Curtain comes down on of a great career

It took me a while to recover from what, to use a racing journo's cliche, one might term my 'punishing schedule' last week.  Lingfield Wednesday afternoon; Epsom Thursday evening; Chepstow Friday evening; the Sky Sports Racing studio Saturday evening.  When my travels finished around 2 am on Sunday morning, I was more than ready for my bed.  Still, all four outings had been enjoyable.  We didn't manage a winner, but Das Kapital ran well at Chepstow on Friday night, finishing second behind the favourite and his paternal half-brother Sigrid Nansen who was completing a three-timer.  That was encouraging.

We did have one entry this week, Sacred Star at Nottingham yesterday, but I didn't declare her.  She can go to Chelmsford seven days later instead, which looks a more suitable opportunity almost whichever way one looks at it, obviously including the fact that she's an AW winner who has run badly on her only turf outing.  I note that Mark Tompkins has a couple of entries in her race.  Obviously I'd like our horse to win the race, but that aside I'd love to see him have a winner to sign off his 40-year training career.  He's part of the furniture here and his retirement really will be the end of an era. 

It has become easy in recent years, while Mark has been training a small string of extremely undistinguished horses, to forget what a successful trainer he was for many years.  Few trainers earn the title 'Classic-winning trainer' but he earned it, and it's something that can't be taken away.  He was my neighbour for many years, just round the corner in Flint Cottage in Rayes Lane, and he was a great neighbour to have because if you ever needed to trouble him for some help, you'd have found that nothing was too much trouble.  He's been the Chairman of the Newmarket Trainers' Federation for years and that's a task which you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy as it is extremely onerous, not to mention utterly thankless.

Mark has been outstanding in that role, going well beyond the call of duty in doing things to help Newmarket and its trainers.  He's invariably friendly: you'd never pass him on the Heath without him having a smile and a friendly greeting, always asking how things are going - and not doing so in the standard glib way just for the sake of saying something, but because he was genuinely interested; and genuinely keen to find that people were doing fine, and quick to offer words of support and encouragement if the answer was negative.

It's easy to forget what has happened in the past, and so it's easy to forget how many people have learned their trade from Mark.  Just off the top of my head, the trainers to whom he was a mentor in their younger days have included Giles Bravery (England), Ben Cecil (California), Aaron Purcell (Victoria) and Jeremy Gask (New South Wales, previously England).  And there will be many, many more because those four are just the ones whose names have come to mind with five seconds' thought.  He's had one champion apprentice (Saleem Golam) and plenty of apprentices who have ridden winners, almost invariably more winners than they would have ridden had they been with anyone else.  He'll be a huge loss to the training ranks, far more so than most observers will realise.