Thursday, January 07, 2021

Our racing year begins


Great excitement.  Tomorrow we'll have our first runner of 2021, only eight days into the year.  That's a bit earlier than I was expecting, but it seems the right thing to do.  I'd marked down a four-year-old fillies' juvenile bumper at Wetherby next Tuesday, 12th January, for Surooj, with the thought in my mind that it if was going to be extremely soft ground there, I'd re-route her to an AW bumper at Lingfield six days later.  Anyway, as so many National Hunt meetings are being lost (frost and/or snow and/or waterlogging) there have been two programmes of 'jumpers' bumpers' put on tomorrow, on the AW tracks at Lingfield and Newcastle.  These programmes were only created yesterday, with entries closing in the afternoon.


Surooj (pictured yesterday in the first photograph and today in the second) obviously isn't eligible for a normal jumpers' bumper as she has never run over jumps, but fortunately there is a normal bumper on each programme.  Lingfield's one is for fillies and mares only.  I entered her for that and then decided to declare her for it.  Basically, I took the decision that the ground at Wetherby is likely to be very testing (at the post-Christmas meeting, when the winner of one race ran a time over 100 seconds slower than standard, it was even heavier than when Surooj ran there on December 5th in a run which left me thinking that I'd like to run her next on ground less heavy rather than more).  So it was easy enough to eschew Wetherby - and then of course there's the possibility of the Lingfield National Hunt meeting six days later not taking place.  (The track is currently water-logged).  So we'll head off there tomorrow and hope for the best.

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