Busy - but warm, so that's good

There are never enough hours in the day.  I'm starting to write this chapter at 8.15, and in an ideal world I'd be going to bed around now.  But I must just jot down a few lines because we have racedays tomorrow and Wednesday, so we should just bring things up to date.  But I'll try to be brief.  If I can succeed, that'll be a double blessing: good for me and good for you too.  Roy at Brighton tomorrow shall be our fourth runner of the turf season; White Valiant at Fontwell on Wednesday shall be our fifth.  I'm actually not unhappy with how the season has gone so far, in as much as it can be said to have gone anywhere, with only three runners in the first six weeks or so.

I probably ought to be unhappy because of the three runners, one has finished last and two have finished second last.  So I suppose all that we have learned so far is that I'm too easily pleased (which we knew anyway).  Hope Is High at Chepstow on Friday was the third runner.  She finished second last (ie fifth of six) but that was OK.  Her best form is on faster (it was funny ground, typical drying spring ground and not at all like the very wet good to soft ground which she had disliked on a previous occasion - this time the horses came back with not a speck of mud on them, but in a very slow time) but she ran OK.  Second, third, fourth and fifth all finished fairly close together, so as she was racing off a rating 5lb higher than she has ever won off (and was running for the first time since September) one couldn't call it a bad run.

There might be an argument to say that I should have reported that she was unsuited by the ground; but I didn't.  I never really like doing so.  I don't see that that's the trainer's job: the only person who can tell whether a horse is or isn't suited by the ground is the jockey, not the trainer.  The trainer is only watching the horse, just like everyone else.  I report things which the trainer can know, eg coughing afterwards, lame the next day etc.  The last time that I reported that a horse had been unsuited by the ground, the stewards didn't accept the submission anyway.

On that occasion, I said it about a horse who was racing on 'good' ground whose best form was all on 'good' ground.  When I made the point that the ground that day was bad rather than good, and that it was nothing like the good ground on which the horse had previously won, the stewards (correctly) pointed out that it would only make things too confusing if they started publishing reports that proven good-ground horses were running badly because they couldn't handle "good" ground.  So it's easier just to decide (correctly) that this is out of my orbit.  Especially if, as was the case with Hope Is High, the horse has run well anyway.

(The Racing Post rating which she recorded on Friday, 75, is the second highest she has ever recorded; and she has run 17 times.  That figure is higher than than that which she has recorded on four of her five wins.  So it would have been absurd for me to report that she had run disappointingly because she was unsuited by the ground.  But - and we'll whisper this quietly because it's just between you and me - she wasn't really suited by the ground.  But she still ran well, so that's good - despite the fact that she finished second last.)

Anyway, we're off to Brighton with Roy and to Fontwell with White Valiant.  I'd be disappointed if at least one of them didn't do better than finish second last.  I hope that both will do better than that.  But disappointment is a regular travelling companion so we won't take anything for granted.  And we won't be complaining anyway because the weather is really lovely, and the world's generally good when the sun's shining, which it has been for three glorious days now.  We have other topics to cover too, of course, most notably Goodwood Racecourse becoming a war-zone on Saturday; but that can wait until I'm less tired and less short of time.  So we'll just content ourselves in this chapter with our two standard subjects: runners and the weather.