Early invasion

We've become accustomed to having Newmarket invaded by Aussies during the summer (and very welcome they are too) but the invasion has started early this year with Mick Dittman's son Luke having started work for Luca Cumani this week. Luke has ridden plenty of winners in Queensland - including partnering Somewhere Safer, who is owned jointly by her trainer Michael Tidmarsh and by me, to victory at the Gold Coast last year - but he seems very likely to find it hard to make his career as long as his father's was, simply because of his increasing size. Still, he's going to take out a license in the UK and so I hope that he'll be able to get some rides here this summer. During the time that his great father was the dominant jockey in Australia, there were intermittent rumours that Robert Sangster was going to tempt him to sign a contract to ride over here, but it never happened. So Luke will be one up on him if he does race-ride here. I'd say that he's very sensible to come over here now because, if his riding career is going to be curtailed by increasing weight at some stage, he's wise to pack as much into it as he can while it lasts. And, of course, there are always some apprentices who start to grow alarmingly and whose careers seem doomed to shortness - only for them to find it feasible to keep their weight in check and to sustain a decent career after all. George Baker is one obvious example, so one never knows what's around the corner. Anyway, that's Luke in the photograph, taken on the Heath today. Note the dry underfoot conditions - that makes a very pleasant change from the conditions of the past few months.

It's even drying up in our field, which is great for us, even if some of the horses don't think so. We've got some who haven't been allowed to use it much, if at all, recently - either because of being prone to mud fever or because of having a tendency to pull shoes off - and they will be delighted when I deem the surface to be dry enough for them to be turned out, but there are others who seem to have the blood of hippoes flowing through their veins. Kadouchski is a classic example of this category: the wetter and the deeper the mud, the better for him. He loves getting himself absolutely plastered in mud and as the field dries out he'll head straight for the remaining wet parts while they last. The first photograph shows him in his preferred state, while in the second one of him rolling this week one can see that the soil is already acquiring the lighter shade of drying ground. We are within sight of having just dry ground which for us will be wonderful - but for him will be a disaster!

Cheltenham remains great entertainment, but you don't need me to tell you that. One would never see a better explanation of why Channel Four's post-race mounted interview is not a good thing than the one which was written in Sunday's Racing Post by C. Williams of Mereworth, Kent; but even the mounted interviews haven't been too bad. Even if the most memorable one came when Davy Russell used the interview as an opportunity to complain about Channel Four's coverage of the Festival. Still, I'd say that we are stuck with them, because it would require a television executive to say, "I was wrong" for them to be shelved - and that's not likely to happen, is it? But here's my thought for the Festival: isn't it remarkable that Paul Nicholls had no runner in the RSA Chase and only a 25/1 outsider (who finished last) in the Arkle? At the start of the season, Nicholls appeared to have a plethora of well-credentialled and, by and large, extremely expensive novice chasers in his stable, and I would guess that, had there been ante-post betting on those two races at that stage, he would have been responsible for something like five of the top ten in the betting for each race. One would have got very long odds about his ultimately being so poorly represented in the races. So what do we deduce from this? Paul Nicholls is a very good trainer so it tells us nothing about his skills - what it does do, though, is to provide a reminder of just how hard it is to get hold of a horse good enough and sound enough just to be able to run in the top races, never mind to run well in them. If Paul Nicholls, with all the raw material in his stable and the financial muscle behind it, wasn't able to produce a horse good enough or sound enough to run with a realistic chance in either of the country's two best novice chases (because, realistically, Woolcombe Folly wasn't a legitimate Arkle contender and was just making up the numbers, as his SP and finishing position suggest) then we needn't feel so bad about our continued failure to make any impression on the upper echelons (or, indeed, the lower echelons!).