Uneasy

Good feedback on the last chapter, thank you.  We'll return to that anon.  Tonight, though, we'll just run through the three horses we've run this week, and then touch on one other point.  Sunday's trip to Bath with Hope was good. She finished third of 13 in a very competitive handicap.  It looked to be her best run of the season - although it might not necessarily have been as she was running off her lowest rating of the year, and then Nicola took a free 3lb off too.  The winner won easily, and we never looked like beating the first two; but we ran very well all the same.  She's a lovely horse who always does her best.  We'll keep going with her through the autumn.  It would be lovely if she could win a race this year.  It might happen.

Yesterday was less good.  Sussex Girl was OK.  She had won twice over 10 furlongs last year, but never run over farther.  We took a step into the unknown (by running over a mile and a half) and it didn't work as she weakened in the final 300m.  But she didn't run badly, and she did everything right through the race.  John Egan so often brings out the best in horses.  Das Kapital was disappointing, though.  He came off the bridle very early in the race and then dropped right out.  I had had very slight misgivings on running again on ground faster than good ('good to firm, good in places') but I hadn't expected it to lead to that poor a run.  Hopefully we can see him on soft ground later in the autumn, and hopefully we can see him running considerably better when we do.

Aside from that, one of the most memorable things of the last couple of days was a tweet which caught my attention.  The tweet, by @ThatTimWalker, says, "Why does the BBC keep broadcasting street interviews with people saying 'I don't understand why we don't just come out.' That folk are still saying this shows how hopeless BBC has been at explaining complexities of Brexit. BBC revelling in the ignorance its coverage has caused."  Fair point: surely nobody, whether 'Leave' or 'Remain' could believe that just coming out without trying to negotiate any post-Brexit advantages is the right way to go?  Clearly some do.  Which is mind-blowing.  Depressing.

I feel a bit the same way that That Tim Walker does any time the TBA ad comes on Racing UK.  There have been several occasions when I have felt moved on this blog to point out that, if there are any concerns about the (lack of) size of this country's population of horses-in-training, this isn't caused by a scarcity of living thoroughbreds capable of being trained and raced.  It is because of a scarcity of people willing and able to pay for them to be trained, a scarcity of owners.  (The other (potential) limiting factor on the size of the in-training herd is lack of labour, a problem which will almost certainly intensify if/when 'we just come out', or we come out a bit less haphazardly than that).

There had been too many occasions in the past when figures in positions of authority in British racing had failed to grasp this (to my mind) obvious point.  Happily, I hadn't had to make it for several years, as more recently we had seemed to be being governed by people less disconnected from reality.  However, unfortunately I feel moved to make the point again, following repeated exposure to this TBA ad on RUK which lectures us thus: "We need to encourage more breeders and more horses to be bred in the UK to guarantee the racing product that everyone aspires to."

For God's sake.  The problem is over-production, not under-production; supply exceeding demand, not falling short of it.  Tattersalls held a yearling sale at Ascot last week, and just about every yearling there either was sold below cost of production or was not sold.  The principal victims of this over-production problem are breeders who breed with the aim of selling the offspring as weanlings or yearlings (breeders who are often, and usually misleadingly, referred to as 'commercial breeders') and many of them are TBA members.  It would help them considerably, and make me feel considerably less uneasy, if this ad was warning us against the problem of over-production, rather than telling us that it is such a good thing that it ought to be exacerbated.