Sandown on Breeders' Cup weekend

Our dry spell duly broke on Thursday night when we had 30mm of rainfall from dusk to dawn, and a fair bit more during the morning on Friday (yesterday). But it's remained warm so we can't complain, and rainfall was what I was banking on earlier in the week when making plans to run Alcalde at Sandown today. He duly went there and duly ran well. These big-field handicaps at Grade One tracks, flat or jumping, are always tough races, so his close fourth today in an 18-runner handicap hurdle represents a very creditable effort. I went there feeling that he was in great nick and that two and a half miles around Sandown on a wet track would be ideal, with the only drawback being that the race was fiercely competitive. So, all in all, he ran extremely well - and again was very well ridden by Joe Akehurst, who had ridden him nicely too at Cheltenham on his previous run. It's amazing that Joe has only ridden five winners, because he rides with much more maturity and polish than such a total would imply. There is always a brahma, and today's was my escaping a fine for being late into the parade ring. If you look at these photographs closely, you'll see that the breast-plate which we usually use on National Hunt runners has been replaced by a breast-girth which isn't ours. Our breast-plate had been in Gibsons (the saddlers up by Tattersalls) for re-stitching and this was its first use since that operation. I started to saddle Alcalde today at the usual time - and found that the way I'd put the breast-girth on wasn't right. So I tried another way around. And another. And it slowly dawned on me that whichever way I tried the breast-girth, it still wasn't right. I finally worked out that the breast-girth must have been dismantled and then reassembled by the saddler back to front, as elementary a mistake as one would ever see. It had never occurred to me that Gibsons' man could have made such a complete f**k-up of what is basically a very simple job, so by the time I'd worked out why I couldn't get the breast-girth to fit right, five minutes had elapsed. And by the time I'd hotfooted it off to the weighing room to borrow a breast-girth from the valets and had returned to the saddling boxes, another five minutes had gone. Hence Alcalde only arriving in the parade ring after the majority of the jockeys were already on their horses. I was duly quizzed by the stipendiary steward, but it was plain that I had a genuine excuse (added to the facts that Alcalde did walk a complete lap of the parade ring and the race was still off on time anyway) so no further action was taken.

So, all in all, that was a very pleasing trip - and for Anthony too. He's really getting into racing now, his enthusiasm having largely been fired by the superhorse Frankel. I didn't start to follow racing until I was aged 10, so he's ahead of me in becoming interested at the age of eight. At the last Newmarket meeting Anthony asked Tom Queally to sign his picture of Tom riding "the best horse in the world", and Tom, as one would expect from such a decent man, took all the time in the world to chat to him. So that was Anthony's favourite Flat jockey met - and today Anthony took the opportunity to ask his favourite National Hunt jockey, his namesake Anthony McCoy (pictured at Market Rasen in the summer in the colours he most frequently wears), to sign his race-book; and again the victim was courtesy and friendliness personified. There is an awful lot wrong with British racing, but while it has ambassadors such as these two jockeys, who have both gone well beyond the call of duty in helping to fire the enthusiasm of one youngster, it's not doing too badly.

It's certainly doing better than its American counterpart, with the current Breeders' Cup meeting having outdone both Gibsons and the implementation of the whip rules as regards getting things badly wrong. It was bad enough that the Churchill Downs management told the British trainers to have their horses ready to work at 9.30 on Thursday morning, and then closed the track bang on the dot of 9.30; but the scratching of the Andre Fabre-trained Announce yesterday took the biscuit. You might have seen Announce playing up on the way to the start yesterday and sidling into the horse ambulance which, bizarrely, was parked on the track; and then being scratched by the vet at the start because of this incident. You might also have seen the senior vet Larry Bramlage being interviewed and saying that, while Announce probably hadn't sustained any significant damage in the incident, it had happened such a short time before the start that there was not time to make a thorough assessment, so they had erred on the side of caution and scratched her! If I'd been Fabre, I'd have gone the roof, but I dare say that the great man kept his cool far better than I would have done. But, even so, I trust that he would have pointed out the supreme irony that, if the vets had really been erring on the side of caution, Announce might have been the only runner in the race: Fabre never runs his Breeders' Cup horses on bute, whereas I would guess that a large amount of her rivals would have been on it (the Breeders' Cup rules permit it to be administered to a horse up to 24 hours before the post time of the race) - and, if one works on the (fair) assumption that one would only put a horse on bute who had something wrong with him/her and that it is not possible to make a worthwhile judgement of a horse's soundness who has bute in his/her system, then Bramlage, who had authorized the scratching of Announce on the basis that it was not possible to make a worthwhile judgement of the filly's soundness, might have ordered the scratching of most of Announce's rivals before he'd even got around to thinking about scratching Announce. Cock-eyed governance doesn't come any more screwed up than that decision.

On the subject of governance, I see that the whip debacle continues. Now that it's rained and the ground has become more testing, we're predictably getting even more transgressions (I think that we had five or six yesterday) so now might be the time to make the observation that the problems came not from the old rules themselves, but on the occasions when they were broken. We are all agreed that after Maguire's ride in the Grand National, and the negative publicity which it brought to racing, something had to be done. The problem was two-fold: the ride was, apparently, visually off-putting for many viewers, and also the fact that the jockey incurred a whip ban was seeming proof that how he'd ridden was unacceptable. But - and this is the point - there never seemed to be any perceived problems when jockeys rode within the rules. Would it not, therefore, have been more sensible to have worked out that the problem lay not within the letter of the rules, but in the fact that they were being broken? As the solution chosen has not been to do what was needed (ie find a way of ensuring that jockeys do not break the whip rules) but to rewrite the rules in such a way that has led to their being broken more often, one would have to say that, even if we are still way ahead of our American counterparts as regards common sense in legislation, we still have a long way to go.