Pixie finished 8th of 18 yesterday, again beaten just four lengths so very frustrating. She ran correctly and had a decent finish, but got boxed in when it was time to accelerate. There was a hole near the end, but she didn’t have enough in the tank to take it and at best it would have left her 5th. To make matters worse, she hurt herself in the truck on the way to the track, breaking through the door that separates the stall from the back part of the two-horse vehicle. I debated scratching her, but it was essentially superficial, so I decided to go ahead. It was the sort of injury that will prove more problematic in the days after than the day of  – she scraped the front of her left fetlock. As I expected, today it’s pretty sore, but I don’t think it affected her run. I am, however, extremely unhappy with the transport company because that sort of accident should not happen and I won’t be using them again. To add injury to insult, I got knocked in the eye with Pixie’s knee while I was trying to treat her leg and she snatched it up too quickly for me to get out of the way. Now poor Tim has to put up with all the bad husband jokes prompted by black eyes. (It’s not the first time; my mare Well Done Clare smacked me in the head a few years ago and I looked like Rocky for a good couple of weeks.)

It’s been a very disappointing and frustrating August, with horses just not quite getting the job done. I’m trying to keep optimistic for September, when we have more chances to come. Hard Way and Skid are entered for next week, so we have to look ahead.

Pixie’s been on the Guinness diet this week, a little extra motivation for her to down those oats mixed with special herbs to handle her ever-present female problems. She seems to be in good form for tomorrow. We’re considered an outsider by the Paris Turf, and who can blame them. This horse has been an exercise in frustration for us as well as the betting public. As usual, if she want to, she can win. If not…well, John has already given us the excuse of a right-handed track, and he may well be right. She’s been better left handed. But we’re stuck, at the moment, because it’s all right-handed until mid-September, so she’ll have to do her best.

This will be our last runner in Deauville for the summer season. I had really hoped to have Tyke ready for the trainers’ race tomorrow, but it was not to be. He still isn’t there yet, so it would have been pointless to try to race. Ironically, the horse I had really wanted to ride in the race last year, Abwaab, will run this year ridden by his new trainer. Last year he had won just a little too much money so he no longer qualified. This year, he hasn’t topped 10,000 euros, so can run. Tyke would have been perfect – just under both the earnings and handicap level, but not ready. It’s frustrating, because it’s the only chance all year for trainers to actually ride a race. This means, of course, that I’ll have to stay fit and relatively thin for another year, in case the stars finally align and let me ride the damn race!

Skid will stay home tomorrow rather than go to Deauville to take his chance on the fibersand. I had really wanted to race him there, but his work on Sunday was really lacking spark, and it seems he’s just slightly off these past few days, so we’ll have to wait. I will see the results of a blood test to make sure nothing is amiss; it’s possible he’s just hit a slump for no particular reason. Pixie, on the other hand, worked better than I had expected so she will go ahead with her entry at Clairefontaine on Saturday. She will have another crack at the same course and distance as last time, but Nadege will be back on board, which I think will make a difference.

I took yesterday off to go to Pip’s funeral in Newmarket. He had many, many friends and the church was overflowing with a who’s-who of racing – even Lester Piggott was there. There was a reception after at Tattersalls, and it was very sad and strange to be there when no horses were being sold. But I suppose it was also the right place to toast Pip, since it was the last place many of us saw him alive and laughing. Apparently Pip was buried with his feed scoop because he was known for meticulously designing each horse’s individual diet while he was training. I don’t remember that, but I do remember that he fed five times a day and that he always had the best-looking carrot supply I’d ever seen.

We were reminded yesterday that Pip always quoted various hyms and poetry, and he used to wake his staff with this:

“Shake off thy sloth and joyful rise,

to pay thy morning sacrifice.”

My morning sloth only gets shaken off after two cups of hot, black coffee, and I don’t want to slide too much into amateurish philosophy. But these kinds of things do make you think about life, and the lesson I hope to take from it is to make sure I enjoy what I’m doing and have fun while it lasts, because you never know what’s around the next turn.

I have two dogs: Cocoa, a one-year-old Doberman, and the Professor, a 10-year-old basset hound. The more dangerous of the two by far is the basset. He doesn’t mean to be, but he has an attachment to food above and beyond that of even the most dedicated carnivore, which is something I should have remembered when I tried to save him from himself by confiscating the lamb chop bone he stole after the barbecue on Friday night. But no, I was too worried about the potential for his choking on a bone to think about the bones in my own hand. Forgetting for a moment that basset hounds are designed to bring down wild boar and have amazingly strong  jaws, I tried to wrest control of the lamb bone. In the process, the middle finger of my left hand found itself a victim of Prof’s jaws when he crunched down not once but twice, thinking he was still chewing the bone. He quickly realized his mistake and spit out the bone and my finger, but the damage was done. I do, of course, realize that you’re never supposed to do what I did; accidents, by definition are the result of a string of stupid decisions made too quickly.  We managed to stop the bleeding and wrap it up so I could sleep a bit and get back to work Saturday, but after riding two horses I realized that more attention was needed, and probably antibiotics, too. So off I went to the emergency room, only to be chastised by the doctor for not coming in sooner so he could have repaired the damage to the tendon. That made me immediately thankful I hadn’t come in sooner, because I’m sure the tendon will repair itself just fine. Just clean it out, wrap it up and give me the pills, please, I said. But he insisted on an x-ray, just to be sure. The x-ray showed various damage in several fingers, most of it old. “You’ve had fractures before?” he asked. I explained to him what I do for a living, and that if you x-rayed by feet and ribs, you’d find plenty of old fractures, too. Most of us who work with horses crack and break those bones without giving it much thought, and sometimes without even noticing. Doctors can’t do much to fix broken fingers, ribs and toes anyway, so why bother? For the moment, my bitten finger is taped to a splint, keeping me effectively off horseback until at least Tuesday, by which time I will have decided I’ve had enough of the splint and get rid of it.

Prof, meanwhile, has apologized profusly. Cocoa was just confused by the whole situation. We can give and take food away from her at will (something we trained her to do from the moment she arrived to avoid the same problems we’ve had with Prof, who came to use as an adult). Cocoa doesn’t realize she’s a Doberman, and all she wants to do is play, 24 hours a day. She doesn’t care who with. She happily ushers the UPS delivery man into the yard and shows him where to put the dog food we have delivered, whether or not we’re home. He just has to hope Prof is sleeping. He’s the real guard dog of the house.

My horses have had their share of issues with the starting gate, and Jennifer comments below with a valid point: Why don’t you just train them more in the gate? There are two schools of thought on gate training. The first, which has been mine until recently but I’m starting to rethink it, is that once the horse knows what the starting gate is, how it works and what it’s for, leave them alone and don’t bother with it when not racing. The second school is to take them to the gate very, very often, play with it, walk through it and take the stress out of it. There are positive and negative points to both approaches.

The starting gate is by nature a very stressful machine to a racehorse. First off, it’s extremely claustrophic for most horses – Pixie is the exception in my string. She thinks the gate is just fine, but she likes to be squeezed and confined because I’m convinced she is a bit autistic. She is much more comfortable in the gate than behind it. But most of them – in particular Tyke and Hard Way, can’t take the tight space. Because a thoroughbred is a high-stress animal anyway, and because we spend most of the time in our training trying to get them to relax and work comfortably, we usually avoid the gate. Also, every time a horse breaks out of a starting gate, an enormous stress is placed on their entire body, so you don’t want to go to the well too often. Let them break when they need to in a race, but otherwise leave them alone.

But the other school of thought on making the gate a normal part of training certainly has its merits. I think the Americans actually are doing something right here. They tend to do a lot of schooling around the gate, walking through and standing, but not necessarily breaking out. I’m starting to like that idea more, and I will probably start to do it with some of my horses. The frustrating thing is that things happen on race day that no amount of training can head off. Tyke, for example, has no issues with the starting gate in training. He just doesn’t like to be pushed around, which is exactly what happens when a gate crew has four minutes to load 20 horses. But once he’s blindfolded in that situation, he loads fine. (He doesn’t want to stand there very long, mind you, but he loads fine.) Pixie has no trouble, and neither does Turfani, who is happy to do whatever we ask. Hard Way loads fine, but will not stand. Skid stresses behind the gate but loads and stands fine.

In France, a horse doesn’t have to have a “gate card” or other approval to race, but I think we might be headed that way soon. Certain trainers are known for horses that are difficult to load, and twice now I’ve had trouble in the gate because my horses acted up while waiting too long for fractious horses behind them. It’s a tricky situation, the gate, and horses will always invent ways to cause trouble. The other day a two-year-old running for the first time decided he had stood long enough, sat down and crawled UNDER the front of the gate and ran off. A few months ago, a horse managed to turn himself around and face backward. Considering that, my gate problems aren’t so bad.

Yesterday in Deauville was one of the most frustrating I’ve had as a trainer. I brought two horses with good chances to win, and neither finished in the money. Turfani got badly jostled in the early stages so couldn’t keep position close enough to the leaders to let her take a place. She finished 7th and closing, running well but too late. That’s the problem in these 20-horse fields, especially on the 2,000-meter course at Deauville. There’s not much space going into the first turn and you can get shoved out. But Hard Way was even more frustrating. He drew post 15, so I didn’t ask for him to be loaded last because I thought it would go quick enough with only four horses to go once he was in. But it wasn’t quick enough, and he started fidgeting and panicking in the gate, so when it opened, he was in the process of sitting down against the back of the stall. By then, the rest of the field was gone. Hard Way jumped out straight into the air, causing Nadege to lose the stirrups in the process. She picked up the pedals just as Hard Way launched himself into the air a second time and then finally galloped on – 12 lengths behind the rest of the field. Nadege kept her head and didn’t press the issue, allowing him to gradually catch up. Then when they turned for home she asked him to go, and he closed to finish 11th – beaten 10 lengths by the winner, which means that if he hadn’t lost the 12 lengths at the start, there’s a good chance he would have won. Paris Turf gave him “best impression” of the race, which I like to call the Miss Congeniality award. You didn’t win, but damn, you gave it a hell of a shot and we all liked you. Both horses came home fine, which is essential, and Hard Way actually managed to ride in the truck to Deauville all by himself like a big boy, even though we had to let him loose in a double-wide stall to do it. So that’s something, anyway. One has to find the positives. Next up: Skid gets let loose on the fibersand in Deauville next Wednesday.

This week’s entries certainly did not go as I had hoped. I wanted to run Hard Way in the 2,400-meter second division of the Tierce in Clarefontaine on Tuesday, but he was eliminated, so I had him in a 2,000-meter handicap in Deauville on Wednesday as a backup – the same race in which I had entered Turfani. Since it will be a split handicap, I had hoped that Turfani would fall into the second half, so we could have a shot at winning two races. But no – when the final deadline passed this morning, we ended up in the same race. On top of it, the weather is turning against us. Beautiful, wonderful summer weather for everything you’d want to do, except race a horse that needs a little cut in the ground. Hard Way isn’t bothered one way or another, and he will race for sure, but Turfani doesn’t handle the heat and really needs it a little soft. Rain is forecast, but not until Thursday. The track crew told me yesterday they were watering, and friends staying there say there has been a humid fog hanging over the track every morning, but I’m not sure it’s enough for Turfani.

On the upside, both horses are in top form. Hard Way has gained a lot of muscle since his last race, and Turfani is squealing and jumping out of her skin. I still may scratch her at the last minute if it really looks too firm, but at the moment I would really like to take advantage of her good form. It’s a shame I can’t get a crack at two different races, so I guess we’ll have to settle for a dead heat.

Pixie had a pretty bad run yesterday, finishing back in the field in her handicap. I switched jockeys to an apprentice to get the weight allowance, but it turned out to be a bad idea. My instructions were to find cover behind the leaders and make sure you ride to the finish. Instead, he left her three wide for the entire trip with no cover at all, so she really over-extended herself before the home stretch. On top of it, he snatched her up about 150 meters from the post, then dropped his hands and cantered out.

Pixie hasn’t run with much spark this year in any case, which has been frustrating. We may give the same course and distance another try, with a jockey change again, at the end of the month.

Meanwhile, Hard Way was eliminated from his handicap on Tuesday so will run Wednesday in Deauville instead. He will go 2,000 meters rather than 2,400. I prefer the longer distance, but the Wednesday race is still good for him. Turfani is entered in the same race, but since it’s a split handicap, it looks like she will fall into the second division, which I prefer. She does need cut in the ground, though, so we won’t take her unless it rains a bit before Wednesday. Both horses seem to be in top form, so I hope they can both race.

Pixie’s Blue runs tomorrow at Clairefontaine, an 1,800-meter handicap with a new jockey, Erwan Bureller, up so that we can get the apprentice weight allowance. He claims a kilo and a half, which is important because otherwise we would have been top weight of 60 kilos in this race. Pixie has been working well, but I’m not really sure where we are with her – she ran pretty lackluster last time out and is hard to peg at home. The finishing post tomorrow will answer the question.

Hard Way and Turfani are on deck for next week, and both are doing well. Klutzy Tyke had his first canter back this morning, and worked well despite having knocked his leg and loosened a shoe the day before yesterday in his box. This horse is starting to make me afraid to open the stall door for fear of what I might find – and always with his same big dopey head saying “What? Don’t look at me. I don’t know what happened.” At least he’s pretty zen about it all.

I just got word last night that Pip Payne, a longtime friend of mine – and many, many others in the racing world – was found dead, apparently a suicide. Pip was one of the most optimistic, helpful and supportive people on the planet, and I can’t believe he’s not around any more. Not only was he indispensible for all of my horse-buying trips to Newmarket, but he was always available for a quick call for advice on any horsey subject. Of all the people I know, I can’t think of one least likcly to take his life. When I made the decision to switch careers and take up training full time, Pip was one of the few who said he had no doubt I could be a success. I bought one of my first horses from him when he was still training, and we kept in touch ever since. I just saw him four weeks ago at the July sales, when we had drinks with him, his wife and one of his three sons.  I stood next to him in the sales ring as I bid on Derringbay, a three-year-old gelding who, thanks to Pip, I paid way too much money for! We were laughing about it later, and now he won’t be around to see who gets the last laugh when – and if – this horse ever makes it back to the track.

I can’t imagine a trip back to Newmarket without seeing Pip, who was always ready with a joke, a beer and did things like have me paged over the public-address sytem at Tattersalls just to improve my name recognition. The town, and racing, will not ever be quite the same. I can’t imagine what personal demons he was fighting that pushed him to do this, but I hope he is now at peace.