Weekend reflections

Highlight of an extremely inclement (thick, damp, cold fog all day yesterday, and rain all pretty much all day today) weekend, for us anyway, has been the win of To Be Or Not To Be at Kempton yesterday. That was a lovely result. I'm so pleased for her owner Wayne Thomas and his partner Cathy Dunkerley: they deserve all the credit as he bought her for very little money at Ascot Sale and one or other of them rides her out every day, so the thrill they will have got from the win really will be combined with the satisfaction of a job well done. It's very hard to win a race with an expensive horse, so to win with a very cheap one is a really great feat. To the outside world it was, I am sure, just another minor event, but they are entitled to feel as if they have climbed Mount Everest. The fact that the filly went off at the absurdly long price of 28/1 was the icing on the cake, and I hope that one or two readers of this blog might have had something on her after the recent reference to her previous run at Wolverhampton as being the run of a horse who seemed ready to win in the fairly near future. Steve McCormick and I had bumped into Tony Jakobsen, whom many will remember as the former 'Warren Hill' of the Sporting Life, on Warren Hill (where else?) in the morning and he'd passed on the opinion that, on his reading of the form, she had a good chance, so I hope that one or two others might have reached the same conclusion.

Whether Kadouchski will have as good a chance at Sandown on Friday remains to be seen. I've entered him there, but that was not my original plan. He was rated 86 when he won the seller at Leicester, and my thoughts after the race were that we could return for a 0-100 handicap hurdle over course and distance in the first week of December: we'd be sure to go up a bit in the ratings, but it never occured to me that he wouldn't be eligible. However, he has been raised 18lb for his win and is now rated 104, so that plan had to go by the board. (I think that that's the highest rise any horse I've trained has ever incurred, as even Quakeress, who achieved the probably unique feat a few years ago of having her rating doubled, only went up 15lb for winning at Wolverhampton, her rating going from 15 to 30; imagine a 15-rated horse winning nowadays - it's hard enough to imagine one running!). It's actually not unjustifiable that Kadouchski should have been raised this much, but I just didn't expect such a literal interpretation of the form-book: the second and third were both rated a stone or so higher than he was, but I never take the ratings of highly-rated horses in sellers literally, on the basis that if those ratings were fair the horses wouldn't be running in sellers. However, I suppose the handicapper has to work on the assumption that those ratings are accurate, because they are, after all, his ratings. So that leaves us on 104, and facing an inevitably tough task, unless I were to opt to stay in selling class. We might end up dropping back to selling class if handicaps prove to be too tough, but just now I think it's wise to give handicaps a go; and Sandown, although likely to attract a strong field, ought to suit him (he seems to prefer going right-handed, which rather cuts down our options) so we might as well run there and see what happens. And then two days later Ex Con is scheduled to make his long-awaited debut, in a bumper at Warwick, so we'll have to see what happens there too: he's such a big and solid horse that I think that, however long and hard he was worked, he'd still need the run the first time he ran. But it's just great finally to be at the stage of making an entry for him, which is what I did today.

So that could be nice: two trips to National Hunt meetings within three days. I'm pleased to see that Racing UK is still working on its list of National Hunt Icons, just as I am. Today it revealed that Lydia Hislop is National Hunt Icon Number Seven, which was slightly surprising: the full list is never published all at one time, so it's hard to work out whether number seven puts her in above or below Martin Pipe. (Sorry, I've just checked: the Racing UK list is of 'Jumps Icons', not 'National Hunt Icons', but I'll continue to use the traditional term).

Despite the unpleasant weather (although arguably not as bad as last weekend, when we had a very hard frost, then snow which made underfoot conditions treacherous, then rain), it's been a nice weekend, with To Be Or Not To Be's victory being merely one pleasing aspect. Another was the fact that we had Anthony, and we also enjoyed a visit from Ben, Emma's godson, who came with his parents and sister Lottie. Although I don't like having runners and not being there, it inevitably happens once in a while, and yesterday was one such occasion. With Anthony here, I didn't want to go away for the day and not take him with me, but if I'd taken him with me it would have meant that he'd have missed spending the time with Ben, which would have been a shame as they got on like a house on fire. (They are almost exactly the same age, which helps). So, all in all, it's been a nice weekend.