preakness, hewick, brown jack & chris pitt.

​Sometime today, time-zones confuse me so it may have already happened, Saffie Osborne, in conjunction with her father and comedy partner, Jamie, attempts to become only the second female jockey in U.S. racing history to win a leg of the Triple Crown. Her mount, Heart of Honor, has the most annoying habit any racehorse can have in not liking 1st’s against his name, and preferring to bask in a succession of 2nd’s, which suggests he is either unlucky or does not particularly strain every tissue in the final hundred-yards of a race. Now is the hour Heart of Honor. For Saffie and your country strain every tissue and prove yourself a true warrior. 
I do not follow U.S. racing and apart from viewing a replay of the Kentucky Derby, a race that had more in common with equine mud-wrestling given the underfoot conditions and the mud-pack every horse adorned at the finish, than a classic horse race, I have no insight on the form and quality of the 3-year-old classic crop. If they are an ordinary bunch then Saffie might have an opportunity of attaining the height and glory of Rachael Blackmore. Saffie is a great gal and I have my fingers crossed for her, though crossing my fingers is not going to improve my typing skills. If I left in all the typos I produce, mainly just hitting the i when I intended the o or the h when I was intending to spell gal or glory, for instance, the 200-words thus far would read like a cypher and any reader would need to be a cryptographer to understand my meaning. 
And to think after her first every ride in public Saffie’s mother turned to Jamie and suggested that perhaps race-riding was not for their daughter.

Hewick, along with Monmiral, goes into battle against the best staying hurdlers at Auteuil today. He was a meritorious runner-up in the same race last season and is now 4Ib better off with Losange Blue, though he is also a year older. He is a great little horse and once I know how Saffie gets on in the U.S. I will recross my fingers in hope of Hewick providing Shark Hanlon with more recompense for the injustice done to him by the Irish authorities last year. 

In Sean Magee’s history of Royal Ascot, an entire chapter is devoted to one horse. The horse in question cannot be claimed as the best horse ever to grace the Ascot turf but he remains the most popular horse to have ever graced the Ascot turf. His name: Brown Jack.
An element of horse racing that grieves me is the reuse of famous equine names of the past. Though to the horse its name is of little consequence, to the human element it should be of great importance. I was enraged when Coolmore named a horse Spanish Steps a decade or so back and many people rallied to my cause. To this day, the majority of correspondence I receive is about blogs I have uploaded about perhaps my favourite racehorse of all-time.
A good while back a horse came from France with the name of Brown Jack and I was pretty narked about it and wrote to the racing Post to complain about it. People must be reminded that Brown Jack was the Desert Orchid of his day. He had public houses names after him, as well as a steam locomotive. Away from Ascot, he was the winner of the second Champion Hurdle ever run. He was, I stand to be corrected, the first horse to have a book written about his life. R.C. Lyle. A great book. With what I deem faint praise, Ascot stage a 2-mile handicap named in his honour. He won the Ascot Stakes in 1928, was second in the race the following year, though he won the Alexandra Stakes a couple of days later, and went on to win Alexandra Staes for the next 6-years. Steve Donogue worshipped him and when he was retired on winning the race for a sixth time in 1934, grown men were seen to weep. He deserves a full-size statue at Ascot. He should be honoured, as Seam Magee honoured him, above all other winners at Royal Ascot since 1934, including Frankel.
We all live in the shadow of these great horses. We cannot be seen to allow them to drift into the dark of the unremembered.

I received an e-mail today from someone in New Zealand regarding how to contact the writer Chris Pitt, author of ‘Fearless’, ‘Down to the Beaten’, ‘A Long Time Gone’ and many of the best books ever written about the sport. I have suggested a few routes to discovering Chris Pitt’s contact details and I thought I would extend the enquiry to anyone who might read this blog. I always try to help anyone who gets in touch with a question and query and I am disappointed when I cannot directly provide answers.