Level-headedness

Another week, another two runners.  We've had Roy (Yarmouth, Tuesday) and Loving Pearl (Chelmsford, Saturday) is still to come.  Roy (pictured here coming back in after the race with Georgia Dobie) ran well, by the standards of Roy away from Brighton.  Sixth of 16, closing all the way through the final furlong.  That's encouraging for when we go back to Brighton, which is pencilled in for 20th August.  In the interim I hope that he'll have a run at Windsor in an amateurs' race on 11th August.  The run shows how frustrating was his two-mile race at Lingfield.  On this run again you'd say that he'd relish two miles (which he can't have at Brighton) but when he did get that at Lingfield he over-raced and consequently weakened at the end.  Whatever - he's in great heart.  Nine years young.

You'd hope that Loving Pearl would run well on Saturday but I'm far from convinced that I'm ever going to train a winner at Chelmsford.  I'd more or less given up going there with any horse who might be good enough to have a choice in where he/she goes, but it turned out that I selected two horses to go there.  Sacred Sprite went there last week - and, of course, had no luck.  Loving Pearl goes there on Saturday (ridden by Franny Norton, which is rather nice as he won three races on her half-brother Rhythm Stick) so we'll see what happens.  I won't be holding my breath.  Even Indira, Loving Pearl's half-sister, was unplaced when she went to Chelmsford, and basically she was never unplaced.  And the post-script, of course, is that I'll be entering Sacred Sprite for there again at the end of next week.  Some people - you just can't tell 'em!

Great racing at Goodwood.  Two personal highlights today.  Firstly, Rachael Gowland (pictured here galloping Loving Pearl on the Al Bahathri last week) nearly rode the Magnolia Cup winner today (beaten in a photo-finish which, we were told on TV, took three minutes to decide). Rachael has been regularly coming in here before going to work for the past several months and has taken her preparation very, very seriously.  She was more than ready for the race by the time that it arrived, and the fact that she nearly won the race on a horse rated 49, beaten a lip by a horse rated 66 which she was meeting at level weights, tells you all you need to know about how well she's done.

I can't, of course, highlight how well Rachael has done without praising the winning rider Khadijah Mellah.  A couple of months ago I was worrying that this was going to be a story without a happy ending because she didn't look like someone within two months of being ready to ride in a race.  But in the last couple of weeks she's really got into the swing of it, as today's winning ride showed.  The progress she has made in a short period of time really is remarkable.  I'm only sorry that I didn't go down to Goodwood today to 'support' (ie watch).  Goodwood very kindly invited me and it would have been a lovely day, but there's plenty to do here, and the distance and the traffic means that a day at Glorious Goodwood is a full awayday, and it would have been hard to justify.

The other personal highlight of the day, aside from Rachael's good ride, was Deirdre (pictured here in the middle of May, shortly after her arrival) winning the Nassau Stakes.  It has been a highlight of the year seeing this lovely mare frequently on the Heath in the mornings from May onwards.  She's an absolute darling.  She just wanders around, seemingly for hours every day, cantering sedately around Bury Hill occasionally and stopping to admire the view when she comes off the end of the canter at the top.  The people with her, including her rider who walked into the winner's enclosure with her today, are so friendly and so courteous, and I'm delighted that their trip has been so well rewarded.

One other observation.  Yesterday was the final day of the antipodean racing season.  One never used to pay much attention to state-wide statistics because racing in town was paramount.  The champion jockey is the one who rides the most metropolitan winners, and the provincials and the races in the bush didn't count for much.  That's all changed now that racing there has become so much like racing here, in that the big stables have so many horses that they have to send them everywhere.  And now that there's good prize money for every race, wherever it is.  So riding the most winners in Victoria attracts nearly (but not quite) as much attention as riding the most winners in Melbourne, ie at Flemington, Caulfield, Moonee Valley and Sandown.

Anyway, Linda Meech finished, I think, tenth in the premiership but state-wide was the leading jockey.  I've never met her but she's long impressed me as everything a very good jockey ought to be.  There was a very good article about her this week on Racing.com, highlighting her achievement, and one of the things she said was very good.  We often hear about the vile things which people say on 'social media', and those vile things are reason enough to eschew this part of life.  (I'm a Twitter addict, only look at Facebook occasionally; and that's it for me).  But she summed it up perfectly.  It's not just the abuse one is wise to avoid.

"I stay out of that sort of stuff for a reason.  You are either getting told how bad you are or how good.  I like to stay pretty even, so I stay out of all that."  Very good, isn't it?  In this era of mental health awareness, we're very mindful nowadays of the potential harm of verbal abuse, but it's easy to forget that the dangers of being lionised are just as real.  We were all brought up by parents who worked on the basis that excessive praise was at least as damaging to a child as excessive criticism, and I rather enjoyed Linda Meech's reminder that the praise is just as dangerous.  A whole generation of parents could do well to take that on board.