A grim day

You may have noticed that I often use the phrase, when reflecting on a day when things haven't gone very well, that "no lives were lost".  You might think that in doing so I am merely chucking in a cliche, but that's not the case: it is a genuinely-meant expression of awareness that things really aren't too bad when no one, human or equine, dies.  I was reminded of this on Saturday at Chepstow when we were down there with Frankie.  One of the benefits of running a jumper in the south-west is that there's a decent chance that Chris Down, one of my favourite trainers, might have a runner.  Chris is a good trainer and a nice man, and it's always a pleasure to pass the time of day with him.  The last of his three runners had been in Frankie's race (finishing a close second) and I had a chat with him as we both prepared to head for home after racing.  Chris' horses have been in great form and he'd had a couple of winners earlier in the week, while his horse in our race had nearly won - in fact, I'd taken heart in the closing stages as Frankie began to weaken that, if we couldn't win, Chris probably was going to do so, only for his horse to lose out close home.  When I asked Chris how his earlier runners had gone, he told me that one had run a nice race finishing just behind the place-getters, while the other had run disappointingly poorly.  I observed that, "Well, you have had a really good week - and today it's nearly been even better", to which Chris' response was, "Thank you, and today's been good.  We're going home with all three, and when you take them all home it's always a good day: as we know, that doesn't always happen".

Tragically, Chris' very true observations came home to roost for us yesterday, a day of grim weather (as you can see below in a couple of photographs which I took in Newmarket before setting off for the races) and an even grimmer event, when Alcalde (pictured on New Year's Day in the opening paragraph, and then parading before yesterday's race in this paragraph) suffered a fatal injury, snapping a hind cannon bone on the flat about 300m after the fifth hurdle.  To say that his connections and everyone here who knew and loved this sweet horse are devastated would be an understatement.  Some fractures don't seem too bad when they happen and one hopes that it will be feasible for the horse to recover from them; while others, like this one, make it instantly clear that saving the horse is not an option.  On this basis, if I can take one crumb of comfort from a ghastly situation, it is that this happened on a racecourse, rather than on the home gallops, where in retrospect it is clear that it could equally well have happened.

Alcalde isn't the highest-profile horse to have suffered a fatal injury by breaking a cannon bone in the past few days.  That, of course, is the same fate which befell Jessie's Dream, whose most recent outing came this week two years ago, when he finished second in the RSA Chase at Cheltenham.  He fractured a cannon bone on Gordon Elliott's gallops at the end of last week - and he'd have had to wait some considerable time for a vet to arrive to put him out of his suffering, whereas Alcalde's pain lasted probably no more than two minutes.  That he was spared any more suffering than need be was in part thanks to the quick thinking of both William and Warwick's vet, who between them ensured that the awful but merciful deed was done as swiftly as possible: the horse was already drawing his last breath by the time that Lucinda and I arrived, which was probably no more than two minutes after the injury occurred.  Of all the many good turns done to us by William, his decisiveness yesterday ranks high.  The end result is the same, but I've seen too many instances of horses' euthanasia being drawn out by indecision to know that standing around waiting for someone else to take responsibility, while understandable in a litigious era, achieves nothing other than to increase the poor horse's suffering.  One can reap the benefit of having an experienced, professional and caring horseman riding one's horses in ways over and above the results of the races.

So that, I am afraid, is the story of a truly grim day.  As we know all too well, Alcalde wasn't the first and won't be the last horse to suffer a fatal injury.  However, the fact that we know that these things happen - and not only to other people on other days - does very, very little to minimize the stunning shock and numbing grief when tragedy strikes suddenly out of the blue, which is the way which it generally favours.  I could dwell on this topic for days, or I could do nothing other than what I have done, which is to give an account of what happened - which, when one keeps a blog, one ought to do, whether events are very good and it's a pleasure to relate them, or very, very bad and one would prefer not to talk about them.  It is at times such as this that Sir Mark Prescott's description of the retirement of his mentor Jack Waugh comes to mind.  Jack Waugh, as you probably know, formerly trained at Heath House before retiring in the late '60s and handing the operation over to a young Sir Mark.  In a way it is strange to hear of financially-solvent trainers retiring, rather than dying, because training doesn't need to be a physical job if one's business is healthy enough to allow one to delegate all the hands-on work to others (in fact, if one's business is big enough, it is almost the case that training can't be a physical job, because there are too many administrative tasks for the trainer to do) - and keeping animals isn't generally something from which people whose lives revolve around keeping animals retire. As Clive Brittain always maintains, "I'll give up training horses when I give up breathing".  But Jack Waugh reached a point when he wished to retire - and he explained his decision to Sir Mark by saying, "If you are conscientious and you care for the horses in your charge, every time one of them goes down to the start, a little bit of you goes down with him - until eventually there's just nothing left".