Author: grarick

Our spring season has been made considerably brighter by Deep Ocean’s untiring efforts and the revelation of Gorki Park, who has shown us he knows how to be a proper racehorse.

Deep ran 4th in the big handicap a week ago at Longchamp, showing he does have the ability to run competitively in tough company despite his heavy penalty in the handicap ratings. He may have another crack on May 18th over the 2,000-meter straight course here in Maisons-Laffitte, or he may wait a bit longer. At some point he’s likely to come off form a bit, because he’s been working hard and running great. The problem is he really can’t ever have much of a break, because he gets too fresh around the yard and turnout time isn’t an option given the state of his legs. He just has to keep training until he decides he doesn’t want to any more, and he seems quite far from that point. Horses with arthritis issues are like people – you can’t stop moving or you’ll stop permanently. In any case, he seems to be good spirits and happy to keep working, so we’ll keep working. His fourth place in the Tierce netted him another 6,690 euros and brought his career earnings to 105,000, making him our first horse to top 100,000 euros. (In all fairness, he already had 30,000 on the books when he came to me, so I can’t claim total credit.)

Gorki Park, meanwhile, confirmed his promising second place at Longchamp with a win at St. Cloud last Wednesday. He overcame a horrible draw and really gutted out the finish, because about 100 meters from home he looked like he might be beaten. But he fought to the wire with the second- and third-place finishers and managed to get his nose in front this time, beating a field of 19. The race was the second division of the Tierce, so he took home the winning prize of 15,000 plus the French-bred premium, taking the total purse to 24,600 euros. He came out of the race fine and I think he’ll probably do this again in the not too distance future. He picked up a 2.5 kilo penalty for the win, but I think he can still be successful off that mark.

The other horses are coming along, and we’ll have a few runners at the end of next week. Grey Falcon might test his wings again in Chantilly; he didn’t get off the ground last time out in Compiegne, but he’s a huge, late-developing horse and seemed to be going through a growth spurt (again!). He is improving steadily now and we should see something from him soon. Our new recruit Gold Knight is likely to have a go as well, and before long Eternal Gift will be back in action. His gelding went extremely well and he seems to have lost nothing (except some unnecessary bits).

Hard Way had a MRI scan last week to check on the status of his neck fracture. The news is mostly positive, in that the bones have healed in a way that will not compromise the spinal cord and all the fragments have fixed themselves in non-threatening places. He is having some arthritis in those vertabrae, though, and it remains to be seen how he handles training going forward. So far, it seems he definitely wants to race again (and soon, if he has anything to say about it), but we’ll have to wait until early June because he will be positive from the general anesthesia for five weeks.

And a bit of sad news on the home front: We lost our old basset hound, the Professor, last week to a combination of old age and heart failure. He was just shy of his 14th birthday, and he had a long and very good life. Coco the doberman is still not sure what to do with herself, since Prof was the head of the household and definitely told her what to do and when to do it. But she is adapting and I think we’ll be a one-dog house for the moment. We all do miss the crabby old man, though.

 

So here we are, again gearing up for my least-favorite race, the Tierce handicap (well, the Quinte handicap, actually). Deep Ocean has no choice since he jumped up the ratings with his two wins, so we have to run with much tougher competition now. We almost got lucky and made it into the second division, but in the end, we missed by one: He’ll be number 16 of 16 at Longchamp on Sunday, running for the big money.

Actually, he did very well the last time we were stuck in this position, just over two weeks ago at St. Cloud. He had nothing going for him: Left-handed track, heavy ground and a big, big step up on category. All that said, Deep always tries his best, and he finished 8th, beaten just two lengths and missing money by a head bob. Unfortunate, really, because he ran too well to get his handicap lowered and not quite well enough to make money. But he seems to be still in good form, so it’s not out of the question that he could make some money on Sunday. We have a good draw for once, breaking out of the 7 hole, and even better news is that our neighbor in stall 8 is a horse called Monofar, who tends to go to the front and set a good pace. If all goes well, we’ll just follow him and hope we get a good trip. It’s right-handed, he’s already run well at Longchamp and the ground should be to his liking. Fingers crossed he’s up for the run.

Gorki Park, meanwhile, ran a cracker the same week at Longchamp, finishing second by a nose-hair. He fought well to the end and confirmed he’ll be a useful little horse. I had thought he was coming into form, but his run at Amiens was so dismal I wasn’t sure what would happen at Longchamp. But a proper track rather than the potato field up north made all the difference, and he really distinguished himself. Hopefully, he’ll run at St. Cloud on May 1, but we’re not sure to get in. Start declarations are tomorrow and I’ll have a better idea then. He also holds a backup entry at Longchamp on May 2, but that race will be too hot, so we’ll have to find something else if we don’t make the cut in St. Cloud.

The rest of the yard is coming along, but needs a little more time. Grey Falcon has hit a growth spurt, which explains his horrible effort at Compiegne. Like a typical teenager, he’s sleeping all morning and incredibly uncoordinated. He’s starting to pull himself together, though, and by mid-May will be ready to be back at it. Eternal Gift is now a gelding, a fact that doesn’t seem to bother him one way or another. He’s been trail-riding with Hard Way as a way to keep his form up, and he won’t be delayed for too long, I don’t think. Hard Way, on the other hand, seems to be having a bit of an issue, and I suspect one of the fragments from his neck fracture may have shifted. So unfortunately, instead of running his comeback race next Saturday we’ll have to wait. He’s going in for an MRI scan on Tuesday, which will shed some light on whether this could be a serious problem or not.

Gold Knight is progressing very well and still has May 17 as a target, although he may well be ready before then. We’ll see. And King Driver and Not Bad for a Boy are just about ready to come in from pretraining and get down to serious work. Bring on summer!

In our last episode, Deep Ocean was going to try for a second straight victory in Lyon, but he ended up in the first division of the race, which I thought might be harder to win. It wasn’t. He won, and won well. The handicappers at France Galop were not amused. They walloped him with a four-kilo bump in his rating, sending him up to 34.5 and effectively ending our chances to win again soon. With that rating, and the amount of money he’s earned so far this year, we have two choices: Claiming races, which are off the table because the owners don’t want to risk losing him, and Tierce handicaps, which are fiercely competitive and damn-near impossible to win.

The plan after Lyon was to keep him ticking over and run the Tierce handicap at Longchamp on April 28. Deep doesn’t have the best legs in the world, and he was pretty stiff for a few days after his last race. But that was only for a few days. After a week, I could hardly hold him in the morning, and he clearly did not understand that there wasn’t a race around the corner. So we had a change of plans, and he now will run the Tierce at St. Cloud on Tuesday instead of waiting for Longchamp (which he will probably run, too). I’d love to give him a bit of a break as a reward for recent efforts, but he’s not interested, so we’ll kick on.

Deep is better right-handed than left-handed, and St. Cloud is a left-handed track. He’s also better on the fibersand than on turf, and St. Cloud is turf. He’s gone up seven kilos in the handicaps in the past month, and he’s running against company that should easily outclass him on Tuesday. But he doesn’t know that, and he will try his best, as he always does. His owners have been fantastic, and they’re just happy to be racing at this level, so they understand if he doesn’t bring home money this time. I hope. It’s pretty easy to get a little spoiled with a horse like Deep.

As for the rest of the yard, we have some work to do to get everybody else up to speed. Grey Falcon ran yesterday at Compiegne and it went pretty dismally. He’s not back to form yet from Cagnes, but we need to get his handicap rating down a bit so we went for a grass gallop. The only thing is, I had a tough time find a jockey so I put up an unknown apprentice. The Falcon was running his first race on a track that wasn’t flat. Compiegne is on a hill; the backstretch goes down and the home stretch goes up, and the ground was – well, hard to say what it was. Horses were sinking in and kicking up huge divets, but the ground was dry so it was like galloping in a grass-covered sandbox. The Falcon bowled down the hill with the poor kid hanging on for dear life. He really needed steadying up and collecting a bit, but he got no help from the saddle and when he changed leads in the stretch the kid very nearly fell off. He quickly dropped his hands in surrender and practically trotted over the finish line. Grey Falcon, for his part, tried his best but manged to strike into himself on both front legs just below the knee galloping like a rabbit in the bad ground. He’s feeling pretty sorry for himself today (although that didn’t stop him from eating). He’ll be fine in the long run, but he needs more back muscle so he can carry his big frame properly. He’ll come to form in a couple of weeks, I think, and then we can look for more from him.

Eternal Gift ran decently at St. Cloud last week over a mile, but the distance was probably a little too long and we’re going to finally accept the fact that he really needs to be a gelding if he’s going to be an effective racehorse. He’s scheduled for the equipment change on Wednesday, and if all goes well he’ll be back to racing in about two months. He won’t really lose too much training time if we don’t have any complications from the surgery.

Gorki Park will run Thursday at Longchamp if we’re not eliminated. We’ll know tomorrow whether we make the cut. He’s working well and will definitely appreciate Longchamp more than Amiens. The race is likely to be split into two divisions, and if that happens, we should have a good chance. He hasn’t done too much so far, but I like this little horse, and I do think he’ll start to hit the money soon.

Hard Way is on the comeback trail and training well, and his target remains May 4 at St. Cloud in the same race he won last year. He has all-American owners, and we like to keep busy on the first Saturday in May!

Lastly, a big welcome to our new addition Gold Knight, who I claimed yesterday for Foxtrot Racing, a partnership in England. He’s a lovely little horse, and I think we’ll have a lot of fun with him in the coming months. He has 9 places from 13 runs, so he’s a useful horse. Once he settles in, he’ll be one to watch.

Deep Ocean is heading back to Lyon tomorrow to try to do the near-impossible: Win a second handicap in a row. He went up three kilos in the handicap after winning on Feb. 27, and he’ll run the same course and distance tomorrow. He likes Lyon (at least one of us does), but I had hoped he would fall into the second division, where he would stand a good chance to win again, despite the weight penalty. But we ended up in the first division, which makes things quite a bit harder. On paper, he should be fourth, but I hope he can do better than that. He is feeling in top form, so we have to hope for the best. Antoine Hamelin gets the ride this time because Fabien has other commitments in Chantilly.

It would be nice of Deep could develop an affinity for a track a little closer to home. I’m really not looking forward to tomorrow12 hours of which will be spent driving a horse box. Thankfully, somebody invented Red Bull. The stuff is evil and probably bad for your health in ways they haven’t even discovered yet, but I do find it extremely useful in extreme situations. In any case, the truck has four new tires, so we’ve got that going for us.

After Deep, our next runner will be Eternal Gift on Sunday in Amiens. This race was supposed to happen last week but got canceled because of the blizzard. Unfortunately, France Galop reopened the entries, so the race doesn’t play out nearly as sweet as it did the first time. We’ll see the final start list on Friday and have a better assessment of our chances then. I haven’t run Eternal on the turf yet, but I doubt soft ground is going to be to his liking and I’m still not sure he’s all that effective at a mile. It’s all still a learning experience with him. Gorki Park also will discover Amiens, but not until next week. His entry in the maiden there is looking pretty good, and he has started to pick up the weight he lost coming back from Cagnes.

Grey Falcon also is putting weight and muscle back on, and he is likely to tackle a handicap in Compiegne on April 6. Hard Way is coming along, too, and hopefully will be ready to defend his title at St. Cloud on the first Saturday in May, a date that has some significance for the Americans in our crowd.

King Driver has moved to Xavier Richard’s pre-training yard in Normandy, where he joins Not Bad for a Boy, our new recruit from England. Hopefully, the two of them will be back in Maisons-Laffitte in two months or so. They’ve both had a few months off, so need to build some muscle before taking on more serious training.

We’ve had some unfortunately news for Magical Flower, who injured her suspensory tendon in Cagnes. The problem is very minor, but a tendon is a tendon, and she can’t train for four months or so. Given that diagnosis, we’ll now be looking to place her as a brood mare because her pedigree is quite nice, she has good size and conformation and is now a winner, so she does have breeding value.

Santarini, meanwhile, is convalescing down south and we hope to have her back in two months or so. Meanwhile, off to Lyon…

Deep Ocean made our stopover in Lyon on the way home from Cagnes worth it, winning his handicap by three lengths. It was a great evening’s racing, because his owners came down and were dressed for the photo, so good thing Deep delivered. I was pretty sure he would – he was feeling great in Cagnes and he loves the right-handed track in Lyon.

He picked up three kilos in the handicap, which puts him back to a rating of 30.5, which stymied us for much of last year. But he feels better to me this year, and while we won’t get too much further off that rating, I think he can do well again in the same type of race, back in Lyon, on March 21, which will be his next target. After that, we’ll have to work at getting the mark back down, but we’ll do what we can while he feels good.

Deep is all heart and is a solid ball of muscle, but he is full of arthritis. I think that’s why he loves Cagnes – six weeks of sun and a dry climate to take him out of the winter does him a world of good, and he usually comes off his annual “spa treatment” in good shape. We should get a couple of more good races before he’ll probably slack off a bit in form.

The rest of the yard has made it back fine. Grey Falcon and Gorki Park need to put on a bit of weight, and Magical Flower still hasn’t bounced back 100 percent, but I’m hoping she will in the next few days, because she has a very good entry in Chantilly next week. Gorki will wait until the end of the month and Grey Falcon doesn’t have a target yet. We’ll wait until he puts back on some muscle before we start to look at entries.

Eternal Gift is likely to run next week in Amiens, and Hard Way came back to the yard on Saturday in very good shape for a horse that’s been sitting around watching the grass grow for seven weeks. He won’t take too long to get back into racing shape.

We’ve got a few other horses scattered around the country in either pre-training or on vacation, so we’ll have to get that sorted over the next month and build the team for spring and summer. And thanks to Adele, for that cool song about Deep.

Where do I start? We finished the Cagnes season with a win, six places and just over 22,000 euros in prize money, so it was a success. We would have liked to find the winner’s circle a few more times, but most of the horses ran well and they’ll be far ahead in their training for the spring races around Paris. Alongside the racing, there were plenty of episodes of  “As the Stable Turns” playing out on the sidelines.

Who would’ve thought two months ago that Magical Flower would be the star of the show? She was placed twice and then won in her three starts here, and she won in a way I never would have believed: lapping the field from behind in a 1,300-meter sprint. She’s been having a bit of a break since and is likely to try to do the same back in Deauville on March 15, although she’ll have to go 1,500 meters. She is incredibly well placed in the handicaps, still rated 25.5.

Deep Ocean will run in Lyon on Wednesday on the way home, and he should have a very good chance to win. There were only two races for him here in Cagnes, and he was second once and unplaced in the other, for my part more due to jockey error than anything else. Deep seems to love Cagnes – he’s practically changed into a summer coat and feels better than I’ve ever had him in the morning, so we’ll see what happens in Lyon, where he has already won once before.

Eternal Gift ran a couple of places and then got lazy, so we’ll have to do some fine-tuning to wake him up. He needs, of course, the ultimate equipment change, but I really don’t want to stop and geld him now if I can avoid it. We haven’t gone to blinkers yet, and I’ll be making some changes to his morning routine once we get back to Maisons-Laffitte.

Grey Falcon has been slightly disappointing, but I’m confident we’ll get him on track. When he came last year, he was hugely overweight and unfit. Now he’s gone too far the other direction, and is looking very much like a greyhound. He’ll need to build up a bit of muscle and put some weight back on now before he’s at his best, but he’ll get there this spring. We’re still finding his best distance, too.

The baby of the team, Gorki Park, is improving well and opened his bank account with a fourth place in the three-year-old handicap on closing day. He beat some nice horses and will be better running on the turf than the fibersand. He’s still growing and building back muscle, so I think he could be a fun horse this spring.

Santarini came out of her race with a bone chip in her left knee, which explains her bad performance. She went for arthroscopic surgery at the clinic here last week. It went well, except for the fact that they operated on the wrong leg. I’m not making this up. When the vet called after the surgery, he explained that they had found quite a bit of arthritis, which they hadn’t seen in the x-ray, and a chip or two. Not surprising that they hadn’t seen the arthritis in the x-ray, since we didn’t take any of that knee. Well, what’s done is done, and I have no doubt that her right knee probably wasn’t in great shape. In any case, they’re going to operate on the left one tomorrow, so when she’s finished, we’ll have two repaired knees for the price of one. To ease the trauma of what she’s already gone through, we found a convalescent stable near Cagnes, so she will not have to make the trip home for now.

Blue Lilac has been disappointing and clearly has some issues, so she is moving to another trainer in the area. She’ll need a few weeks of rest, I think, and then maybe she can tackle some of the easier races in the South. Paris-area racing would be too tough for her, so we wish her well down here.

The team leaves for the North on Wednesday morning; we’ll stop and race Deep in Lyon, and then head home to Maisons-Laffitte. It’s been cold and raining in Cagnes for two days, which makes is slightly easier to leave, even though it’s freezing where we’re going. For most of the meeting, the weather has been wonderful, and the sun has been good for all of us.

We’ve had a great time, and there are plenty of stories to tell. I would’ve been telling them here, except that my computer blew up about two weeks ago and I’ve been a bit stuck since. For the moment, I’ve commandeered the computer of my assistant, Agata, and I’ve only figured out how to long in to my blog today. The computer speaks Polish sometimes, and French sometimes, and Tim has managed to get the keyboard to speak English, so I can type even though none of the labels on the keys match up to what I’m typing (which is fine with me – there’s no logic to a French keyboard).

So perhaps I’ll dredge up a story or two of Cagnes in the coming days. Maybe the one about the singing trotters, or the skiing, or the stripper (not my idea), or the wheelbarrow wars. Maybe.

We’ve had three more places since the last post, but we’re still looking for our first victory down here in Cagnes. Magical Flower ran fourth twice and Deep Ocean finished second. Magic is running well, and with a little luck she just might hit the winner’s circle here. Today she got stuck making the running again, which wasn’t necessarily the plan after she fought so well from midfield last time out. But we had a low inside draw, and from that post you either need to gun it early or get swallowed by the wave of horses coming over from the outside. I much preferred the way she ran last time, when she actually fought to pass horses in the stretch, something we’d never seen her do before. In any case, she’ll have a couple of more chances down here. She seems to like the weather and the track (as do we all) and she’s taking her racing well.

Deep only got beat a half-length last week, which was frustrating because I thought he might win. He runs better right-handed and didn’t change leads in the stretch like he should have, which made the difference. He’ll have another shot next Wednesday, but it won’t be quite as easy of a race. In any case, he always tries his best.

Eternal Gift will be our next runner when he makes a road trip to Marseille on Monday. I didn’t like the choices for him here in Cagnes, where he either would have had to run against older horses or run on the turf, so we’ll take our chances up the road in a condition race.

Gorki Park, Grey Falcon, Blue Lilac and Santarini all have yet to hit the board, but they’ll have chances soon, I hope. Gorki ran badly on Monday, and I’m not sure why. He didn’t have the same action as he did in his first two times out, but I can’t find anything too wrong with him. His shins may be bothering him just a bit again, but I don’t think it’s serious. Grey Falcon got a bad ride last time out and will have another chance next week. Blue Lilac hasn’t show much so far, but we’ll give her another couple of shots, too, and Santarini desperately needs to get into a race – she’s been eliminated twice now. We’ll try to get Blue and her into the same race on Feb. 9 and go from there.

Meanwhile, the carnival atmosphere behind the scenes continues apace. The usual gathering at “Joe’s Bar” – tack room by day, debauchery by night – takes place every evening after stable time. The cantine is doing a brisk business and the Concorde is never empty. My staff is living in relative squalor in the lad’s rooms above the boxes, but they seem to like it in a strange way. Their room looks like a cross between Animal House and a trailer park after a tornado – not the least because the apprentice jockey from the English team seems to have moved in with them.

I, on the other hand, am living in relative luxury in my tiny studio in the Afasec building. The final bend of the main track is right outside my window, and the pull-out sofa bed is barely bigger than a glorified twin – OK for me, but not sure what will happen when Tim comes in a couple of weeks. That said, my bathroom is big, very warm and usually with hot water, which is far, far more than I can say about the staff accommodations. I’ve also got WiFi, which is indispensable. Andrew, who rents a far more lavish apartment in the Baie des Anges, does not have WiFi, so sometimes I find him sitting outside my door piggy-backing on mine.

My car has become the communal shuttle, so I have to make sure I keep track of who has it and where the keys might be at any given time. Everyone is more than willing to help out everyone else, sometimes in the strangest situations. The other night, Agata and Natalie found themselves rounding up a horse that decided to have an after-midnight tour around the stabling area. Once they caught the horse, they looked everywhere for the empty box it might have come from but found only fully occupied quarters. They found an empty box in the trotter barn and parked the horse there, told security about it (they were in their booth at the front gate, blissfully oblivious that anything had happened) and went back to bed. They checked back the next morning and found a trotter in the trotter box, so where the thoroughbred they had parked there the night before went was anyone’s guess.

Luckily, none of our horses are escape artists; their boxes are outside of the main stabling enclosure, so if one got loose, who knows where we’d find it. That said, since we are right across from the grain depot, perhaps we wouldn’t have far to look. Santarini is the most likely candidate for an accidental escape. There is a hook on the front of her door that she loves to play with, and she can also reach the light switch on the wall outside. More than once I’ve gone back for a late-night check to find her trying to sleep under fluorescent lighting. If only we could teach her to turn it off herself.

First off, Eternal Gift finished fourth yesterday, so our first runner here was in the frame. He should have finished a bit better, but our jockey made two tactical errors: He gunned to the front when he didn’t need to, and he decided to stay glued to the rail for his stretch run, when most people know the rail is mortal on an all-weather track. The ground there is dead, and winners do not come on the rail. Our jockey admitted as much after the race. Eternal was last off the bridle and he ran a great race. He should have been at least in the first three, but we’ll have to fight another day. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about some of the really good people you meet when you come to this meeting.

We were given six boxes for the meet, but ended up oversubscribed by one since Magical Flower earned a place on the team by actually lifting a hoof for the first time ever in finishing fourth in Deauville. It would have been a shame to stop there, so here she is. Since Blue Lilac was the last horse on the bus, she drew the overflow box in the trotter barn next door. She loves it there, and frankly, so do we.

The barn is a dismal place; the boxes are small and pre-fabricated. A good wind would flatten the place. But it boasts the most welcoming ambiance on the backstretch. Our neighbor is a trotting trainer called Gerald, who promptly loaned us a wheelbarrow, fork and broom and said to ask for  whatever else we might need. Like many trotter guys, he’s a salt-of-the-earth type. When I came to feed our horse today, he was repairing a mud-flap for his sulky by cutting apart a plastic bucket and nailing it into place. He has three runners tomorrow, and couldn’t find a replacement on short notice. Around us, the rain was pelting down; it is not supposed to stop until Monday. I realize that with everything north of us in a deep freeze, we have no reason to complain in relative tropical splendor. But Cagnes-sur-Mer rests in a bowl at the bottom of the alps, and when it rains, the water collects in the most logical place: The racecourse. So after we trudged in rubber boots through night stable duties, I took the girls for a drink in the cantine – a time-honored Cagnes tradition. Gerald walked in, and we asked him to join us.

Turns out it was Gerald’s birthday. I don’t know which one – it wouldn’t have been polite to ask, but I’d say he’d be in his upper 60s. We got to talking about how he got into the trotter business, and he had a very inspirational story to tell. He grew up in a farming family in the west of France but suffered from depression. When he was in his 40s, he had what he called a “serious accident.” Given his disfigured face, I assume it may have been a suicide attempt, but again, one doesn’t ask details. He said he started riding horses as part of his recovery. He rode gallopers first, but then got interested in trotters. One thing led to another, as these things often do, and Gerald started training, first for himself, and then for clients. A few years back, lightning struck: He came upon a horse called Risque Tout, who has since earned nearly a million euros racing. He now has about 80 horses on his farm in the West, and he brought seven here for the meeting.

He has three runners tomorrow, and we’ll be cheering him on. It’s always an inspiration to meet another person passionate about horses, whatever the discipline. It seems we could learn a bit from Gerald. In any case, Blue Lilac is happy over there. We’re hoping she learns something, too.

 

 

 

We’ve shipped just about everybody to Cagnes, and just in time – snow and freezing cold have moved into the Paris region, and we’re down here in much more reasonable weather. We haven’t yet seen as much sun as Cagnes is known for, but it’s promised tomorrow. Even when it’s cold here, it’s a dry cold, which makes it so much more supportable. All the horses arrived safely yesterday, and there has been the usual chaos settling them in and staking out our places, sweeping, organizing and setting things up. Only Blue Lilac was left behind, but I’ve managed to find another box, so she’ll ship down Thursday night.

Natalie and Agata were quite nervous about the first day out (Agata’s first words to me upon seeing the mix of trotters and gallopers on the track: “We’re all going to die here.”) But they found the courage to tackle it this morning, and we rode out with not too much trouble. I took Deep Ocean as the schoolmaster, and I can’t wait to race him. He knows exactly where he is (he got the same box he had last year, too) and seems raring to go. He’s already changing his coat and pranced out on the track like he owned it. Gorki Park is a bit fizzy and isn’t sure what is happening, and even Eternal Gift was a bit more on his toes than usual. Second lot consisted of Grey Falcon, Santarini and Magical Flower. None of them were thrilled with the passing sulkies, but none caused too much trouble, either.

Our first runners will be Friday, with Eternal Gift in the 1,300-meter handicap and Santarini making her debut for us in a 2,000-meter claimer. Eternal’s entry looks quite promising, and he should do well. Santarini was running shorter distances in England, but I think she’ll stay the trip. In any case, she will need the race because she’s been off for more than two months now. It will be interesting to see how she handles it, but I think she’ll do better her second time out.

The overall carnival atmosphere is picking up as all of the last horses arrive; the cantine is packed after night stable, the stable lads have set up “Joe’s Bar” in a saddle room and the Concorde is doing a brisk business in pizza and mojitos across the street. I managed to abstain since arriving Sunday night, but the English trainers hooked me into a couple of beers tonight. I did duck out before the party moved to the Concorde, though. I’ll save that for after racing.