September Morn

It just gets better and better. Today really was a dawn for a sing-along with Neil Diamond as we greeted it. Conditions might have been grim in Geelong, as our ATR pictures showed them to be, but here it was heavenly. Gerard Butler summed it up best. We see plenty of Gerard, because his horses warm up on the Severals trotting rings, just as ours do. Having spent several years in America, he began training at Churn on the Oxfordshire Downs before moving to Newmarket last year to train out of Mick Ryan's Cadland House Stables at the bottom of Warren Hill. I like Gerard and respect him as a trainer - he is very thorough indeed, his horses get very extensive exercises and invariably look extremely well - so like to pass the time of day with him.
This morning I ventured the opinion that you wouldn't get an autumn like this on the Downs; his reply was that you wouldn't get one like this in California! Things have to go badly wrong for mornings such as these not to be enjoyable, and today things went well. Two horses schooled over small jumps during first lot this morning (Cape Roberto and Ex Con, ridden by Aisling and Gemma respectively) and two horses did stalls work during last lot (Frankieandcharlie and Destiny Rules, ridden Hugh and Adam respectively); and both exercises went very well.
I accompanied the first pair up to the Links on Kadouchski and was able on this lovely horse to use 'Jockeycam': it is maybe not clear in the opening shot that this is the method of filming because the sun is so low that one can't really see anything, but the second picture makes it abundantly clear. And the third picture is remarkably good, bearing in mind that Kadouchski at that point was getting a bit uppity, just to let me know that he'd always rather participate in a schooling session than watch it.

As tomorrow is Grand Final Day in Melbourne, in which 'my' team Geelong will surely beat St. Kilda, the main meeting there for the weekend was the Friday night fixture at Moonee Valley, and the icing on the cake in this household was that Emma and I were able to arrange things so that we could interrupt our tasks at just the right time to listen to the calls of the main races on the internet, this obviously falling after our usual ATR time-slot, which today was from Geelong (and Moruya, which I didn't watch). It was good to hear both the feature races being won by jockeys who have many friends in the UK, Kerrin McEvoy winning the Manikato Stakes on Danleigh and Craig Williams winning the Bill Stutt Stakes on Carrara. The latter race, in fact, was particularly pleasing, not only because the first three home were all ridden by jockeys whose experience has been broadened by stints here (Craig, Brad Rawiller, who hasn't race-ridden here, and Clare Lindop) but also because the winner is a member of the first crop of Elvstroem, of whom we enjoyed seeing plenty in 2005, his good runs in his European campaign that year including minor placings behind Rakti in the Lockinge Stakes and Azamour in the Prince Of Wales's Stakes.
He is shown here in the overseas stable in Geoff Wragg's yard, in the company of our friend Colin Casey, Tony Vasil's foreman "Battling" Brian, and his jockey Nash Rawiller, older brother of Brad. So I am pleased that Carrara, trained like his dad by Tony Vasil and winner in the winter of the Doomben Slipper under Nash, is going from strength to strength, and I was also pleased that Miss With Attitude, who races in the same colours as Rebel Raider, ran well for Clare against the colts on her first start in Melbourne to be third in this race. I've never laid eyes on this filly so I'm not really in a position to comment, but surely, as a daughter of Galileo who has Mill Reef as the sire of her second dam and St Paddy as the sire of her third dam, she has to have Oaks potential. With last year's VRC Derby winner Rebel Raider side-lined, it would be lovely consolation for connections if that proves to be the case.

I'm currently enjoying reading about Classics of an older vintage, because I'm midway through John Saville's outstanding book "Insane and Unseemly". If you're struggling to guess which of the many possible topics this is about, I'll put you out of your misery: the subject is racing in Britain during the last war. As regular readers will have worked out, and not solely from the last chapter, I have massive admiration for the body of people, men and women, who got this country through the war; and this book can only increase that admiration. For instance, one chapter details how racing was going as things got serious as France fell in 1940. The Dunkirk evacuation - as anyone who has seen the wonderful film of the great novel 'Atonement' will understand - must have been truly terrible, for the lucky survivors as well as for the many casualties; and, after listing some of the racing people who perished (including the great amateur rider Kim Muir, who is honoured at the Cheltenham Festival), John Saville mentions that the Duke of Norfolk got out with his battallion of the Royal Sussex Regiment and "arrived home on the evening of 2nd June. Next day he was at Lewes to see his wife's Midas Touch run in the Berwick Plate, which was doubtless his way of coping with the appalling experience he had been through. Today he would probably be offered counselling.". Isn't that great?

But what I'd particularly like to highlight in this book is one aspect on which I have touched previously, including recently. Courses holding too many fixtures (from the point of view of their turf) is one of the bees in my bonnet, and I will just quote a couple of passages which illustrate my point that things aren't what they used to be in that respect. "The most obvious paradox is that despite there being far less racing, meetings were held at many more places and the sport was more deeply embedded in national consciousness. Compared with the 2008 allocation of 1,504 days' racing between 60 courses, the fixture lists for the last complete flat and jumping seasons before the war look very strange. A paltry 588 days were spread between ninety-two courses, twenty-three of which had only one meeting. In sixteen cases it was only a single day. All racing was on turf and it had long been axiomatic that, apart from the exceptionally wide Rowley Mile at Newmarket, no course could stand more than about eight days a season ... The solitary annual meetings at Ascot and Goodwood were important in the London social calendar, while the likes of Bungay, Rothbury and Much Wenlock were eagerly anticipated days out. People would know that race week was coming, whether or not they personally were interested in it or approved of it." I think that there is something for racing administrators both here and elsewhere (Victoria springs immediately to mind) to learn, not only as regards keeping the ground in good condition but also as regards making racing popular with the general public.

I'm midway through the book, so I don't know exactly how things were eventually organized, but it looks as if my previous understanding that they raced at Newmarket (for horses trained around here), at Stockton in the north (for northern trained horses) and at Salisbury in the south (for southern trained horses), with only the main races at Newmarket being open to horses from all areas (hence if one looks at the racing record of a horse such as Dante, champion three-year-old in 1945 and trained in Middleham in Yorkshire, one sees that he won a few top races, including the Derby, at Newmarket and otherwise raced only at Stockton). This appears to be confirmed by something I read a couple of pages ago, which again shows the differing views on turf management from the 1940s to the current decade: "twelve Saturdays had to be allocated to the inaccessible and narrow course at Salisbury, despite being more than the stewards thought it could stand.".


There's so much of interest in this excellent book that I'm sure that I will quote from it again. In the interim, let's hope for some more glorious weather over the weekend - even if that means that it might at times be hard to get Natagora outside, because what self-respecting kitten would abandon Kermit's position halfway up the stairs when the morning sun streams through the window at just the right angle? And let's hope for a good run from Somewhere Safer at the Gold Coast at 6.43 our time tomorrow morning.