damn fine flat racing.

​The ‘power hour’ hit the spot, didn’t it? I would say Saturday’s racing from Doncaster and Leopardstown was as good a day’s flat racing as my memory will allow me to remember. It’s all very well fancy pants racing journalists categorising this year’s St. Leger as ‘not top-class’ – whenever is it? – but as a horse race you would have to walk many a mile to find something better, at least where no obstacles are involved.
To start with the ‘Leger’. I am sick to death hearing jockeys and trainers taking defeat with the hackneyed phrase ‘didn’t stay’. Well, Martin Dwyer, and, yes, you were the one on top and perhaps in a better position than any of us to comment, but I suspect you are in a minority of one with your opinion. When a horse is beaten a length and a neck, and as described in the Racing Post, ‘kept on final 110-yards’, the evidence suggests Pyledriver did get the trip, though perhaps not quite as well as the first two. I have no doubt he was the best horse in the race and the one to follow for next season.
Though circumstances counted against Dwyer, in so much as he found himself treading a lonely path after Hukum took his ground, the two factors that got Pyledriver beat, and I do think he should have won, was the swerve between the final two furlongs and Dwyer’s decision to stay where he was rather than track across to where the race was developing. Jockey error? Easy to say when mounted on a settee in front of the t.v., I know, but his ‘See, I was right. He should have come down in trip not up’, after the race, was disingenuous and I hope after sleeping on it he will present his father-in-law with a more honest assessment of what went awry.
I am afraid I cannot be as diplomatic as Kevin Blake on the Shane Cross affair. It is a bloody scandal that a young sportsman can be denied the right to earn a living for a fortnight due to a failing a flawed coronavirus test. He is a young man who is 100% fit, for pities sake, he has ridden for months on end, has no symptoms and is not ill. There is no evidence that someone with no symptoms can spread infection, mainly because they have no live virus to spread. It’s dead virus they are finding, folks. Do your research and then decide whether to be diplomatic on the subject.
I take no pleasure in Ghaiyyath’s defeat, though it proves, at least to my satisfaction, that ratings are bollocks, especially world ratings. Ghaiyyath’s an admirable horse; he has been brilliantly cared-for and trained by Charlie Applelby, someone who only grows in my admiration, and ridden to perfection by William Buick. A free running horse is a beautiful image and Ghaiyyath has the looks to go with the beauty. He was beaten in the Irish Champions Stakes not necessarily by a better horse, as wonderful a mare as Magical undoubtedly is, but by tactics, tactics that from now on might always be Ghaiyyath’s Achilles Heel. 
How any horse, at present, can be considered better than Enable, the winner of 2 Arcs, 2 King Georges and so on and so on, is beyond me. Yes, Ghaiyyath beat her in the Eclipse but she trounced him in the Arc last season. Enable wasn’t fit at Sandown and Ghaiyyath was not at his best at Longchamp. Two reasonable excuses for defeat.
Ratings for Group horses should not be reassessed until the end of the season when all the data is available for a fair and frank assessment. Ghaiyyath beat a stayer having his first run of the season in the Coronation Cup, an unfit Enable in the Eclipse and the York race was as weak a Group 1 as will be run in this country this season.
Ghaiyyath is a horse anyone would be proud to own and in time he is going to make a super stallion, and he might yet prove me wrong and go and win the Arc or a Breeders Cup and outshine Enable once and for all. I just don’t think he has achieved the honour of ‘best horse in the world’ so far. Ratings are mere opinion. They should only be official at the end of the season when all the form is there for consideration.
A great weekend, of course, for the O’Brien family, and though number one and number two son threatened to outperform the old man, I suspect Aidan is in for a great end to the campaign. I thought Armory looked a good prospect in the Irish Champion Stakes, finishing off his race with alacrity. Tiger Moth was an easy winner of the Group 3. Mogul came good at Longchamp, as well as Serpentine pleasing his trainer, with talk of the Arc next. Can he do at Longchamp what he did at Epsom? And even his ‘poor’ Derby winner Anthony Van Dyck returned to winning ways and I doubt if any of us saw that coming.
Oh, I should mention that in my last piece I predicted that Tom Marquand had a big day coming to him. Yes, it wasn’t English King, though I didn’t suggest English King would win the Leger but I boldly predicted that the gods were going to shine on him. Great jockey and seemingly an even better human being. Holly is a lucky girl.