Into August
A glorious week at Goodwood and so nice to catch up with loads of Surrey Racing owners who were in attendance. From what we heard and saw, a fair amount of them went home with more money than they came with, some cracking punting! Well done for the competition organisers as well, with the top Surrey Racing award going to Barnsley Boy Chris G.
We may be going racing this week with Surrey Shadow who could be heading to Haydock on Saturday, but he does need some soft in the going description, which is currently good to firm, there are some showers forecast but maybe not enough. There are two possible races there, both class 3 (0-95) handicaps, one over 7 furlongs and the other over a mile, we’ll see what Tom is thinking with entries tomorrow.
There is some good and bad news regarding stablemate Surrey Moon. The good news is that he has been on a sustained growth spurt over the past few months and is no longer the small cheap horse we bought a year ago. However, because the growth spurt has been over a shorter period, he is experiencing growing pains in the form of juvenile tendonitis and so will on the easy list for the next few weeks. It won’t give him any longer-term issues, but it will put his racecourse debut back into the Autumn. Some trainers are known to just push on, but we wish to be patient as he is developing into a nice horse.
Surrey Etoile and Surrey King are tipping along and hopefully heading for October debuts.
Surrey Fire has been a little off colour this week so will see how he is next week, but he wasn’t blowing after his last run and if he’s feeling ok within himself can look to run again soon. Hughie thought that he could have been holding himself back because of the firm ground, and it was worth trying a run on the soft (as Oisin Murphy suggested) to see if that emits any change of attitude. We will discuss options with him again early next week and reach out to the owners.
Surrey Quest, Sea Presenting and Surrey Lord have all completed a month of road work/trotting and will now start cantering through August to get their foundation fitness before the faster work in September leading to their seasonal reappearance late September/early October.
For those at Goodwood on Thursday, there was the unbelievable sight of so much rain falling in such a short space of time. The ground description changed from good to firm to heavy and led to a multitude of non-runners. However, Friday saw the going almost back to good as the parched ground soaked all the water up. There is a concern that watering the courses is leading to dangerous conditions with a slippery soft top surface on top of a rock hard second surface, which possibly led to several serious injuries in the early part of the week. Trainers are fearful of this, as well as worried that come the Autumn, so many flat horses are going to be queuing up for a handful of races on the softer ground which is going to lead to some very competitive racing but may also leave many horses balloted out with nowhere to run. With further warm weather forecast for the next few weeks, there is also concern that NH racecourses, especially those who host flat racing in the summer, may struggle to have the tracks ready for the start of the season because of the added risk of how two-tier ground affects take-off and landing areas. The BHA as usual have their heads in the sand over the next few months!