How we beat the favourite!

In the last chapter I think I made reference to the fact that having a few runners in fairly quick succession was going to be quite a strain.  So it proved, as the fact that I've gone so long between chapters suggests.  We'd had Turn Of Phrase at Wolverhampton on the Tuesday.  Then we had Das Kapital at Doncaster on the Friday; Big Pete at Lingfield on the Monday; and Cloudy Rose at Kempton on the Wednesday.  That was me on the road four days out of nine, with three days out of six at the end of that. There's always plenty to be done here so I got a bit behind and it's taken me until now, five days after the end of that sequence, to wrap it up on here.  So here goes.

Das Kapital was disappointing, but conditions were very taxing at Doncaster and plenty of others had a disappointing day too.  It would get too complicated to say that Das Kapital didn't handle 'soft' ground so I'm not going to go down that road (bearing in mind that his only win and his best form have come on 'soft' ground) but I'll just leave it by saying that I expect him to do better on a different day.  And we did beat the favourite, which is always good - even if that meant that we finished 12th and the favourite finished 13th, a neck behind us!  I came away reflecting that, of the three runners which we had had coming up, he looked to have the best chance of them, so it didn't well for the rest.

Sure enough, Big Pete ran even worse.  He's very lazy and it's taken ages to get to the point where I was bold enough to run him.  Usually with these very laid-back horses, they generally spark up a bit when you run them, the competition of being in a field of horses generally getting them going.  Generally, but not invariably, as we found out at Lingfield.  He did nothing, and poor William Kennedy had a harder race than he did.  He had stopped blowing by the time that he got back to the racecourse stables, and hardly had a sweat mark on him.  Still, I haven't given up hope that, although he failed to get roused into competitiveness at the first attempt, second time around things might go better.

Happily, the final runner of the sequence, Cloudy Rose, ran a nice race on her debut at Kempton.  One of three ain't bad!  Predictably she wasn't good enough to trouble the principals, but she did everything right before, during and after the race, and showed enough to suggest that she has the aptitude, physical and mental, to develop into the nice handicapper that she is bred to be.  So that was good.  I came home happy from that outing, and I've just about recovered from the busy period - which is just as well, as we have pretty tough winter conditions to battle at present, and that takes it out of you.  We'll try to keep warm and keep safe.