Monday, August 24, 2015

The return of wet tracks

The weather has indeed taken a big turn for the worse.  Saturday was a lovely day, very hot.  Sunday (ie yesterday) duly dawned very promisingly after a very warm night and it was lovely here in the morning (as you can see here).  However, a big belt of rain moved in here while we were at Brighton in the afternoon, a belt which had passed over Brighton in the morning before we got there.  So we struck lucky, really: we drove through some fairly grim rain on the way south, but we had left Newmarket early enough not to get wet here, and then arrived at Brighton late enough not to get wet there.

In fact, it was a lovely afternoon down there, and one wouldn't have known how grim a morning they had had other than for the fact that the ground had got quite testing.  Roy found that a bit of a struggle - as he had done earlier this year at Lingfield on the only other previous occasion when he had struck a wet track - and he finished a tired fifth.  Things didn't go entirely right for him during the race, and he possibly found the ground less to his liking than the firm tracks on which he had been winning earlier in the summer; and again he was lumbered with 9 stone 10lb, a big weight for a little horse.

But, although he (of course) tried his hardest again and had excuses for his first unplaced run since the start of the turf season, it might be the case that he's ready for a break - which would be understandable, bearing in mind that he's been racing for around a year and a half now, his only let-ups in that period being when he's had things wrong with him.  So that might prove to have been his last run of the year.  But there's no need to take that decision today.  We can mull over it for a few days - and in the meanwhile we can head to Newbury tomorrow with Cottesloe, who is in great shape.  The big unknown is how he will handle what is sure to be a very wet track, the weather having deteriorated badly today.  That is a complete unknown, but he will be very competitive if he can handle the ground - and we'll be wiser come what may.

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