”."

So that's that. Any comments, anyone? Moving closer to home, during the past week we have seen two horses run their last race from this stable. To Be Or Not To Be ran creditably at Newbury last Saturday and then she went through Tattersalls' sales-ring two days later, fetching 20,000 gns to the bid of the former Hamilton Road trainer Mohammed Mubarak, who is going to export her to Qatar. This was a very good price for her, and it is a great reward for her owner Wayne Thomas and his partner Cathy Dunkerley, who can take the credit for buying her cheaply and then plotting her successful career. Sadly, Cape Roberto, who ran at Yarmouth on Tuesday, does not provide a similar success story. He'd done nothing when trained by Jamie Poulton and, although we've given it our best shot and although his home-work wasn't hopeless, it became clear when he had his first run for us at Yarmouth on Tuesday that he was likely to do nothing from here either.
He's a lovely horse who, it seems, just isn't cut out to be a successful racehorse. He does, though, have plenty of other fortes - one could take him hunting tomorrow and have a great day on him - as he is a straightforward, willing and hardy horse who already knows how to jump (as this photograph of him and Aisling shows), so I hope that we can find him a position as someone's horse. I can put my hand on my heart and say that, however takes him on, will find him thoroughly satisfactory unless their aim is to win races, so if you know anyone who would like a nice horse, please point them in this direction.


Such is the cycle of life within a training stable that, as we bid farewell to some (although we haven't waved Cape Roberto off yet - he could be here for a while!) we welcome new recruits. The two yearlings (fillies by Tobougg and Bertolini) who arrived from Tattersalls October Yearling Sale are the most obvious of the young prospects just now, and they seem to have settled in well.
Neither has been ridden yet, but both have settled into a routine of long-reining very smoothly, as these two photographs, taken yesterday, show. The Tobougg is the filly with white on all four legs, while the Bertolini has white on only her hind legs. Yesterday was another lovely day, and it is a shame that I managed to get the camera out at about the only time when it wasn't sunny. Today is also very warm - warm enough still for riding in only a T-shirt and shorts, which is truly remarkable for 30th October - which makes things very pleasant. We've got Anthony here plus my father, so that's nice. Anthony had the honour of meeting and shaking the hand of a (retired) Derby-winning jockey (Willie Ryan) outside the newsagent this morning -
which was remarkable as, by one of those coincidences which keep popping up, when we got home and opened our Racing Post, we saw a photograph of Willie winning his Derby on Benny The Dip, thanks to the sad news that the runner-up that day, Silver Patriarch, has passed away. Then this afternoon Anthony has been lucky enough to meet another very distinguished former jockey: Jimmy Uttley, rider of the winners of three Champion Hurdles (on Persian War) and of three Triumph Hurdles
(on Persian War, England's Glory and Boxer). We went round to visit Colin and Eileen Casey (both pictured in this paragraph with him), which is pretty much a given on any of Anthony's visits because they're honorary family, and the icing on the cake was that (the pictured) Jimmy, their neighbour, called in while we were there. And three generations of Berrys were really pleased to meet him (well, perhaps Berry minimus was less starstruck than were Berrys major and minor!).

Another jumps rider whom I've been delighted to see this week has been Ray O'Brien, an Irish jockey who rides in France. He's just in town for a couple of days, and I was really pleased yesterday that he paid Exeter Road a visit to call in here and in Jonathan Jay's stable.
I got to know Ray (pictured) fairly well when he was in Newmarket for a couple of years, working for the now-Warwick Farm-based Mark Wallace, and I always like to scan the Auteuil results in the Racing Post to see how he's faring. He's still doing well over there and rode a Listed hurdles winner, but the most interesting aspect of his recent career is that he's now started riding against his son. He has a son called Ray, who apparently rides as Raymond L. O'Brien, who has started riding over jumps, apprenticed to the successful trainer F. Cottin, and there have already been a couple of occasions when father and son have ridden in the same race. It's reasonably easy to see that that might happen not infrequently on the Flat where jockeys tend to ride well into their 40s or beyond, but over jumps I would guess it happens less frequently as not many jumps jockeys have careers long enough to ride against their sons. In Melbourne I recall Keith Rawiller, father of Nash and Brad, riding well into his 40s and I'm sure that I remember him and Nash both riding a winner on the same card at Sandown when Nash was an apprentice, but of course Nash was riding on the Flat so they wouldn't have ridden in the same races. On the Flat here I presume Paul and Charles Eddery will have ridden against each other, but over jumps? It must happen occasionally with amateurs, who tend sometimes to ride for longer (not having so many rides as professionals they might have a bit less wear and tear), but can we think of another father and son team competing against each other as professionals over jumps? Joe "The Iron Man" Guest rode for a long time and his son James became a jockey with Fred Winter, so they might have done - but even then I can't be sure that they would have done. Any suggestions, anyone?