A pleasure

What can I say about Karma Chameleon? He just continues to amaze. Yesterday was a cold day after a cold night, but it was very pleasant at Wolverhampton in wonderfully brilliant winter sunshine - but even if conditions had been as dull as they had been when the little horse had won at Southwell just after Christmas, he would have fully brightened the afternoon. He arrived here rated 54, finished second at Kempton and thus had his rating raised to 56 - and now, yesterday, he has won (his fourth consecutive race) off a rating of 72. And basically fairly easily. He's just such a tremendous little horse. So professional and unflappable before, during and after the races. So that was just wonderful. We've been lucky, of course, in that the races he's won have been extremely uncompetitive, but even so winning is always easier said than done, whatever the circumstances. And I think that the runner-up yesterday, the Mark Johnston-trained New Decade, will turn out to be quite a nice horse. He looked easily the nicest of our opponents yesterday (and is a far more imposing horse than dear little Karma) and duly ran as such. You can see him alongside Karma in the second photograph, taken as the horses were behind the stalls, and I hope that he turns out OK (as I believe that he will) as he is owned by very nice people, Claire Riordan and Kieran Coughlan. On the subject of nice people, I should highlight how decently Karma's jockeys handled the fact that two of them were at Wolverhampton yesterday (with the other one, Seb Sanders still being off injured) while obviously only one could ride. Shane Kelly had been second on him at Kempton and had won on him at Wolverhampton, while Hayley Turner had had one ride on him for one win (at Southwell on his most recent start). Anyway, rightly or wrongly I elected to put Shane on as he'd ridden the horse twice, but really I'd have felt bad for which ever one didn't get called up, as both deserved the call. Anyway, one might have thought that both would have felt that they deserved the ride - but it's a measure of their decency that both behaved as if they felt that their claims to ride the horse weren't the strongest. Shane straight off thanked me for putting him back on the horse, saying that he certainly hadn't assumed that the ride would be his - while Hayley, when I sought her out to tell her that I wasn't very comfortable at not having given her call-up, reassured me that she hadn't expected to get the ride, as the mount had been Shane's in the first place. Both behaved very well, and it's a pleasure to use jockeys like that - just as it's a pleasure to train horses like Karma Chameleon.

Let's hope that Alcalde, who runs at Southwell tomorrow, can be inspired by his achievements.