Good days

Summertime!  It's great.  Yesterday we had some beautiful weather at Yarmouth, but it was more 'beautiful' used in its correct sense (ie lovely to look at) than 'beautiful' in the sense of being the perfect temperature.  With bracing sea breezes, I was more than happy to keep both my sweater and my jacket on throughout the afternoon, despite the idyllic scenes which make it look as if we were on the French Riviera, with the sky being a perfect match for my 'Godolphin' royal blue racing colours, as you can see in these photographs of Gift Of Silence and Neil Callan before and after her race.

Happily, the day was as lovely as the sky.  You might say that I'm easily pleased as we had two runners and no winners, but there's more to it than winning or losing: there's competing well and competing badly and, while we (and everyone else) compete badly all too often, I'd like to think that both our runners performed with credit yesterday.  We've had five runners on the turf this season now, for one win, one second, two thirds and one unplaced, and I'm happy with that: one's going to have more losers than winners however good one's horses, but if the vast majority of them are competitive, then that's as good as it gets for anyone.

It was Gift Of Silence's first handicap and first run on turf, and I was pleased with her gritty second place, which has taken her record to 4-0-1-1, which are respectable figures.  And, if her performance was pleasing, then Wasabi's was even more so.  As this picture of Wasabi (ridden by Terri, trotting along the side of the Heath behind Tommy and Iva on Monday) shows, she went there seemingly in good nick - but that couldn't obscure the fact that she had the worst handicap form of any horse in the country.

Prior to yesterday, Wasabi had contested two handicaps, both last 'summer'.  The first time, she had run one stormy night at Epsom where the track was as heavy and loose as you'd ever see, and she wouldn't go a yard: she was off the bridle all the way, and she and Cathy Gannon came back looking as if they'd taken part in the Welsh National on a bog track at Chepstow in the depths of winter.  Ah well, things would surely get better when she ran in conventional conditions, wouldn't they?

Well, of course they got a lot worse.  She ran on good to firm ground at Newmarket for her second handicap and, while she did indeed travel a lot more kindly on this occasion, she didn't do so for long: she was suddenly pulled up and dismounted midrace, blood pouring from her nose in the worst bleeding attack on any horse I've trained.  This was a real bolt from the blue and, while one was entitled to hope that it wouldn't be a regular occurence, there are no guarantees.  We didn't take her out of training because of it, aiming to give her another run later in the season.  However, although she showed no further signs of bleeding, she didn't seem herself during the subsequent weeks, so she went off for a spell early in the autumn.

As the three photographs of her show, she still looks at least a year younger than her four years, but she's coming along nicely and her work had been pleasing - but, even so, one couldn't put out of one's mind the fact that the last two trips to the races with her had been massively disappointing.  So it was just terrific to see her at last running as one had long been entitled to hope - ie, really well.  She was perhaps a bit unlucky as she was short of room for most of the straight, but basically it was just great to see her put in a very bold performance to finish third in a big field. She did everything right and will have learnt a lot from the outing, so it's just lovely to see her career back on track.  Fingers crossed it remains thus.

Anyway, so that was all good.  And what was even nicer was the fact that it was a usual Yarmouth raceday, full of friendly faces.  The first race was rather a brahma: Vince Smith, rider of two 50/1 winners in my colours and now Silvestre de Sousa's chauffeur, owned the first winner (and one can see him in the previous paragraph in the winner's enclosure after the race, being interviewed by Jason Weaver).  The brahma is that Vince bought the filly as a yearling to re-sell in the breeze-ups, only Tattersalls wouldn't accept her for the sale - which is looking an embarrassingly bad decision now that she has won a race (from Michael Wigham's stable, and ridden, of course, by Silvestre) before the sale of which she should have been a part (which takes place on Friday).

Vince wasn't Newmarket's only former jumps jockey at the track, as the previous paragraph shows: Scobie Coogan trains a few just outside Soham in addition to his umpteen other enterprises and had two runners there, while Ian Watkinson took Rae Guest's two runners there in his truck - one of whom beat Gift Of Silence.  The winner of the other race which we contested (the last race, in which Wasabi finished third) was also another nice local triumph: we see the Mark Rimmer-trained Corn Maiden on the Heath regularly and (leaving aside the fact that she beat us) it was lovely to see her salute the judge for her very deserving connections.

So that was all good - and if yesterday gave us some splendid weather, today was even more special.  I still haven't jettisoned the shorts and this morning, with a good covering of frost at dawn and zero degrees, reminded me why.  But we're nearly there, and the day really was lovely.  Heavy fog descended soon after 6am, and when Ethics Girl and I got to the far end of the Bury Road at around 6.50 you could hardly see 40m in front of your face - as you can seen in the previous paragraph, as Jeremy Noseda's gallopers pass under our noses, crossing the Norwich Road from off the Limekilns.

I treated myself to a trip up the Limekilns on Ethics Girl as it's always nice to go up there once or twice a year, and this seemed a good occasion on a mare who likes fast ground, notwithstanding that I wasn't able to take in the views on the way up - and it's never ideal approaching the end of a gallop which you don't use that often when you can't see where you're going and aren't totally sure where you are.  Anyway, even by that time the sun was starting to peep through the fog on Long Hill (which appears in this paragraph and the next, photographed on my way home, with the Limekilns being seen in the previous paragraph).

By around 9.30 the sun had burnt off the fog, and thereafter we were in for a genuinely lovely day, very sunny and very warm.  It worked out very well as Roger and Maggie Vicarage came over today to see Zarosa, who had her first gallop since winning at Newcastle 16 days ago.  We went down to the Al Bahathri to watch her gallop around midday, and what a difference five hours can make: at 7am you couldn't see a thing down that end of town, but by noon we could see for miles, as the penultimate chapter's wonderfully spring-like scene and the last chapter's galloping shot (Annia Galeria and Iva on this side of Zarosa and  Terri) show.

Other than that, I've wasted too much time today on yet more Godolphin-gate stuff.  We're always told that we should speak to the press at every opportunity as it's 'good for racing', but over the past week I think that the press have been finding it hard to find speakers, or at least speakers who aren't so frightened of being quoted as saying what's in their heads that they won't say anything worth saying, and even that has to be 'off the record'.

Anyway, I'm very happy to speak, not only because I love the sound of my own voice, but because I think that racing is on the ropes at present, and it's our duty to ram home the message that we're not all crooks and that what has happened is an aberration, rather than the tip of an ice-berg.  Even I was selective about what I said, mind: I didn't let on (not that it would have been relevant anyway, of course) that I fell off yesterday morning - but, there you go, I've owned up to it now.  But it was good: the horse off whom I fell probably isn't even 15 hands (Annia Galeria) so I didn't have far to fall - and she was so stunned by her low act that she just stood there for me to catch and jump back on her.  Bless her - just so long as she doesn't make a habit of shedding her load. I'm getting too old to want to be falling off too frequently.