Let's make no bones about it, in Simon Cox we may be about to throw the last dice in our dance with the devil. Too many lower case messiahs have come and gone from the B.H.A. without achieving anything more positive than making themselves more wealthy. At the start of his tenure, I was quite hostile to the appointment of Lord Allen, though I did warm to him a little once he took his seat at the B.H.A. He failed because first and foremost he was a businessman through and through and though horse racing may be an industry, it is also a sport and Lord Allen failed to grasp the concept of a marriage between the two. Although I thought initially there were more experienced people to take the helm at the B.H.A. than Simon Cox, now that I know more about him, that he has hands-on experience of the...

The Gran Premio del Jockey Club at San Siro is to be the next appearance of Constitution Hill. The Group 2 is on October 25th. I do think they have made a bit of a bollocks of this project. The September Stakes was a mistake, I now believe. In achieving a higher handicap mark they made so many otherwise suitable races unavailable to them and now they must chase glory in races that could easily attract either proven Group 1 horses in search of soft ground or a three-year-old that will become a Group 1 horse next season. As always, though, I hope Nicky Henderson once again proves me wrong. I do not concur with the cynics who believe Constitution Hill garners unwarrented attention. He remains the one equine superstar we have in this country and we are likely to only have him for another two-seasons at most. If only we...

At Market Rasen on Saturday, Willie Twiston-Davies vented his spleen on the topic of summer jumping. His view did not exactly mirror my opposition to the current summer jumping programme yet I understood his disquiet. Of course, being a critic of summer jumping has not stopped him and his father having runners over the summer. Indeed, yesterday at Newton Abbot the father/son combo trained two-winners, one ridden by the next jockey sensation Lucas Murphy, son of Timmy. My views on summer jumping tend to change with the wind. As W.T.D. himself hinted at, mentioning Killarney, I would like the summer jumping programme to focus on festival meetings consisting of 3 or 4-days fixtures, a formula that is a great success in Ireland. Where I chop'n'change is when the winter season should end and the summer season begin. I was content with the season ending with the old Whitbread meeting at Sandown...

Of course, Billy Loughnane will not accept he is a certainty to be the new champion jockey. He is too sensible than to assume the crown is his. He might suffer a fall today or tomorrow which puts him on the sidelines until after Champions Day and Oisin could then easily ride the 21-winners (currently) that would allow him to retain his title. But we know, barring unforeseen incidents, that Billy is going to take the crown from Oisin. In today's Racing Post, it is suggested that Loughnane will attempt to better both Sir Gordon Richard's total of 269-wins in a season and the record-breaking 289 of A.P. McCoy's. Of course, we are not talking exactness here. Sir Gordon's haul in 1947 came solely from a turf season of March to November, Loughnane has the advantage of artificial surfaces in January, February, half of March, half of November and December. And...

Occasionally, trainers come along whose training methods change the perception of how other trainers train their horses. These people are usually National Hunt trainers, Michael Dickenson and Martin Pipe come to mind. Yet no flat trainer seems minded to copy the training ethos of Aidan O'Brien, with the possible exception of his sons. 'Win or Learn' is the ethos of the O'Briens, with Aidan of the opinion that when a horse is fit and well the best policy is to keep running them until they tell you enough is enough. No other flat trainer of my lifetime, or as far as I can recall while sat here tip-tapping away, would run their best 2-year-old eight-times and still have one or two targets left to fulfil. If Aidan decides to run Sun Goddess twice more this season, finishing at the Breeders Cup, she will have run 10-times. The majority of top fillies...

No doubt I.T.V. will give prominence to the Cheveley Park and Middle Park Stakes today over the Cambridgeshire, even though the 3-day fixture is titled the Cambridgeshire meeting. To me, even though the former has still got the three most exciting 2-year-old fillies taking part, the two-year-old races are just support races to the main feature, the Cambridgeshire Handicap. Sun Goddess, Libertango and Senorita Bonita may be stars of the present but their real story will not be written until next season when we fill out whether they are merely sprinters or if one of them proves to be classic material. The Cambridgeshire is a now race, the winner no doubt reaching the height of his or her career. Of course, the favourite, Gavriel is being touted as 'a Group horse runing in a handicap' but that is yet to be proved. Many a potential 'group horse running in a handicap'...

Writing in The Racing Post today, Will Aitkenhead, head of Corporate and Industry Affairs for Ascot racecourse, assures readers that technology is a force for good and vitally needed to speed-up the time it takes to decide steward enquiries. He might be right. Personally I prefer the fallability of humans over the fallability of all-thing hi-techy. Stewards' enquiries do need to be speeded-up, that is unarguable. The easiest way to achieve this would be remove jockeys from the process. Not all jockeys are as sportsmanlike as Oisin Murphy and jockeys, in the main, are not fighting on their own behalf but in the best interests of the owner and trainer of the horse involved. It becomes a to and fro, with both jockeys asked their opinion of each others testimony. Yet it is not a trial, merely an enquiry and for those who lose the verdict there is always the possibility...

Love Me Tender is a 4-year-old, trained by Willie Mullins. He trotted up in a maiden hurdle at Listowel yesterday and is already being touted as a likely winner of one the novice hurdles at the Cheltenham Festival. Love Me Tender is a 5-year-old, trained by Willie Mullins for J.P. and runs in the Beginners Chase at Listowel today. Confused? I'm not so much confused as annoyed. The opening paragraph, one would assume, must be factually incorrect, don't you think? I am, after all, someone who cares little for research and study. Yet, the above is perfectly correct. Willie Mullins has under his care two young horses with the same name. It is perfectly feasible, if the 5-year-old does not take to fences, that the two horses with the same name could run in the same race. As proved today, both can run at the same meeting and in the future...

Yesterday, as you all will have noticed, the word 'owner' went missing from the title of the blig-blog. You see, initially I put Sheikh Ahmed bin Rashid Al Maktoum in the title, which of course would have made the title more of a paragraph than a short description of what lay in wait of readers. In reimagining the title is where I erred, only noticing the error when archiving the piece from my g-mail account. I tried to recover the situation but was unable, due to my I.T. ignorance, to gain access. I contacted the overseer of the site and despite his best efforts I could not locate the 'dashboard' - did not know I had one - and in exasperation, mainly of my uselessness in these matters, tried to live with my mistake. As you can imagine, this has proved difficult to achieve. Today we have the centrepiece of Listowel's...

The death of Sheikh Ahmed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, brother of Sheikh Mohammed, is the loss of another important owner from the sport. He was an owner of longstanding. He won the 1987 Eclipse with Mtoto, horse of the year the following season and recently owned the world-traveller Addeybb. The Maktoun family may be one of the richest in the world and there may be sons and daughters to inherit the turf interests of their fathers, but their interest in the sport may be simply inheritary, keeping going a family concern, and it may become convenient to them to drift towards the racing jurisdictions in their own part of the world. At a time when there is more rocks in the road for our sport than a subcontinent mountain pass we need all the support we can muster and people like Sheikh Ahmed are hard to find and perhaps even harder...

In today's Racing Post, Lee Mottershead has a piece with Norman Gundill, the grand old man of Pontefract who has not missed a meeting at his beloved racecourse in the sixty-years he has served the place. As you might expect from Lee Mottershead, it is a lovely read which could have been much longer if he had included all of Gundill's anecdotes. I imagine Gundill to be a rare specimen in our modern world, someone who has served the same company for the length of time he has served Pontefract. He began as assistant secretary, then he rose to director, managing director and then clerk of the course. Gundill is the sort of man who should be celebrated across the sport, not simply in Yorkshire. He is, or should be, an inspiration to others, a man whose wisdom and horse racing knowledge is called-upon by the striplings just starting out in...

At Newbury, they needed rain and did not get any. At Ayr the opposite was true. When the government told you the country was in the midst of a drought, they lied. Only the south of the country had brown grass; in the north of England and Scotland sit-on mowers were to be heard on a daily basis. It was a brave call to carry on regardless by the Ayr stewards, especially as some jockeys, at least according to controversy-seeker Matt Chapman, were in favour of calling the all thing off.  I dare say those jockeys with mounts in the big race that needed bog-like conditions were enthusiastic about racing, whereas their colleagues on good ground horses  would have been in favour of an early finish to their working day. Ultimately, the right decision was made, as was changing the running order so that I.T.V. were able to televise both the...

Those of a similar vintage to my own may agree that time seems to zip past us far faster than when we were nimbler and fructuous. Not that I remember being either of those things. I am also pretty sure I skipped those years described by many 'as the best years of my life'. Any hoo: can it be a week already since the smashing of the latest glass ceiling? It sure it is and because of last week, Saffie Osborne is the star attraction at Ayr today, confirmed by her presence on the front page of today's Racing Post. I am not sure about these glass ceilings, you know, being only for female jockeys. It seems a bit discriminatory. There must be glass ceilings for male jockeys, not that I can think of one. Perhaps if an apprentice were to win a classic, though that could be of either gender,...

In today's Racing Post, Chris Cook dedicates his column to the 'plight' of female jockeys and why 'we' should not get carried away with Saffie Osborne winning the St. Leger last Saturday. He is right to mark the card for everyone. As much as it was a genuine history-making day for females in sport, nothing has markedly changed for female riders since the day Hayley Turner won the July Cup as they remain more than a little unrepresentated when it comes to Group 1's and classics. Given females are, in the main, lighter than their male equivalents, and should be achieving rides in the big handicaps in higher numbers than is the case - 25 go for the Ayr Gold Cup tomorrow, with only two ridden by female jockeys - they were scarsely seen in any of the Royal Ascot handicaps, for instance. As Chris Cook highlighted, of the top fifty...

No one, not even a born cynic and conspiracy theorist follower as I am prone to be, can deny that the weather in Britain and Ireland has not changed, perhaps for the better, over the past decade. Winters are less wintery, which can only be a good thing, and summers are becoming more Caribbean-like, which for me is less good. I believe this change in our weather pattern to be due to natural phenomenon, not human activity. At the moment El Nino is not playing nicely as it likes to bat the jet-stream this way and that, causing air currents to be where they are not naturally suppossed to be. Also, and this is never mentioned by advocates of climate catastrophe is the manipulation of the weather by scientists of several countries since the 1940's must also have played in part in buggering-up the world's weather. But let's not play politics...

It always brings me good cheer when the lead story on the front page of The Racing Post at this time of the year revolves around National Hunt. This morning it is Marine Nationale and Barry Connell's plans for him this season. It seems we will have to wait until Christmas to see him again. He is fit and well, though, something Marine Nationale has a habit of not being, with the wait till Christmas a strategy to have him fresh for the Dublin Racing Festival and Cheltenham. There is always the risk factor in delaying the return of a Group 1 horse until mid-season as all it takes is for the weather to close in over the Christmas period or for the horse to fall at the first fence and suddenly connections are on the back foot and with 2-mile chasers there is very little alternatives if Plan A is...

In the letters column of The Racing Post today, Mr. McEwan of Manchester makes a very good argument for horses to be disqualified if their riders have committed the sort of offence that got Shane Foley an eleven-day ban at Leopardstown on Saturday. It was not that Foley's offence altered the chances of one horse in the race but his actions caused three horses to be impeded, with Oisin Murphy claiming his horse, A Boy Named Susie, would have won without the interference and last season's Epsom Derby winner Lambourn being nearly put through the rail. I made the call after James Doyle was not given even a caution after causing Into The Black and P.J. McDonald to all but fall at the end of the race, that if the horse had fallen and either the horse or the jockey suffered injury or worse, the stewards would doubtless have made Doyle...

On occasions, an article will appear in The Racing Post that reminds the reader how much there is in our sport to be proud about and which other sports, if they knew, would be envious of. Former jockey, former St. Leger winner, George Baker, is the face of the B.H.A.'s Rider Development Programme. Not only is George coach to many apprentices, he also drives his white van, loaded with his equisiser (is that spelt right? Looks wrong) to stables up and down the country to advise stable staff on how to improve their riding skills. This initiative will not only improve riding skills but will also reduce, cross-fingers, accidents on the gallops and grow confidence amongst the lesser skilled riders employed in the industry. Always try to rise up from the bottom, not dumb-down from the top. The other day I quoted Jack Leach, former jockey, on why, in his opinion,...

It was always what I wanted to witness. It may have taken over fifty-years for it to happen, and I watched on t.v. that first female jockeys race at Kempton, but when it arrived it was far more joyous than I could ever imagine. If the script for the 250th running of the St. Leger was to be for a film, the editor  would have been ripped-up as too ridiculous, too 'National Velvet' to be considered both likely or believeable. The 250th running, royal patronage and Lesley Garrett, no less, singing the National Anthem, it was history enough. For the race to go down in racing history - history used in its correct context - was too much for any viewer to expect. Yet fate accepted the script in its entirety, allowing Saffie Osborne to remove yet another of the glass ceilings in the sport. The first female jockey to win...

Let me say this from the outset: I like James Doyle. He is one the finest riders we have at present. Holly Doyle once described him as a complete gentleman. I doubt if anyone has anything bad to say about him. That said, in my opinion, he should have received at the very least a 5-day ban after allowing his mount Final Objective to drift off a true line on or just after the finishing line at Doncaster yesterday. P.J. McDonald could have suffered serious injury and his mount Into The Black could easily have suffered likewise. I know it is a busy day with too much racing in Britain plus the start of Champions Weekend in Ireland but it was remiss of the Racing Post to not dedicate a few paragraphs to the incident. It was not appalling riding by Doyle; his riding did though result in a heart in...