mr. incredible, mr. richards & ms. currie.

​Mr. Incredible drove Patrick Mullins up the wall. He did everything humanly possible to get to the bottom of his quirkiness and as proved in last year’s Aintree National he failed without honours to dislodge the horse from his own ideas about the game. With the optimism of a child, believing love and understanding and equine psychology might to the trick, Sandy Thomson acquired Mr. Incredible, believing he might succeed where Patrick Mullins and all the great brains at Closutton only found the very definition of the phrase ‘second-bested’.
The horse, as talented as he might be, has taken a dislike, for whatever reason, mentally, physically or spiritually, to racing. At Kelso last Saturday, he started after a fashion, ran okay until hitting one fence and immediately took the unilateral decision to pull himself up. To add insult to ignominy, Ryan Mania, who to every observer had done all he could to achieve something better, was fined £80 by the stewards for not riding with a whip. He was also admonished for using the reins to encourage Mr. Incredible to change his mind and try one more fence.
Although the antics of Mr. Incredible can be seen as amusing and a challenge for wide-eyed optimists who hope to transform the old dodger, in truth the horse should be taken out of training and given a chance at another equestrian discipline. One thing is for certain, he must not be allowed to line-up in the Aintree National next week. If he is allowed to run and either refuses to start or takes another horse out of the race by veering sideways as he did at Kelso, it will a) stop another horse, owner, trainer and jockey from competing in the race or b) could inflict injury on a rival horse or jockey or even worse cause a pile-up Foinavon-style. Imagine if number 35 on the list of runners was Mr.Vango, the unalloyed shape and make of an Aintree staying chaser, a horse with the form and weight to suggest he would have an outstanding chance to actually win the race, which is not the case with Mr. Incredible.

Famous Bridge will be disqualified from winning the Haydock National Trial back in February as he has failed a dope test. It seems Famous Bridge is one of those horses whose muscles tie-up (like when I get cramp in my calf muscle and sometimes my fingers and toes) and is regularly treated with Dantrolene Sodium (perhaps I should try it), which normally has left the body of the horse long before it races. On this occasion, a trace of it lingered. The problem I have with this judgement is that Dantrolene Sodium is not performance enhancing, yet though Nicky Richards was not fined, the owner, Hemmings Racing, were fined £57,000, the value of the prize now taken away from the owner. That will sting, I would think.
Although the decision to disqualify was easy to make and the rules allow no wriggle-room, the disqualification seems harsh given no offence was deliberately committed. Who is to say the fault was with the manufacturer of the product in question, perhaps some element of the product was greater than it should be. Who knows? Perhaps the laboratory that tested the urine sample investigated the possibility that the product was different in some way to normal. It just seems unfair when the product is ranked as not ‘performance enhancing’.

Being a bit of a softie and a champion of female jockeys, I was pleased through the winter months to see Nicola Currie riding winners again. Without having ever met her, I always find her an engaging young woman when interviewed at the races. I was also pleased when I discovered she was the squeeze of Sam Twiston-Davies, although I suspect that relationship has gone south as south can go.
So, it was a shock to read she is about to start a 39-day ban for multiple infringements of the whip rules. She had the fortitude to take the punishment on the chin, did not waste anyone’s time by appealing and accepted she has been trying too hard to get her career back on track. Now, of course, her career has gone off the rails at the very moment she was beginning to go full steam ahead.
I hope she can come back stronger and with a more relaxed attitude to her career and hope that trainers give her the opportunity to bring to the fore all the promise of her days as an apprentice. She is good and tidy rider but then again that can be said of a hundred of her weighing-room colleagues.