Thursday, June 25, 2020

Making plans

Well, the sun definitely rose this morning.  You couldn't miss it: it's been clear in the sky all day, right from the early start.  It's been a lovely day, the hottest of the year so far.  I think that 29 was as high as we got here, but apparently at Heathrow (often the hottest place) it reached 33.3 degrees.  It even got to 30 degrees in Scotland (at Prestwick).  Tomorrow will still be very warm, but not so hot which is a good thing as we'll be heading to Doncaster with Roy.  You never like it to be too hot when you're taking a horse to the races.  It might rain a bit, but I don't think that the worst of the thunderstorms will be on this side of the country.

Brighton is obviously always first port of call in the programme book when we're making plans for Roy, but there's no racing there this year before September at the earliest, so I hope that tomorrow's race might be fairly suitable under the circumstances.  We just need a truly run race, but if we get that he should be right there at the finish, with the long straight, I hope, giving him scope to work his way forward in the final furlongs.  I'm a bit half-hearted about taking Roy to the races without his owners Larry and Iris McCarthy, but hopefully we won't have to wait too long before owners are allowed to go when their horses are running.

Is it too much to think that a limited number of owners (maybe either one or two per horse) might be allowed to attend from Saturday 4th July onwards?  The raceday procedures work extremely well in ensuring that we stick to the protocols, and it's easy to believe that there's scope for the presence of some more people on the racecourses without jeopardising that.  Pubs will be open from 4th July onwards, and I'd be confident that, even with owners present, social distancing measures would still be better observed on a racecourse than in and around a pub.  The scenes from Bournemouth today give one no confidence that social distancing is still going to be respected in the wider world, but on a racecourse things are and will be done properly, and the presence of the horses' owners won't change that.

1 comment:

neil kearns said...

Best of luck to Almeria's favourite grey and his connections