A lovely day

We did indeed find lovely ground at Yarmouth - and I'm not just saying that because Batgirl won. She wouldn't be a filly one would want to run too frequently on bad ground (not, of course, that you'd want to run any horse too often on bad ground) so I was delighted, walking the course shortly after arrival, to find that Richard Aldous and his team had done a terrific job in providing a really nice surface of good fast ground. So she ran - and she won, which was lovely. Everyone loves Frankie Dettori and it was a pleasure to all connections to have him on board, which became an even greater pleasure when he gave her a typically copybook ride to come home in front. The icing the cake came afterwards when, no doubt inspired by Derek Thompson's trademark master-of-ceremonies act, he performed a flying dismount. It was just a lovely occasion all round, even if I didn't get to see the flying dismount (or the race until I watched a replay afterwards) as I was on my way back up the course with the starters, having gone down to the start to load her, which probably isn't really necessary nowadays as she is a big girl now but which can't do any harm.

So that was lovely. Amazingly, I think that that was Frankie's first ride for the stable, which is really bad as he's probably the jockey whom I've known the longest; so he joins, I think, Richard Hills as the only jockeys to have a 100% strike rate for us, Rhys Flint having lost his unblemished record two days previously when his unplaced run on Ex Con took his record for us to two from three. There is, of course, nothing good about a jockey having a perfect strike rate for a stable as all it means is that his reward for riding a winner is getting no more rides, because of course a clean sheet can never be maintained for any length. John Egan did the best in this respect, still having a 100% record after five rides (which was remarkable as one of them paid 128 pounds on the Tote) but even that had to go. Let's try now to extend Frankie's run for us. More immediately, though, I'm just off to Pontefract, so we'll hope for the best there today.