Saturday afternoon musings

Any time we don't have a runner on a Saturday, ie most Saturdays, it's my wont to put everything to one side during the afternoon and settle back to watch the racing on the television.  Of course, this weekly treat is less special than it used to be in the pre-Racing Channel days, when we were not yet spoilt by having racing on TV every day.  However, in those pre-Racing Channel days I developed the habit of making Saturday afternoons sacrosanct, and old habits die hard.  However, this Saturday, ie the one which has been preceded by the four days of Cheltenham, is one of the few in the year on which I find it hard to get enthused.  Even so, there's interest in every day's racing, and today was no exception.  That's the great thing about this wonderful sport: it's easy to become blase about the lesser fare, especially when there is so much of it, but every race is an interesting and exciting contest with its own collection of stories, and all one has to do to realise this is to pay attention.

So after a wet and very windy morning on the Heath (see above and alongside this sentence), it's been another Saturday afternoon in front of the TV.  I have to admit that the screen only received part of my attention as I was working on the accounts at the same time - but, as you can see below, the television got more attention from me than it got from Gus.  Anyway, prompted by one of today's races, I'm going to leave you with one observation and one question.  The observation was that I was very pleased to see a (Richard Wollacott-trained) horse running in the last at Kempton, the bumper, owned by C. John Hill, the former Barnstaple trainer who used to own (and often breed) most of the horses he trained.  He was a trainer whose horses I liked to follow.  The one I liked best was his Chester Cup winner Morgan's Choice, a lovely little liver chestnut horse by Reliance; while the one I ended up knowing best was Darakah, who came to Woodditton Stud while I worked there to visit Damister.  I hadn't seen John Hill's name for years, so was really pleased to see him owning a runner today.

So that is the observation.  And the question is (and this is going back to the racing earlier in the week) whether Sprinter Sacre really was bred by accident?  Does anyone reading this know?  I'm sure that I heard Clare Balding on the television saying that Sprinter Sacre's dam had been meant to go to another stallion, but was covered by Network by mistake.  Is this true?  It could very easily be true, because the annals of breeding history are full of similar stories of chance, misunderstanding and confusion leading to the creation of champions.  But the only slight query in my mind is that this had never, as far as I'm aware, been mentioned previously, which (if it is true) is surprising.  I do so hope that this story is true.  Does anyone know?