goldie, gosdens, doddle & castle to abbey.

​Question, is Jim Goldie the best flat trainer in the country? Now, you could argue that he is far from the best given he has never won a classic and until Royal Ascot this year Group 1’s had always eluded him. He is presently 17th in the trainers’ championship, millions of pounds in prize money behind Aidan O’Brien, the Gosdens, Andrew Balding and Charlie Appleby, with his star horse, American Affair on the sidelines with what is described as a minor injury. I dare say jarred-up due to the fast ground at Royal Ascot.
But we are dealing with oranges and pears here. Jim Goldie is, basically, a trainer of second-hand horses, horses that the aforementioned trainers would not have in their stables. Owners do not, and seemingly do not have to, provide him with silver bullets to fire, unlike the aforementioned who have nothing other than silver bullets to fire. Goldie will buy a horse from the sales for 3,000-guineas and win valuable handicaps with it. His horses are never swans, though a good number of them do a fine impression of being the whitest of swans.
It would be very interesting if a top owner/breeder instead of sending one of his or her lesser lights to the sales this autumn, sent it Jim Goldie to see if he could unlock the ability its pedigree suggests it should have. The man is in the veteran stage of his career. He has worked hard all his life, creating along the way his own stables and gallops. He is a self-made man who owes little to anyone for his success. He is, I boldly claim, the best trainer in the country and he deserves nothing less than to have one of the top owner/breeders sending him a nice, untried horse once in a while. I doubt if any of the sixteen trainers above him in the trainers’ championship could win a race with the majority of the horses Jim Goldie has at his disposal. 

The Gosdens were fined £3,000 by the B.H.A. yesterday after two horses from their stable were found to have minute traces of ketamine in their system. This is the second time the Gosdens have been guilty of this offence. Once upon a time the book would have been thrown at a trainer for having a horse fail a drug test, these days, thankfully, common-sense is applied to cases and in this instance, as in the previous incident, a former employee, who looked-after one of the horses to have failed the drug test, was found to be a recreational user of ketamine and was the source of the contamination.
My feeling on this is that I believe it serves no purpose for such cases to be made public. I am not suggesting the Gosdens’ should not have received a fine, though as ketamine is used by vets as a sedative and not a stimulant that might improve the performance of a horse, no harm was caused to either the horses concerned or the reputation of the sport, so why bring it into the public domain?

The half-million euros Irish Oaks this weekend will have fewer than 7-runners, 7 at the maximum and will quite possibly have the shortest priced favourite for a classic for many a long year. It will be a doddle for Minnie Hauk, with the possibility of Ballydoyle also banking the majority of the place money. Not a good look for the sport.

Several top trainers and at least one top jockey, Charlie Bishop, took on the Castle to Abbey Challenge last weekend, raising over £100,000 for Racing Welfare. The walk, for which the weather was a combination of hot sun and torrential rain, comprised an up and down travail of some of Yorkshire’s most scenic landscapes. And I congratulate myself for achieving my one day a week walk to the Atlantic Village shopping mall at the top end of the town. It is no longer called Atlantic Village but some silly name I neither like nor can remember. It is uphill nearly all the way and at 71 I surprise myself every time I finally reach my front door without having suffered cardiac arrest or a pulled muscle. Messrs Balding, Johnson-Houghton, Lavelle and others deserve a medal. I envy them and regret not having taken-on such a challenge at least once in my fitter years.