Better weather

The weather's nice now anyway, notwithstanding the fact that we still have our moat at the bottom of the yard courtesy of the best part of an inch which fell in a short period yesterday morning.  Racing today and tomorrow in Ireland having been abandoned also gives us a clue that the British Isles still haven't become a rain-free zone, as does the fact that there's still a lot of soft ground around the British tracks.  Not at Yarmouth, probably, but the tracks over on the west side of the country are still coming up with soft ground.  We had torrential rain for about an hour and a half yesterday morning, but by mid-morning we had the sun shining out of a blue sky.

And it remained/is remaining very warm (day and night) which is probably the most important sign of summer.  Anyway, what we have at present couldn't quite be called perfect summer conditions, but it's still a massive improvement on what we'd been having for the previous x amount of weeks.  There have been some lovely mornings (albeit they are already starting noticeably later than one would like) which is lovely, even if it's probably too little, too late in that respect.

Quite what'll greet me tomorrow when Zarosa, Terri and I head westwards to Chepstow I don't know, but at least it's been wet there, which is the most important thing.  It's soft ground, and that's what I was hoping to find for Zarosa.   Mind you, it's two and a quarter miles for (maiden) three-year-olds and upwards, so, even though we'd like it wet, I'd be worried if it were too testing that it might the kind of conditions in which the three-year-olds are at a disadvantage against the mature jumpers (and there are a few National Hunt horses in the race).  Still, we'll see.

It's certainly the right race for us to be in as the opposition is not strong and we're on a very light weight, helped of course by the 16lb wfa allowance which the three-year-olds receive from their elders.  What we won't have in the field, though, is a horse rated as low as one of her opponents last time: when she ran at Yarmouth last week, she was up against a horse trained by Christine Dunnett rated 9.  This has to be the lowest rated horse in training.  The funny thing, of course, is that this horse ran off 45 or 46 and didn't finish last.  (And, in fact, had only finished last in one of the three maiden races - not sellers - which he had contested prior to this handicap debut).

How the 9 rating was reached isn't clear, but it's a little hard to see what agonising went on to come up with that figure, bearing in mind that any rating below 45 is purely academic, as no horse is ever given a weight which corresponds to a rating of less than 45 anyway.  Why not 10?  Why not 20?  Why not 30?  And has the rating been increased in this week's review?  On the subject of ratings, we should either be saluting Sir Mark Prescott on winning with a horse (Critical Point) who until recently was rated 25, or either congratulating him or commiserating with him on getting a 75,000-gn Pivotal colt (full-brother to Needwood Blade) rated so low!  When the horse wins his xth consecutive race (I see that he's in again this week) I'm sure that all will become clear.

I doubt that Triermore Lass will run enough times to get a rating, but on the subject of notable performances, one had to salute that Terry Clement-trained Moonax mare for making her debut at the age of nine (that's not a misprint) at Newmarket on Saturday.  It was nice to see Harry Poulton, who's a good rider but gets very, very little in the way of race-rides nowadays, having a ride at Newmarket on a Saturday, but it would have been nicer still had he got the mount on something whose realistic odds were less than about 100,000/1 (which made her 100/1 SP look derisory).  She had actually run in two Irish point-to-points in the spring of 2008 (getting round on neither occasion) so it wasn't really her debut as regards all forms of racing, but even so it was a remarkable beginning.  One has to salute Harry for getting her to finish only 32 lengths behind the winner.

And let's hope that we're saluting Zarosa's jockey Jimmy Quinn at around 7.24 tomorrow evening.  She's a very spunky and hardy filly who seems to be taking her racing well.  She's very enthusiastic.  She hasn't done a great deal since she ran last week, but she's cantered the past three days, and also kept herself busy in the field, where she's shown today passing the time of day with Ethics Girl, who similarly has come out of her race last Thursday in rude health.  That's the chapter's last picture, taken in warm but overcast conditions; the first five photographs were all taken at the end of last week when the weather was really splendid (showing parts of the strings of Marco Botti, Luca Cumani, Saeed bin Suroor and Michael Stoute, and then Ortensia on her own) while the sixth photograph was taken in yesterday's rain (although it wasn't raining particularly hard just at that moment) and shows the newly-arrived grey French gelding Tac De Boistron, who has left Alain Lyon's stable in France and is in Newmarket for six weeks en route to joining Michael Kent at Cranbourne to run in the Melbourne Cup.