Pictures from Pakenham

Today started well with TV pictures of Monsam winning at Pakenham. It was a tremendous performance - in what seems to be a new type of race for Australia, a ratings-related handicap, which I don't think is a step in the right direction. If it ain't broke, don't fix it; and I've always thought that their Class system has been working better than our method does here (although I suspect their system wouldn't be a success if it were to be introduced here). Still, organizing racing in the UK isn't in my remit, much less organizing racing down under, so my ill-informed opinion doesn't matter. Anyway, back to Monsam. At The Races carried pictures from Rockhampton and Pakenham between 2.30 and 5.30 this morning, and I was delighted to take advantage of the opporunity to watch the horse which Dickie co-bred and part-owns, and whom we visited at Markdel last month, salute the judge. Dickie tells me that he broke the track record, so he could be good. He could be very good. He might even be great ...

Dickie has bemoaned the fact that the mighty Monsam is absent from the list of horses in training on this website. He seems to have missed the point that I neither own nor train Monsam, which more or less makes him ineligible, but as his win has made him the lead story on this edition of the blog, we might find that Emma puts up an accompanying photo of him standing to attention in Lee Freedman's stable alongside Dickie wearing the notorious West Tip sweater which matches the colours in which he races. Or maybe she might wait for us to be sent a photo of him returning to scale at Pakenham, with Dickie and Brent Stanley each sporting identical liveries. Or she might realise that I'm so pissed off with Dickie tricking me into missing Stoneage Romeo's race (see below) that she won't put up his pic at all.

Unfortunately, as you'll have gathered, I missed the opportunity to watch Stoneage Romeo running at Ballarat yesterday. This was my own fault, because I made the basic mistake of paying attention to Dickie. Joff had told me that the horse had been nominated for Ballarat and for Moonee Valley the following day and, although each engagement looked an unsuitable target, the Empire had given its wildly optimistic trainer permission to run in whichever he wished. Unfortunately, Dickie emailed me after acceptance time telling me that the horse was running at Moonee Valley, and stupidly I didn't verify this information, which meant that I didn't realise that Ballarat was the chosen venue until after that race had been run. To the surprise of nobody bar the trainer (the horse would have paid around $75), Stoneage didn't make any impact in the race, but it would have been nice to have been able to watch. Hopefully I'll see his next race, which I hope will be over considerably farther. By that time, Clinton may also have changed his chiropracter, because the horse's high head carriage, inability to put on weight and apparent reluctance to stretch out at the end of the race suggests that his current one is missing something.

I'm currently chiropracter-less, which isn't good, because Carol Whitwood has had a knee operation and is out of action for a couple of months. Showing typical consideration to her clients, she made sure her operation and convalescence came at the time of year at which she would be least missed, but really I'm lost without her. As a last resort I've done some running repairs to a couple of horses myself - I normally restrict my input to diagnosis - but I'll be so pleased to see her back! I've seen so much evidence of stables where whatever 'back' work is done is done badly that I so appreciate the assistance of someone who is genuinely good at the job. And who is so genuinely helpful. We're so lucky to have her.

We're also so lucky to have a horse around as pleasant as Timmy (Limit Down). He ran a great race at Kempton on Wednesday. A seeminly endless string of eliminations had meant that he went three and a half months between races, but he showed no signs of rustiness by putting up a really bold show to finish second. The winner, wearing first-time blinkers, ran as if he was a grade or two better than Regional racing, and I came away as proud of the horse as if he'd have won. Timmy is a pleasure to have around, Becky is a pleasure to train for, and I so hope that horse and owner can be rewarded with a win. We'll probably have another try at Lingfield on Wednesday. The likelihood is that Brett will be in the saddle next time - he was already committed to going to the other meeting by the time we knew we had got a run this time - but that's no reflection on Rab Havlin, who gave him a cracking ride. That's two he's ridden for us this year, Jolizero at Warwick being the other, and I'd give him top marks for each. And that's rare.

Another hoop whom observers of this stable will know that I respect is the currently embattled John Egan. Of course his current problems are entirely of his own making, and unfortunately he is not the only victim of them, but that doesn't alter the fact that there's a lot of good hidden in there among the obvious flaws. And I'm not just referring to his excellent riding - nine times out of ten, he'd jump at the opportunity to do someone a good turn, as I've been fortunate enough to discover several times, and I very much hope that he can emerge from his current woes and that stability can return to his life and the lives of those around him. If you're reading this John - which is very, very unlikely - please focus on the light at the end of the tunnel.

A less complicated character who has been in the news this week is Chris Dwyer, one of my most long-standing and most valued friends. Today's Racing Post carried news of Chris' decision to cease training, and all here wish him and Shelley very well as they concentrate on their thriving business at Georgia House Stud in Burrough Green. Racehorse trainers suffer from the same delusion as secret agents - I think the line comes from a John Le Carre novel that the greatest secret in M15 is that there are other ways of spending one's life - in that it's easy to think that life as we know it will end if we chose to do something else, but Chris and Shelley have seen the light, will still be more than busy and, I hope, more than satisfied and considerably less stressed. It was thanks to Chris and Shelley that I was entirely undeservedly creditted with my first success as a trainer (Cyrano's Lad, whom he rode to victory at Lingfield in May 1995) and first Newmarket winner (Silktail, who beat Istabraq a couple of months later on the July Course) and the many other kindnesses they have done me are too many to mention. Chris is one of the two people (Lawrence Wadey being the other) without whose support and encouragement I doubt I would have ever embarked upon a training career, so I should not allow the day of his announcement to end his own training career to go unremarked. He's been kind enough to point some of his charges in his direction, which is great, and I hope that I will be able to persuade him to come and put some of them through their paces from time to time. He's a true horseman as well as true friend, and if he were to tell me that one's ready to run well, then that would do for me.

Two sad items in today's bulletin are the news from HK that Takeover Target has tested positive to what appears to be a steroid, and that we have had to take Harry, the Most Welcome two-year-old, out of training. He was the star of last weekend's posting after he galloped very well, but unfortunately a minor problem has presented itself since then, and the only sensible course of action is to acknowledge that and rest him. He hasn't been lame at any stage but, while small problems tend to go away if the horse is rested, they generally become big ones if the horse continues to work. I hate injuries to horses. In this case, one aspect is easy to bear because the horse is feeling no pain, but being the medium for disappointment isn't good. One has to own horses to appreciate just how much emotion one invests in the journey of hope, and to tell someone that that hope needs to be put on the back-burner isn't a task which I relish. Of course one knows that it is inevitable that setbacks will occur however carefully one trains horses, but when I'm entrusted with someone else's property, I always feel that my main priority is that it doesn't get damaged while I'm the custodian. Inevitably I sometimes fail in this objective, and when that happens - as today - I do feel bad about it. Fortunately Michael and Kim are proper horse people who realise that disappointments do inevitably sometimes occur, so they have taken the news very well - but in one sense that makes it an even less enviable task to tell them, because they are just the sort of people who deserve to be given good news. Still, the horse is still young and hasn't suffered a serious injury, so let's hope that the good news is only postponed.

The latest twist in the tale of Takeover Target is a shame. Drugs are becoming a major part of racing - I suppose they have been for a century - and there are two ways of looking at things. Nowadays it seems to be the generally accepted opinion that using prohibited drugs to try to improve a horse's performance is perfectly acceptable as long as the drugs have left the horse's system by the time it races. However, although the British press and the BHB (or HRA, or BHA, or whatever they've most recently expensively re-branded themselves) appear to find nothing odd in this and to feel that people are just unlucky when they cut it too fine, the idea doesn't rest easily in my mind. It is becoming ever easier to become convinced that one has to join 'em to have any chance of beating 'em, so to discover that a horse like Takeover Target, whose story had appeared to be the ultimate fairytale of the honest battler beating Goliath, has had his success based on chemical assistance is very disillusioning. It's rather like hearing that Sergeant Cecil has failed a dope test - but that, I really do believe, just isn't going to happen.