Well, it’s all wrapped up in Dubai, and bloggers and journalists alike are lining up to take pot shots at Sheik Mo and complain about how this might change the Kentucky Derby lineup. But who among us wouldn’t kill for the chance to race on World Cup day if we had the right horse? The rich are easy targets, but when their money’s on the table there’s always a scramble to grab it. That’s not to say I haven’t taken my own shots at the good Sheik over the years, and I was especially disappointed at how he snatched Eastern Anthem and Gladiatorus back from Mubarak Bin Shafya to return them to the hapless Saeed, who seems to have, well let’s just say less than a Midas touch when it comes to horses. And yeah, it’s kind of not fair to put up your own stakes money so your own horses can win enough to qualify for the Kentucky Derby. Maybe better to do what brother Hamdan did, and come through the back door at Kempton. But hey, all that money rolls downhill, and those of us running handicaps and claimers instead of Group 1 races can be thankful that guys like Sheik Mo and the boys at Coolmore pour enough money racing to keep it ticking.

I’ve got a  little piece of the Sheik’s investment standing over in the yard in the form of Cape Tycoon, a four-year-old son of the Darley stallion Cape Cross. Cape Tycoon has been slow to bloom – he was bought at the Newmarket July sale last year after running some dismal races in England, but he was completely backward and needed to grow. We put him in Normandy for five months and he came back a huge, hairy beast, but he’s been back in training since January and is now really starting to show some promise. He galloped today with a speed I didn’t know he had, and he doesn’t seem to be bothered (so far, touch wood) by the horrible conformation of his knees. The French say “le sang ne ment pas,” or blood doesn’t lie. This horse has the best pedigree and the worst knees in the barn, but so far the pedigree is, thankfully, winning.

and slower than five. Turfani ran a respectable race today, finishing 6th of 18 runners over 2,000 meters on the soft turf at Fontainebleau. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised, because she was dead last around the turn, and just started to slowly pass horses on the long grind uphill. The first seven horses were eight lengths clear of the rest of the field, so she did well.

I had to change jockeys at the last minute; the apprentice I put up apparently had an accident this morning in Chantilly. His agent (he has an agent?) called me at 1:20 p.m. – that’s right, 1:20 p.m. – to say that oh, by the way, your jockey isn’t showing up today. The horse was already on the truck on her way to the track, and I had a moment of panic, because with 18 runners in an apprentice race, it’s safe to say that most of the apprentices on hand were taken. Luckily for me, there was also a lady jockey’s race, so I signed up Marie Flahault, who rode my first winner for me a few years ago. Marie did a fine job; she got a little too happy with her whip at the end, but since she’s such a tiny person she isn’t capable of hitting very hard, there was pretty much no harm done.

Turfani came home fine, so now we’ll see how she handles the next few days. She is a pretty high-stress mare, so I expect her to be off her feed for a bit, but we’ll see. And for those of you keeping score, this is a hay-oats (well Baileys) and water horse. No medication allowed, and I’m not tempted to use any. She gets OCD pellets every day for joint issues (a combination of glucosomine and corta-flex), plenty of carrots, apples and garlic, plus Bailey’s No. 10 racehorse mix. If all goes well, we can look for something in about three weeks for her.

This has nothing to do with racehorses, but a lot to do with life. Every now and then, a group of us that used to ride together at a riding club in Maisons-Laffitte get together for lunch. We’ve all gone separate ways since we met about 11 years ago, but we keep in touch. Among the group are Diana, who now owns Little Tommy and is basically my barn manager and also a tremendous equine nurse when needed, Michele, who just turned 71 and leads multi-day trail rides in between caring for his handicapped son, and Helen, who at 84 years old still rides every day and swims on the days she doesn’t ride. Helen is a force of nature who has a wicked sense of humor and has the good luck to still look damn good for a woman of that age.

When I first came to Maisons-Laffitte and was still in the early stages of learning to ride, it was Helen who took me out on the trails and looked after me. I was a hefty 180 pounds and quite a spectacle on the back of the poor horse (luckily, some of the French saddle breds are pretty sturdy) and Helen could ride circles around me. I remember one day in the middle of a rare heat wave we had been walking our horses for quite some time, probably to give me a break. “Let’s get trotting. My ass is hot from all this sitting,” Helen said as she rode off, with me in awkward pursuit.

If any of us have the luck to grow old with half the class and good form of Helen, we’ll be very, very fortunate. Helen’s 85th birthday is coming up in May, and she’s already planning on quite the party. And she’ll certainly start the day on the back of a horse.

Turfani will run Wednesday at Fontainebleau – she just made the field, No. 18 of 18. She will break out of the 16 hole (unlike in the States, the saddle-cloth number and post position have nothing to do with each other). She had a very pleasing last workout on Sunday. The race Wednesday is 2,000 meters and it’s the 7th of the day, post time 5:05 P.M. It hasn’t rained in ages (very strange for springtime in France, but after the winter we’ve had nothing suprises me) but the rain is forecast to come – all day on Wednesday. That could make for a slippery track, but Fontainebleau has a sandy base, so with a little luck and heavy rain early in the day, we should have nice soft going for our race without being too sloppy. She will be ridden by the same apprentice that debuted Hard Way, a nice kid who tries his best to follow orders. I will ask him to tuck her in the back of the pack (somehow I don’t think this will be a problem) and then wake her up a bit in the stretch and see what happens.

Kempton was fun, but now it’s time to concentrate on the horses at home. Turfani has an entry Wednesday at Fontainebleau; 24 have start declared and only 18 can run, so I’ll have to wait until final decs on Monday to see if we get in. I’m hoping, because it should be a nice easy comeback race for her, which is what she needs because she seems to be a bit fragile, mentally. Physically, she’s in good form, but she is definitely a little worried about what we might ask her to do. It’s clear she hasn’t enjoyed her racing much in the past, and she seems to be carrying some bad memories. The race Wednesday is 2,000 meters for apprentice jockeys, claiming for either 9,000 or 12,000 euros. They don’t get easier than that in the Paris region. She will run for a tag of 9,000.

Tommy, meanwhile, is still on target for his comeback at Longchamp; again, we’ll see once entries are in what the chances are of getting into the race. His target is also a claimer, but for 17,000 euros. I would prefer to run a handicap with him, but he’s been off the track for so long that he has lost his qualification and needs to run a claimer first. We should be safe – he hasn’t run since the autumn of 2007 so no one should even think about buying him.

The rest of the guys are coming along fine, so now it’s just training ahead patiently until they say they’re ready.

Just got back from a sort of surrealistic night at Kempton racecourse, where Mafaaz won a perfectly scripted inaugural Kentucky Derby Challenge Stakes. Plastic American flags were being passed out at the entrances, Woodford Reserve was kind enough to provide free (!) mint juleps, a taped trumpeted call to post was played before every race and a stand usually called Le Creperie was tarted up as The American Diner – although it was still serving crepes.

Most of the people I talked to weren’t all that interested in the Kentucky Derby, but they said they might pay some attention now that John Gosden says he plans to take Mafaaz stateside.  Mafaaz is owned by Sheikh Hamdan, Sheikh Mo’s brother. Interesting to see that the horse gets a guaranteed post position after only the second start of his life, while Sheikh Mo is busy buying top Derby candidates and shipping them all over the world to try to accomplish the same thing. Sort of takes family rivalry to a whole new level.

We’ll see if Mafaaz actually ends up in the Run for the Roses. Gosden said tonight that he plans to ship to the States soon to run the Bluegrass as a prep for the Derby. A suivre…and pass me another free mint julep please…

While horses on the U.S. side of the pond are pounding their way to the Kentucky Derby through a series of tough Group (ah, sorry, that’s Graded for you guys) races, there is a small back door in Europe that seems to be quite a bit easier. The Kentucky Derby Challenge Stakes will be run at Kempton Park  near London on Wednesday night, and the winner is assured a spot in the Run for the Roses. Whether the winner will choose to take up the challenge is another matter, but if he does (there are no fillies in on Wednesday), he will surely be the lowest money winner to line up for the Derby. The favorite has bankrolled a grand total of just 5,000 pounds, or $7,000, and the highest earner in the race is sitting at just under 43,000 pounds. Even with the first prize of just under 50,000 pounds on Wednesday, the winner is unlikely to approach the kind of cash his U.S. counterparts have to earn to snag a spot.

To be fair, a three-year-old in Europe has little chance to earn big purses in Group races before the summer. While Group/Graded stakes are available in the United States virtually all year long, the first Group race in Europe was just this past Saturday in France, and it was for four-year-olds and older. The first Group races for three-year-olds won’t happen until late April, way too late for a Derby prep.

It should be an interesting race Wednesday; I’ll be writing about it for the New York Times, and will also contribute to their Rail blog again this year. I’ll be talking to trainers at Kempton about what appeal the Kentucky Derby holds, and whether they would actually ship a horse over to run it.

Turfani and Tommy galloped this morning, and Turfani was much more pleasing this time around. Tommy was his usual lazy self, so we didn’t go all that fast, but it suited Turfani just fine after the tough time she had working with a sprinter last week. She got into her stride pretty well, and most importantly came back pleased instead of panicked. I’m now looking to enter at Fontainebleau for the 25th in a 2,000 meter claimer for apprentices and young  jockeys. The racing won’t get much easier than that, so she’ll just have to get on with it and see what happens. Tommy is going well, and should be ready by early April. Since he is very particular about the ground, the two best tracks for him will probably be Chantilly or Longchamp, and there is a nice race for him at Longchamp on April 9, so that’s our target. It’s still too far off to get excited, and anything could happen, but at least the horses are working well enough to set some concrete goals now.

The planets must be aligned in some way that is drawing humans to horses for better and for worse. On the for better front, I see that my fellow blogger the Wind Gatherer has started taking riding lessons; coincidentally, I started giving riding lessons this week to my newest owner, Mark Tronco. Wind Gatherer is already jumping, so he’s a little ahead of Mark, but I can see progress will come quickly because Mark is a runner and a boxer, and that athleticism really helps in riding.

On the for worse front comes news from Chicago that somebody at Hawthorne Park was stupid enough to allow two overweight (and that’s the best I can say for them from the photo I saw) morning disk jockeys race each other, apparently thinking it was safe enough if they put these  guys on the “pony” horses instead of actual racing stock. (And apparently neither they nor the reporter from the Sun Times knows the difference, but that’s a separate problem.) Neither one of these guys knew anything about riding, so why they thought this would be a fun promotional stunt is beyond me. One of them, unable to stop his horse (surprise!) decided it would be better to jump off. This would be Darwinian except that he managed to survive the fall. He was, however, just smart enough to regret the whole thing and realize how stupid an idea it was.

It’s really amazing what horses will put up with, and what stupid humans will subject them to. Riding around on horses seems to be such a primordal part of human evolution that we forget that it is a privilege, not a right. Horses put up with us because we have developed a somewhat symbiotic relationship, with the horse usually getting the short end of the stick. Those two yobs in Chicago had no right to climb up on those animals.

Mark and the Wind Gatherer are doing it the right way: Find a kind schoolmaster, take some lessons and earn the privilege of working with the most noble of animals.

Skid’s back, now gelded and showing not much awareness that anything is different, which is good. Everybody else is training on, slowly edging toward a race. The season has started in the Paris area, with opening day at St. Cloud on Saturday and Auteuil getting under way last week, so I’m itching to have a runner. But the winter set training back, and it looks like I’ll have to be patient a while longer.

Turfani was entered for Deauville on Thursday, but her workout Sunday was a little less impressive than I wanted to see, so I’ll wait another couple of weeks with her. She will still probably be the first runner of spring, probably near the end of the month. Tommy is nearly ready, but doesn’t go on soft ground, so there’s no point in rushing. Hard Way thinks he’s ready but won’t be for a bit, probably mid-April. Tyke is coming along well, but he’s such a big horse it will still take more time to get him up to speed. I don’t think he’ll be ready until the end of April.

The nice part is that I can see progress, and April should be an interesting month.