A booking is a booking

As this chapter's photographs show, yesterday was, surprisingly, a lovely day.  We'd had a lot of rain over the weekend, as you might be able to guess from the fact that the meeting which should be taking place at our local jumps track, Huntingdon, on Thursday has been abandoned as large sections of the course are under water.  But we didn't get the snow which fell over large swathes of the country - and yesterday, after a very foggy start, turned out to be a lovely spring day from around 8.30 or so onwards.

Today hasn't been too bad either, with the sun coming out for a while this afternoon, but tomorrow's forecast of a daytime high of +4 and an overnight low of -2, with the likelihood of snow flurries, suggest that we can't drop our guard just yet.  If only!  However, I'll be relatively sheltered from the elements tomorrow as I'll be on the road for part of the day.  We'll have our only runner of the week in the first race at Kempton tomorrow evening (and it'll be an unaccustomed pleasure to be racing there in daylight, as the race is 5.45, and it'll still be light then).


Our runner tomorrow will be Gift Of Silence, who will contest her second maiden race.  I hope that she'll be one of the chances in this race, notwithstanding that the race will be more competitive, as regards both quantity and quality of opposition, than the one in which she ran three weeks ago.  And there looks to be an obvious winner of the race too (the Roger Varian-trained three-year-old Kohlaan, who is the clear form pick on his only run to date, when he was third at Lingfield in November) so it would be wrong to go there with high hopes.  But we might have a small, low hope, because living in hope is, of course, a prerequisite for racing horses.

It will be slightly strange for our jockey Neil Callan to be riding against a Roger Varian-trained favourite, as Neil has been Roger's stable jockey for the past couple of years.  However, he lost that job last week, so it will be good to be giving him a ride as I'd imagine that he might be short of patronage for a while, having been away for the winter (in Hong Kong) and having come back to find that he's lost his job.  However, he's a very good jockey, so it shouldn't take him long to put the momentum back into his career - and if we can give him a helping hand along the way, then so much the better.


I don't see anything more strange, incidentally, in Neil losing his job than the fact that, now Frankie Dettori is a freelance, no one in his right mind would retain a jockey.  More strange is the fact that Neil rides Gift Of Silence, while Martin Lane, who rode the filly very well last time and would obviously have been (and was) first choice, will be sitting in the weighing room twiddling his thumbs.  The problem was that the Racing Post's featured filly Born To Run was an intended runner in the race and, while Gift Of Silence would clearly have been the better ride, Martin understandably felt obliged to ride Born To Run, as he is the principal jockey for her trainer Hugo Palmer.

There were only 18 entries for our race and the safety factor is 14, so the possibility of eliminations never entered either my head or that of Simon Dodds, Martin's agent.  Had it done so, I would have said that I'd wait until after declaration time to see whether Born To Run got in; but, it not occuring to either of us that Born To Run, Simon just told me an hour before declaration time that Martin apologetically was going to have to ride Hugo's filly.  Simon offered me Neil instead, and I was very happy to use him instead.

Imagine our surprise, then, when 17 or the 18 entries were declared, necessitating three eliminees, one of whom was Born To Run. (And what a pity it was that one of the 18 didn't declare, as 18 declarations would have triggered the race's division, and there would then have been two divisions with nine runners in each).  Simon did ask me if I would like to switch back to using Martin, and the basic answer was that I would have liked to have done so - but I  explained that I didn't think that that would have been fair on Neil (even allowing for the fact that he possibly might never have known that he'd ever been booked for the ride).

I am aware that there are umpteen trainers and owners who think it acceptable, having booked a jockey, to cancel that booking on the basis that a preferrable jockey has subsequently become available.  And I am also aware that there are umpteen jockeys and agents who think it acceptable, having accepted a ride, to cancel that booking on the basis that a preferrable ride has subsequently become available.  But I'm not one of them, so Neil will ride the filly tomorrow, and I'm sure that Martin will ride her again at some point in the not-too-distant future.