Seven Days

A person whose job it is to promote horse racing was, rather disappointingly, being sniffy about the Craven meeting on social media last week. I understand that some people don't like racing at the Rowley Mile and, yes, last Tuesday in particular was a little challenging on the weather front. But if you're a Flat racing person, and particularly one who is being paid to tell other people that they should come racing, then you really should appreciate all that is wonderful about these weeks of Classic trials across Europe....

Back in the dying years of the last century I spent some time working for Horse & Hound. It was part of a large magazine group set in a 30-storey tower block on the south bank of the Thames in central London. A strange place for an equestrian publication to be based, but there we were, sharing the 20th floor with Country Life and Shooting Times, the odd Labrador or terrier running around loose, occasionally biting a delivery man or cocking a leg on the coat stand. You can imagine...

The curtain came up at Longchamp on Sunday, with the 'réouverture' being conducted in extremely testing conditions but nevertheless providing a welcome return to action at France's premier racecourse. The most important thing on arrival in the Bois de Boulogne is to make it into the track without being mown down by one or more of the cyclists within the relentless peloton that streams past the gates of Longchamp of a weekend. Everything after that feels like a blessing.  And indeed we were blessed with an almost dry and definitely...

I love Paris in the springtime, sang Ella Fitzgerald, and I'm pretty sure it was a thinly-veiled reference to her secret passion for heavy ground three-year-old maidens at Saint-Cloud. What Classic clues may we glean there? Well, maybe none. But I liked the look of Narkez (Fr), who gave his rivals a six-length walloping in the Prix Comrade last Tuesday, picking up where he left off after winning at Clairefontaine last October. Bred by Nurlan Bizakov under his Sumbe banner, the colt represents that magic Siyouni (Fr)-Galileo (Ire) cross, though...

We've been waiting so long for the proper Flat to start that it seems almost criminal to veer straight off to the other side of the world, but there was plenty of interest for breeders from this side at Rosehill in Sydney on Saturday morning.  One person who managed to stay awake past 2am to watch the highly impressive last-to-first romp of Post Impressionist (Ire) (Teofilo {Ire}) in the G3 N E Manion Cup was his breeder Henrietta Egan, who is based at Corduff Stud with her husband David.  Now...

Yes, I know. It's a bit early for this, isn't it? We usually have a strict No-Seven-Days rule until the week after the Brocklesby but this winter has dragged on and on and I just can't wait any longer. We have the small matter of the Cheltenham Festival to get through this week, and we'll be giving it our full attention, but as we have counted down the days to the 'The Roar' it has been impossible to ignore the sneaky French getting their Turf season underway with a couple...

So long has this column been disrupted by sales and travel that this final instalment for a Flat season that seems to have whizzed by faster than ever should perhaps be renamed 28 Days. That's not to say that we are giving you four times the value, however. The last week or so has been spent in California at the 40th running of the Breeders' Cup. Any racing event which draws some of the best racehorses from a variety of nations is a treat, and with its 14 Grade 1...

As we stand braced for five consecutive weekends of Group 1 action in France and Britain, it is a sign of course that the Flat season of 2023 is drawing to a close, albeit with a bang rather than a whimper. As announced in the Racing Post on Sunday, these final skirmishes on the turf will also bring with them the ending of the longest-running family training dynasty in Britain when William Jarvis saddles his final runner after 38 years with a licence. You could say he was born to...

With a royal audience, Continuous (Jpn) became the seventh winner of the St Leger for Aidan O'Brien, relegating the King and Queen's runner Desert Hero (GB) to third, just as Pour Moi (Ire) had done in the Derby with Carlton House back in 2011 in front of the late Queen. There were plenty of strands to an enthralling St Leger that would have made for good storylines: two of those, victory for Desert Hero with his owners present on Town Moor, or a final British Classic for Frankie Dettori, may...

The Devil's Dyke stretches in pretty much a straight line for more than seven miles through parts of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. The best part, according to this scribbler anyway, is the section roughly a mile and half long which cleaves Newmarket's July Course from the Rowley Mile, with a break in the dyke allowing the two courses to join briefly just beyond the ten-furlong mark on the latter. A Dutch author, Iman Jacob Wilkens, once claimed that Cambridge's Gog Magog Hills was the true location of the City of Troy,...

The Tattersalls Somerville Sale has meant that a return to Newmarket could be delayed no longer but this column sprang, or perhaps staggered, into life on the final day of Baden-Baden's Grosse Woche. The scribbling started reasonably early on Sunday morning from a desk in the press room that boasts one of the best views in the racing world, looking out across the turf to the wooded mountains of the Black Forest. It was also the desk that was once occupied by British-born but German-based racing correspondent David Connolly-Smith, who...

It's the time of year which most trainers must dread as they juggle spending time in their yards and at the races with attending yearling sales here, there and everywhere. One who will doubtless be patrolling the sales grounds of Doncaster and Baden-Baden this week with an extra pep in his step is Ralph Beckett. Marc Chan, one of Beckett's principal owners, had four runners in the past week and all four won. Even more remarkably, three of those victories came in stakes contests on the same day at three...