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We're nearly there, I suppose, but we STILL HAVEN'T REACHED THE END OF JANUARY!  I was delighted to find recently that it's is not just me who finds this month interminable.  It seems that just about everyone does.  I read a very good rhyme/mnemonic on Twitter the other day which I had sort of heard previously.  In other words, I knew it well but the version I know was a bit shorter than the one which was published.  Here we go:-

'Thirty days have September,
April, June and November;
All the rest have thirty-one
Except for February alone,
Which has twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine in a leap year;
And January, which has seven thousand, four hundred and eighty-two."

But when we get to Saturday, assuming that we do get there, we'll be into February.  And then we'll have our second runner of the year: The Rocket Park in a maiden race at Lingfield.  And we'll be entitled to feel that we've broken the back of what has - admittedly, even if it's easy to forget this - been a fairly clement winter (so far).  Even if it then turns out that we haven't.

I hope that the opening paragraph doesn't sound too dismal because the buoyant and groundless optimism with which I began 2020 is still more or less intact.  January is never a pleasant month and this one certainly hasn't been good, not least because I had a period of being under the weather last week.  I seem to have some sort of dormant shingles-type virus which re-surfaces once or twice a year at times when I get particularly run-down, so I probably shouldn't have been taken aback to find myself wiped out a few days after having taken two long and emotionally-draining day-trips to Ireland within a week.  But happily, helped by my putting myself to sleep for 18 hours when I realised what was happening, that setback has been more or less overcome in less than a week.

There's been plenty going on in the racing world, I suppose, but much of it has probably passed me by.  I did see a Racing Post article which re-raised the old chestnut that 'horses who race as juveniles are less at risk of injury'.  This is so obviously correct that it is hardly worth mentioning.  When a batch of yearlings arrives in a trainer's yard, he puts them all into work, and the ones who end up running in the first year are the ones who are inherently the soundest.  The more fragile ones have to be brought along more gently end up not racing until they are aged three and above, if at all.  That's just common sense.

A clearer way of phrasing it might be to say that 'horses who are inherently fairly sound are less at risk of injury than horses who are inherently fairly unsound'.  The problem is that people (including, often, the people who make the pronouncement) get confused and think that this is the same thing as saying that horses who are trained and raced at two are less at risk of injury than they would have been if they had been if they had been treated a bit more gently and merely trained at two without racing and given a more gradual build-up to the start of their racing career.  This is a very different thing.

 

It's impossible to know how things would have gone if one had done things differently.  It's like the old thing of horses being raised on limestone-rich soil in Ireland having more bone than they would have ended up having had they been raised in, say, East Anglia: we can ascertain how much bone as horse has from being raised where he was raised, but it's impossible to state with certainty how much he would have had if raised elsewhere.  So it's hard to be definitive about whether or not the statement at the end of the previous paragraph is correct, but my feeling is that it isn't.  I've always found that one maximises a horse's chance of staying sound if one gives him/her a very gradual build-up to the start of his/her racing career (which is why this is what we do with the ones who have demonstrated themselves to be inherently fragile by being put into training at two and then demonstrating that they are not (yet) sound enough to race).