Every little helps

I'll be heading to my bed early tonight as I have a busy couple of days coming up and I'm still a bit behind on my sleep from Saturday night, when I started my shift on Sky Sports Racing with Tim Carroll at 9.30 and ended it at 1.30 on Sunday morning, meaning that I got home at 3.30 and got to bed shortly after 4.00.  So an early night tonight will be a good thing to set me up for the trip to Brighton tomorrow, when Roy runs in the final race at 5.00.  Nine runners and he's still towards the upper end of his range in the handicap ratings, but he's very well and should run creditably.

He'll have a new jockey tomorrow.  It's an apprentices' race in which any apprentice can ride (very often they are restricted to apprentices who haven't ridden, say, 20 winners, or whatever) and generally I like to use experienced apprentices in those ones.  Set against that is that he has top weight of 9 stone 11lb, so I rather wanted to claim - but obviously it's more or less an either/or situation, as the more experienced apprentices have either no claim or merely a 3lb claim in the race.  (No claim if they've ridden more than 50 winners; 3lb if they've ridden more than 25).

I'd like to think that I've found a happy medium.  Kathy Begley (formerly Glenister) (formerly apprenticed to David Evans; now, as of this spring, apprenticed to Richard Hannon) rides very well and is very experienced, but she's on the 22-win mark, so she claims 5lb in tomorrow's race (exactly the same as she would claim riding in a normal race against senior jockeys) taking his weight down to 9 stone 6lb.  I'm very happy to have found as good a rider as she is and still to be able to reduce his weight by 5lb.  Every little helps, as we're frequently told.  So we'll head to Brighton, do our best and hope for the best, but expect nothing.  (As ever).