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.