Come blow your horn, start celebrating; right this way, your table's waiting!

Good.  That's a wrong righted.  From a tweet by Lingfield's excellent clerk of the course George Hill I see that there was a presentation ceremony there at this afternoon's meeting to mark Nicola's achievement in being the Champion Apprentice of the AW winter season.  That's just as it should be.  Good on 'em.  Obviously I'm particularly pleased as the rider concerned is our rider, but that's not the point: the AW Winter Champion Apprentice deserves to be have his or her achievement recognized and honoured, irrespective of who wins the title, just as the Champion Apprentice in the main season deserves (and receives) his or her plaudits and ceremony.

The spectre of a potential fly in the ointment was briefly raised after I wrote the last chapter as someone suggested that any rider who starts the season as an apprentice should have all his/her winners included in his/her tally, irrespective of his/her status when riding them.  That is plainly not true, however, as was made very clear two years ago.  Tom Marquand was Champion Apprentice in 2015.  The following year it became clear during the second half of the summer that the 2016 title was going to be between him and Josephine Gordon.

Early in the autumn, as was extensively covered in the Racing Post and other media outlets at the time, it became known that, as Tom had ridden out his claim early in April, he was going to have to surrender his apprentice license exactly six months later, early in October, one week before Champion Stakes Day (which is illogically the final day of the so-called championship season) and that consequently any winners which he rode in the final week of that season would not count towards his tally in the apprentices' table.  This was black-and-white, undisputed.

It was actually rather nice that season because Josephine, understandably, was keen to be ahead of him not merely at the end of the season but at that point too, so that, were she to win the title, nobody could begrudge her her crown by saying that she had had, say, 26 weeks to rack up the winners while Tom had only had 25 - and it turned out that she was indeed ahead of him when he ceased to be an apprentice with one week remaining, so it wasn't just that she beat his total with one more week than he had, but she beat his total in exactly the same time too.

One sometimes sees something similar in National Hunt racing.  The title of Champion Amateur used to be a big thing, but inexplicably nowadays it is paid no heed.  (Well that's not true: presumably the contenders for it are very aware).  I wouldn't be confident that I could name one Champion Amateur in the last decade, whereas previously the title and its winner always used to be given great publicity.

One often sees a leading young amateur who clearly has a good future as a professional leading the amateurs' championship by, say, three wins in February, and being asked about his future.  He's on the crest of a wave, and clearly it's in his financial interest to become a conditional as soon as possible - but he says that he is going to remain an amateur until the end of the season before making the change because he is keen to win to be Champion Amateur (because, clearly, winners ridden by him that season on a conditional license do not count towards his total for the amateurs' championship, notwithstanding that he had started the season as an amateur).

Anyway, it was great that today's ceremony happened.  But that was today, and next we have tomorrow.  And tomorrow for me and Roy will be a trip to Kempton.  It's a twilight meeting rather than an evening meeting, which is great news as that means that it doesn't finish as late as it would were it an evening meeting.  It finishes nice and early at 9.15 (once again prompting the question of what time the last race would have been were it an evening meeting).  We're in the last race, but by a stroke of good fortune we're in the first division of it at 8.45.  Every second counts at that time of night!  For both Roy and I it will be our fourth trip to Kempton this winter and our first trip to the races for four weeks.  It is also very likely to be our last trip to Kempton of the current winter/spring, as Brighton will be calling from the end of this month onwards.  I'm sure that he'll run his usual creditable race tomorrow and, as always with him, I'm looking forward to the outing (its late hour notwithstanding).