pre-york. post chester.

​I have heard racing commentators give the opinion that the flat season is now off and running. To me, far more a jumps enthusiast than a flat lover, this opinion is both confusing and wrong. The reality is told by the racing calendar; the 2023 turf flat season started back in March with the Lincoln Handicap meeting at Doncaster. Jockeys rode winners; trainers trained winners, and stable percentages started to accrue. The flat season between the Lincoln and the Guineas should be renamed the warm-up season and have its own private jockey and trainer championship. A sort of sprint Grand Prix as Formula 1 are now playing around with. It would give purpose to the countdown to the first classics of the season and might provide surprise winners, though you couldn’t include all-weather winners as then you couldn’t dub it the Turf Flat Sprint Championship. Nor could the word ‘sprint’ be used as not all the races would be sprints. The Turf Flat Interlude Championship. That’ll do. Only whimsy, anyway.
To say the flat season is off and running simply because the first two classics are run is wrong, in my opinion, as the classics have trials, and it is my opinion the season does not begin in earnest until both the trials and the classic races are safe and snug in the form book. (Don’t talk to me about the St.Leger as it is almost the forgotten classic, the dead as a dodo classic. A classic in name only classic.) To my way of thinking, the flat season is not truly in full swing until after the Epsom Derby meeting. After Epsom, all the hows, whys, wherefores and tribulations have been fought over, speculated upon and we know, as far as any one of us can truly know, the 3-year-old pecking order. It is only then can we settle down, take a breath and look forward to the multitude of summer racing festivals that kick off with Royal Ascot and all those fancy hats and uncomfortable-looking morning suits. Aren’t we British mad? Insisting on wedding garb to be worn to a sporting event that will be staged either under grey-to-black clouds or under a peerless blue sky with temperatures exceeding 70 degrees.
Anyway, a whole lot of mental energy expended to put into words the unnecessary and downright-confusing-to-explain to non-racing people first 4-months of the British Turf Flat Season.

Saffie Osborne is the new and much taller version of Holly Doyle. I like it when my expressed first impressions bare fruit as has happened with Miss Osborne. I watched her at Ascot one day on what would have been one of her first rides in public. Being by the famous Jamie, eyes were turned in her direction. ‘Getting rides because she is the daddy’s daughter,’ some might have said. I had legitimate grounds to despise her as her presence at The Old Malthouse and the weighing room had elbowed one of my favourite jockeys, Nicola Currie, out of her stable jockey position. All conjecture, for me, at least, ended that day at Ascot. She rode well, was tactically savvy and though she didn’t win it was obvious Jamie had tutored her well. Before Saffie put herself in the limelight, there was no question to be asked as who was the best rider in the Osborne household. There are definite grounds for debate around the dinner table now, though.
The one annoyance in Saffie’s victory response after her splendid ride on Metier to win the Chester Cup – her small place in racing history – was the use of the phrase ‘petrol in the tank’. Firstly, race cars rarely run out of petrol and can go just as fast with a few drops left in the tank as when full, though they stop rather quickly when the gage goes past the red zone. Isn’t the English language eccentric? – ‘stop rather quickly’. As silly as ‘stop rather fast’. Hey-ho! Horses are not cars. There is no combustion engine involved, so to suggest they are fuelled by petrol in some way is as surreal as the League of Gentlemen. I blame Mick Fitzgerald for popularising this description of a tiring horse and vote to have him horse-whipped for the offence.
Why can’t jockeys say ‘he was running out of oats’ or ‘the boiler was in need of more horse-nuts’? Neither, of course, as accurate as using science to explain why the horse was tiring at the end of an exhausting race yet closer to accuracy than the idea in the mind’s eye that horses are fuelled by petrol.