That's why they call it Lingfield

You will be familiar with the phrase "That's racing". When one just has to shrug one's shoulders and accept that this sport frequently throws the unexpected and the hard-to-swallow (as well as, thankfully, very occasionally the sublime) at one, one just has to take things on the chin, shrug one's shoulders and wryly observe, "That's racing". The classic example came after the 1956 Grand National, which of course will forever remain the oddest thing ever to have happened. After Devon Loch had inexplicably malfunctioned three quarters of the way up the run-in when miles clear and had thus snatched defeat from the jaws of certain victory in the world's greatest race, his jockey Dick Francis must have been shattered. One can see this in the photographs of him walking away, and it's easy to understand. The horse's owner, the Queen Mother, must have been equally devastated. Dick Francis subsequently related that when he was taken up to the Royal Box afterwards, he was at a loss for words and couldn't come up with anything more coherent than a vague, "Your majesty, I'm just so terribly sorry ..." - only to find himself greeted by a kind smile and the words, "Don't worry, Dick - that's racing". One will never find a better example of coping calmly with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and that's an example to us all which even Rudyard Kipling would have struggled to better.

Anyway, the point of this all is that my American friend Dean Roethemeier tells me that many of his compatriots, when we would say, "That's racing", say instead, "That's why they call it horseracing". The sentiment clearly is the same, and that's good; but the words actually make no sense at all in the context. And I was reminded of Dean's phrase when I left Lingfield Park yesterday afternoon reflecting, "That's why they call it Lingfield". Regular watchers of this stable might have noted that it is very rare for me to have a runner on the AW track at Lingfield. I have long considered that, of the AW tracks, Wolverhampton is the one where the best horse in the race is most likely to win, while such a thing is least likely to happen at Lingfield. The pattern of racing is forever hard to predict, the tempo is so variable and it such a common occurence that the jockeys get in each others' way and one comes away thinking that, had one run the race six different times, one would have got at least five different winners. Anyway, it was with grave misgivings that I took Karma Chameleon, going for his fifth straight victory, to Lingfield yesterday (and only because there was no suitable race anywhere else this month). The little horse looked (by his own admittedly nondescript standards) terrific and had clearly thrived on the five-week gap between races. It was my pre-race plan and his jockey Shane Kelly's pre-race plan that we be very handy throughout to try to minimize the chances of our being Lingfielded - but that's exactly what we were. 500m from home we were in a hopeless position from which we could not possibly be involved in the finish - and we ended up failing by a rapidly-diminishing neck. It was very pleasing to see him run an absolutely terrific race - and it was very frustrating to be a 'certainty beaten'. Still, we can't sniff at his record for the winter of four wins and two seconds from six starts - and, as we can go back to Wolverhampton on March 8th, we can only hope that that record might be further enhanced before the winter season is out.

And that, of course, as I'm sure that Dean will confirm, is why they call it Lingfield.