Category: Updates from the yard

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.

We’ll start our year off with a couple of runners in Deauville, but the focus is really shifting toward Cagnes sur Mer, which starts on Jan. 15. Gorki Park will have his second run tomorrow in Deauville in a 1,500-meter maiden. The distance will be too short for him, but he needs another lesson before he heads south. There is a better race for him in Deauville on Jan. 12, at 1,900 meters, but then he’d have to truck south in the next day or two, and that is too much stress for a young horse. So he’ll have a schooling session tomorrow instead.

Magical Flower will run Saturday in a condition race that she has no business being in, but because she is barred from everything else, it’s that or nothing. She needs 3,000 euros in earnings over the past year to avoid being the first eliminated, and she is at 2,900 euros, which in Deauville is the kiss of death. There are 10 runners Saturday  – five deserve to be there, and five, like me, are hoping that one of the good horses is having an off day and that we can nose into 5th place to break the curse. Magic will soon head off to do some jump racing, but as long as she is here and working so well in the morning (as always), we might as well try to do something on the track, as futile as that effort might be.

After that, we hope to debut Blue Lilac and Santarini (who would be debuting for us, anyway), in claimers in Deauville on Jan. 12, the last chance before having to go south. If they get in, great, but if they don’t, they’ll go directly to Cagnes.

Deep Ocean and Hard Way, our two old stalwarts, both got eliminated in the handicap on Friday. Because it is a “Quinte” race divided into several divisions, priority entries don’t count, which leaves Hard Way out in the cold. It is extremely disappointing, because there is no other race for him now until spring, so I have to send him on vacation despite his being 100 percent ready to race. The program of winter racing in France defies all logic. With the exception of the one Quinte handicap, every other race is closed to horses who have won more than 20,000 euros last year except for claiming races. Since neither Deep nor Hard Way run claimers, we’ll have to wait. Deep, at least, can go to Cagnes, where there are races for him. Hard Way could go, too, except there isn’t a rider on the planet who would be able to hold onto him every day in training, so there’s no point in taking the risk. Instead, he’ll go to grass in Normandy for two months and come back in March.

The rest of the Cagnes line-up consists of Grey Falcon and Eternal Gift, who horses who could do very well down there. Grey Falcon has been the revelation, and I can’t wait to see him run again. Eternal has all the ability he needs to win a Quinte handicap, providing he can overcome his hormonal issues. He’ll have to be gelded at some point, but I really don’t want to stop for that now.

So we grit our teeth for a few more rainy trips to Deauville with the promise of sun in just two weeks. Not that I’m counting.

We had another somewhat successful day in Deauville on Christmas eve, with Eternal Gift running fourth in a “D” race, and acting like the horse I had hoped to see first time out. He is a very nice colt with plenty of speed, but he is a bit lazy, and I’d been telling him all week that unless he showed us something, he’d have a Christmas Day rendezvous with the vet to relieve him of the burden of manhood. Apparently, he got the message, because he did show us a bit of style on Monday. We’ll have to be careful with his handicap mark, and I’m not sure if he’ll run again in Deauville or go directly to Cagnes sur Mer.

Deep Ocean finished only fifth, squeaking into money in a race he should have won. It was very frustrating, but it turned out my worries about drawing the No. 1 gate hole were completely justified. It was a strange race, with five horses setting the pace in a line and then everyone lined up two-by-two, like a nightmare Noah’s arc, behind them. Deep found himself 20 lengths off the pace coming into the stretch, so he did remarkably well to take a check. It was really too bad he got such a bad trip, though, because he seems very in form at the moment. I would like to get him straight out again, but there is very little choice. The next really good race for him isn’t until the end of January in Cagnes, and I really don’t want to wait that long since he’s well now. So that means I may have to race him against Hard Way on Jan. 4 over a trip of 2,400 meters. He’s run that distance before, but he’s best at 2,000. Hard Way, on the other hand, is a specialist at the longer trip and I’d think Hard Way would certainly beat Deep; they are practically identical in the ratings so they’d carry the same weight, give or take a half kilo.

Magical Flower ran the gentleman rider’s handicap, and it was a predictable catastrophe. I couldn’t put up the rider I wanted because she had too light a weight, and I ended up with someone who couldn’t really do the job of getting her out front at any point in the race. So she did what she does, which is chat with her friends and stretch her legs a bit. I really do need to move her on, but since she’s here and fit, I’ll keep trying to get her into some sort of race before she goes off to do some jumping.

We should have a few more runners in Deauville before we head down to Cagnes. Hard Way, as mentioned, will run his handicap on Jan. 4 and they he is definitely off on vacation because he can’t go to Cagnes. Deep, I hope, gets in the same day, and Gorki Park is likely to have another go on Jan. 4, too. He’s entered in a 1,500-meter maiden that will be too short for him, but he needs another lesson before he goes to Cagnes. There is a better race for him in Deauville on Jan. 12, but he’ll have to take the transport south two days later, and I want to give him time to recover from his race before he gets the stress of the trip. There will be plenty for him to do down south, and I want him in top form for the task.

Blue Lilac also hopefully will debut soon, although the race I had targeted for her on Jan. 5 might be too hot and we may have to wait, yet again. Grey Falcon is in great form after his efforts, but I’ll probably keep him ticking over until Cagnes without another run in Deauville. That leaves Santarini, who should have one run for us in Deauville before Cagnes but I’m not sure if that will happen or not. She is a huge, huge filly, and it’s been a little difficult to get all the parts working together at the same time…and she’s also excluded from most races because she hasn’t won enough money AND she’s come from England, so she has two regulatory hurdles to overcome before we get a better choice of races. So once she’s right physically, I’m hoping the stars will align and we’ll get a race.

 

Grey Falcon has turned out to be a proper racehorse, but he almost didn’t get the chance to show us that yesterday. Less than two kilometers from the end of the autoroute in Deauville I thought gee, the truck seems to be handling a bit funny. Maybe it’s my imagination. Thirty seconds later and BAM, the right rear tire blew to pieces. I got us to the side of the road just next to an emergency call box and we jumped out in the pouring rain to call for help. The response? Someone will be there within two hours. I’ve never really been able to take “no” for an answer, and this situation was certainly no different. We had a half-hour at the maximum to get this tire changed and get to the track, which I explained, trying to stay calm and limit my use of profanity, to the emergency operator. He seemed to understand.  A half-hour, he said. Not good enough, I said. Fifteen minutes. Or perhaps our live cargo might find their way onto the highway to cause some serious damage. (An empty threat, of course, but he didn’t know that.)

Meanwhile, we started to attack the problem ourselves. We had two men in the truck, but the pathetic tool that passes for a jack was not going to get the job done. We had to wait. I had Pierre, who owned the other horse in the truck (and who would go off the favorite in the race) call and harass the tow-truck company. “They said they’re coming,” he said. “Call again,” I said. “Call every five minutes and tell them the horses are starting to kick the truck to pieces.”

The horses, mind you, couldn’t have been better. They didn’t move. I used the time to call the insurance company. “Ah. Sorry, we can’t help you just now. Everyone is at lunch.” “Really?” I said. “Well, I’m on the side of the road in the rain next to a truck with two horses in it trying to change a tire. Tell them bon-fucking-appetit!” I hung up. The tow truck came. After nearly amputating his fingers on the first try, he got the truck jacked up (he had a much more serious jack) and the tire changed. He looked at the spare. It was as bald as my friend Mark’s head. “You won’t get far with this,” he said, to which I replied: “It’s got air. That makes it better than what we had.”

With no help from the insurance side, Mark, luckily, had enough cash to pay the tow truck. Who needed, of course, to make sure all the paperwork was filled out. “Listen, I really don’t have time for this. Here’s the money, I’ll deal with the paper later, and bet on the horse because he’s going to win,” I said, giving him the name of Pierre’s horse. “What about the other one?” “He’ll be fifth,” I said.

We made it to the track in the nick of time, although the horses really didn’t seem to know or care. Grey Falcon is a calm sort, and he wasn’t fussed at all. It was only his third time out, and he still ran a bit green in the home stretch, but he tried hard and finished third of 15 runners, just beaten a nose for second and a half-length overall – by Bunook, his companion in the truck.

I chased around trying to get a new tire after the race, only to find out the wheel was broken, so there was no hope. I would have to get home on what we had. The rain was getting heavier. Don’t go too fast was the advice from the garage. “Don’t go too fast because we don’t have any tread, or because the tire will explode?” I asked. A little of both was the answer. We loaded up and set out. It was sheeting rain most of the way. I did my best to drive slow. Anyone who knows me will understand how difficult this is.

We all made it back in one piece, the horses in far better shape than the truck tires and all of us wet and tired. (Except the horses, who were dry as a bone and munching hay the whole time.)

Ah, it’s a glamorous profession. I hope those tow-truck guys got their bet in.

I’m blaming Facebook. And, to a much lesser extent, Twitter. I’ve gotten into the habit of posting short blurbs on all the stable news on Facebook, which is why this blog has laid fallow for so long. So let’s catch up.

The results, recently, have been good. The Deauville winter meeting is the usual horrendous mess of entries, with hundreds of horses entered for every handicap and dozens eliminated. We have had mixed luck getting a run, but the horses who have made the cut have run well. Hard Way was second, again, Magical Flower finally managed to take a check and Grey Falcon surprised us by running a cracker last week. Deep Ocean is sitting on a win, but sitting at home, because he was eliminated and now has to wait until Christmas Eve – and hope we get in. He seems in excellent form and it is getting increasingly difficult to hold onto him in the morning.

Surrey Storm, who we knew as Milly, ran a great second in Lyon in her swan song before going to the breeding stock sales in Deauville on Monday. She is now on her way to Ireland to have foals. We were very sorry to see her go, because she was a very tough little racehorse, but pleased that she should have a bright future as a brood mare. She deserved a break, in any case, after running an absolutely tough season with a win and six places from 15 starts. The little kid ran all over France, and made money at Cagnes sur Mer, Lyon, Lion d’Angers, Vichy and Longchamp. If her offspring are as tough as she is, they will be very interesting to watch.

Our new recruits from the Newmarket sales in October have settled in well. Eternal Gift will debut for us in Deauville on Friday, but we hope to get his handicap mark down before doing anything too serious with him. Our other purchase, Santarini, should run at the end of the month. And Gorki Park is finally going to make his debut, also in Deauville on Friday. The goal for all these horses is Cagnes, and we’ll all head south in mid-January. It can’t come soon enough. The deep freeze has started around Paris, and it’s always a challenge to train when you never know what the gallops will allow you to do from one day to the next. Luckily, everyone is fit and ready to race, so we only have to keep them ticking over on snow days.

Anyway, mea culpa for neglecting my blog for the three of you who still might be checking it. Facebook is evil, as we know, but it is a decent tool for communicating tidbits of yard news. I will try to be better about catching up here, too. All three of you deserve it!