Arc week

We've got to the last day of September and are still going around in T-shirts, which is the sign of a very benign autumn. It's been great. Admittedly the cloudless skies which had been the feature of the bulk of September have been replaced over the past few days by more typical overcast conditions, but it's still very warm (and very dry), at night as well as by day. Riding out in just T-shirts (plus shorts, obviously) isn't quite what it sounds, of course, now that body protectors are compulsory, because these supposed safety devices have one advantage (and probably only one) of being very warm. But even so it's great still to be in summer gear. This evening I was standing out in the yard after dark (ie after 7.00) listening to some of Dave Morris' stories, and it felt as if it was 10.30 pm on a midsummer night - great! Dave had been watching some Racing UK Arc previews, a lot of which have been focussing on the outstanding 1986 winner Dancing Brave (thus mirroring a lot of the Racing Post's pre-Arc build-up stuff), and this had moved Dave to take any suitable audience (ie me) on a trip down memory lane, allowing him to reminisce about looking after the fourth in the Dancing Brave's Derby (ie the Derby in which Shahrastani beat Dancing Brave), the Henry Cecil-trained Faraway Dancer. It made for a very pleasant interlude, because Dave's utterances are always worth hearing as long as one isn't in a hurry, so it was rather nice to stand out in the warm night, hearing and seeing a flock of geese fly over just before it got dark, and then seeing some of our bats flit about above my head (a true sign of a warm night) after darkness had fallen.

This weekend's racing is going to be great. Not only do we have, of course,the feast that is Longchamp's Arc weekend, but three days' of Newmarket will be very interesting, and then we have horses for whom to cheer in both Melbourne and Sydney. The news announced yesterday that Michelle Payne is to ride the 2007 Cox Plate winner El Segundo, whom she rode in a trial when we were in Australia in January and on whom she has an unblemished race-riding record of one ride for one win, in Saturday's Turnbull Stakes at Flemington went down very well in this household, as did the discovery that Lawrence Wadey's The Embassy has got a start in the Metropolitan.
Chris Munce will be on board and the horse is well drawn so, while he faces a massive rise in class and is what in English terms would be described as well out of the handicap, he must have a some sort of chance of picking up a valuable Group One prize. Which is really exciting, so ATR's overnight coverage will be particularly appreciated this weekend, even more so than normal. And then we have Newmarket's former temporary resident Scenic Blast running in Japan, I presume in the early hours of Sunday morning by British time, so that's another excitement.
With Steven Arnold unavailable, another jockey whom I respect, Mark Zahra (seen above on the Peter Snowden-trained Commands two-year-old Rarefied at Caulfield on 10th January, shortly before winning the Thomas North Plate), will take the ride and it would be great to hear of (I doubt we'll have the chance to see the race) this combination winning and thus following in the footsteps of another Aussie King's Stand Stakes winner, Takeover Target (seen here giving the young bloke some advice last summer).

But, of course, this weekend also features a race which, while not on a par with the various Group races around the world, will be keenly anticipated here, because Ethics Girl, who is surely bred to stay at least that far, tackles twelve furlongs for the first time. And what better place to do it than at Epsom, over the Derby course and distance, in the "Apprentices' Derby"? This race used to be called the Steve Donoghue Apprentices Derby (but surely used not to be run in October, because the August Bank Holiday fixture used to be Epsom's final meeting of the season) and sadly it no longer bears that title, but I'll think of it as such. She's well and she's got an experienced apprentice riding (Marc Halford) so let's hope that she and The Embassy can join forces to provide Lawrence (who co-owns her, as he does The Embassy) with a weekend to remember. The ground is likely to be pretty firm (not that you'd guess that from the official going report) but that shouldn't bother her. I suspect that it would, unfortunately, bother Stardust Memories, whom I'd entered in a maiden on the same card, so she had better not accompany us on the journey. So that's where I'll be on Saturday, and I'm looking forward to it.

It'll be great if Ethics Girl runs as creditably as To Be Or Not To Be did at Musselburgh on Sunday. I love Musselburgh and felt rather bad about having a runner there and not going, but it's a long way away, it was a Sunday, and my presence would have been superfluous as Wayne and Cathy had taken the mare up and so I knew everything would run smoothly without my intervention. My heart went out to them because the mare ran so well, and yet had comparatively little to show for it. She finished fourth, but beaten about a neck in total. Prize money to the winner was about ten and a half thousand pounds, while prize money to the fourth was just under eight hundred - so that was a very costly neck. The third horse, who beat her by a short-head, was a Godolphin-raced Storm Cat half-sister to Bernardini - and you don't expect to run up against something like that in a handicap at Musselburgh! But, while it would have been lovely if To Be Or Not To Be had won the race, one couldn't begrudge the winner her victory:
watching the race, it seemed as if the Mark Johnston-trained Feeling Fab (a daughter of a stallion whom I admire, Refuse To Bend, who is pictured here at Kelvinside Stud earlier this year, shortly before heading back to Europe) was trying really, really hard, and film of her standing exhausted, as if she'd just won a long-distance steeplechase, in the unsaddling enclosure afterwards confirmed this impression. It's no disgrace to be beaten by a horse like that.
She was one of Mark Johnston's Sunday winners in, remarkably, four different countries, as Mark won a Group One in Germany with Jukebox Jury, a handicap at Ascot with Record Breaker, and a hugely valuable Goffs Sales race at the Curragh with Shakespearean, whose victory has surely guaranteed European first-season sires' honours to Shamardal, another stallion I admire. I took this photograph of him at this year's Darley Stallion Parade, but that wasn't the first time I'd seen him: that was in the parade ring prior to his winning debut at Ayr in July 2004, and I liked him then and have liked him ever since.

If we are giving plaudits to Mark Johnston, which we are, we also ought to give them to two other very admirable trainers. Richard Fahey has recently passed the ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY WINNER MARK for the season, which is an absolutely superb achievement; while David Evans would 'only' be on about half that total, but that too represents a tremendous effort. Hats off to both men. And plaudits also to Nic Coward, who coped admirably with a Matt Chapman grilling in a recent ATR feature. Racing faces tough times and in these it's easier to criticize than to do something. Nic is clearly intent on doing something and I'd say that he's probably about as good a leader as we'd get. He probably doesn't have all the answers - but then again nobody does, and it's quite plain that he's trying to get things done as well as possible. Anyone who can handle Matt as well as he does has got to be good!

Finally, I can't close without passing on my enjoyment of one of Kelly Harrison's answers in her Q&A session in Sunday's Racing Post. A few years ago I went up to Musselburgh with Micky Fenton. Our plan was to drive to Ely (he kindly volunteered to drive), where we'd catch the Peterborough train, and then change onto the Edinburgh train.
We got to Ely in good time and, while Micky (seen here with Anthony Berry and Alan Munro at the Great Leighs trials day in April last year)was parking the car, I went into the station and bought the tickets. Unbelievably, while I was doing so I kept seeing Micky just wandering around outside by his car and doing anything and everything other than coming into the station. The upshot was that, impossible though this was to believe, we missed the train. Anyway, I thought at that point that we'd blown our chance of getting to Musselburgh on time, but Micky wasn't in the least put out and he promptly broke the record for driving from Ely to Peterborough so that, even if we didn't quite get to Peterborough before the train which we'd missed, we got there in time to catch our connection to Edinburgh. Anyway, this episode came flooding back to me when I read Kelly's answer to the question, "What is the strangest/funniest thing you have seen on a racecourse?": "A jockey got up early to catch a plane from Stansted to Ayr. While drinking coffee at the gate waiting to board, he managed to miss the plane. In a panic he decided to drive the six-hour (six-hour is putting it very kindly - JB) journey instead at flat-out speed. He arrived at Ayr with seconds to spare to ride a favourite that got beat and the rest of his mounts didn't run! This could only happen to Micky Fenton ..."! I really enjoyed chuckling over that story. And it illustrates just why Micky's hyper-relaxed nature (like formerly that of Harry White, who famously fell asleep before the Melbourne Cup) makes him such a good jockey, even if it makes him only odds-against ever to get from A to B in a normal manner!