One of the lucky ones

It's just gone midday on Old Year's Day, it's still below zero outside (it started out at -3 and has now risen to -1) and I'm indoors for my lunch.  And I have lit the fire.  I'll head outside for evening stables in another couple of hours or so, and I hope that by around 5.00 that'll be the work done for the year.  We've had freezing fog all day and that hasn't cleared, but that just makes it a suitably subdued day with which to end a subdued year.  Not the best of years, for sure, but not the worst either.  Any of us who hasn't died or suffered serious health problems doesn't have too much to complain about, and I'm pleased to say that that includes me.

We had the last of our 48 runners of 2020 last Saturday (Boxing Day) and that was also a suitably subdued way in which to end the year.  The metaphor doesn't actually end there because the same proviso applied - it wasn't the best outcome but certainly wasn't the worst either.  Kryptos ran in a horrible race at Wolverhampton.  Seven runners.  After about two and a half furlongs, dear old Big Country suffered a fatal heart attack and came down fast and hard, although fortunately Luke Morris was more or less unhurt.

Big Country brought down Daaher, but by the grace of God, with a bit of help from the quick thinking of both Kryptos and Nicola Currie, the pair didn't bring down Kryptos, who was immediately behind them.  That was the end of our race (we emerged from the melee detached from the other horses still standing, and went on to finish fifth of the five finishers) but basically we were OK, thank God.  Not so poor Big Country, and not so Daaher's jockey Jimmy Quinn, who got up gingerly after a couple of minutes but apparently has fractured some ribs.

That was going to have been Kryptos' final race for this preparation, but he ended up not really having had a race and seems to have come out of the experience unharmed, so we may let him run again.  If so, Lingfield on 9th January looks the likely option.  If so, he would be our first runner of 2012.  I hope that Surooj (Wetherby, 12th January) and Turn Of Phrase (Kempton, 13th January) would then be our next two, with Cloudy Rose and Das Kapital likely also to run during the first month of the year.  So we'll continue to work forward, taking it one day at a time, trying and hoping to make 2021 a year to remember for good reasons.  And that's all anyone can do.  So much is out of our hands, but we just have to try our best, work hard and hope for the best.  Life isn't about everything being perfect: it's about making the best of the situation, whatever that situation may be.

For racing as a whole, we have plenty to look forward to.  It's been a miserable year to own horses, but it seems that collectively our country's band of racehorse owners has been wonderfully supportive of the sport at a time when it's hard for them to make the most of ownership.  That's great, and that spirit is what will keep the sport going, even if (as seems likely to be the case) further downturns in the economy will obviously make it harder for some people to maintain their support at previous levels (or at all).  And racing seems to be faring well in the bigger picture, as the attention which Hollie Doyle deservedly received from the wider sporting world has shown.

The key moment was Hollie's receipt of the Sunday Times Sportswoman of the Year award.  That was wonderful.  It was (I think) the first time that a female jockey had ever featured on the short-list, never mind won the award.  I would imagine that that award was responsible for her making it onto the short-list for the inaccurately named BBC Sports Personality of the Year award (which would be better named Sports Achiever of the Year - if it had been Sports Personality of the Year, the result would have been Marcus Rashford first, the rest nowhere, and he didn't even make the short-list) because it would be odd if the Sportswoman of the Year didn't get onto the short-list for the overall award.  And the fact that she then finished third behind the certainty Lewis Hamilton was wonderful for her and wonderful for racing as it shows that both she and her sport command widespread respect.

Nick Rust receiving an OBE in the New Year's Honours list is another sign that racing is taken seriously in at least parts of the wider world.  I think that he's been an outstanding chief executive of the BHA and will prove to have been a very hard act to follow in a very difficult job (both in the sense that one is working to solve problems for which there are no perfect solutions and in the sense that one would need the hide of a rhino not to be hindered by the avalanche of mostly ill-informed and unfair criticism which seems to come with the role).  As such, he is clearly a worthy recipient of his OBE.  But what is also good is that it shows that racing is taken seriously in higher quarters.  Racing seems to be politically more respected than it has been for a few decades, and that's very good news (and part of Nick Rust's legacy).

So that's it for the year.  I'm lucky in that lockdown doesn't really affect my day-to-day routine so I'm spared the problems posed by having too much time on one's hands and by isolation (from people and/or animals).  I very much count my blessings for that, and am aware that tens of millions aren't so lucky.  But, as I said earlier, I hope that all of us who are still alive and still in reasonably good health are able to count our blessings.  Enough people have died in 2020 and enough people have had severe health setbacks for it to be clear to the rest of us that we are the lucky ones.  The past year has been no different to any other year, in that, as long as we're still alive and still have our health, we're doing well, and anything else is a bonus.  I'm ending 2020 counting my blessings, and I'll be starting 2021 doing the same.