It has been a while since I’ve seen Queen Anna come out of the boxes like she did on Sunday at Central Park. She was so consistent at breaking at Henlow and Towcester and then picked up ligament problems and hadn’t been herself.
But I have always liked her and Queen Adele and picked both of them out at 13 months old as future broods. Obviously, Adele’s path went a different route and she left the kennel but Anna has done everything I always expected of her. Hopefully she will be in season soon.
I couldn’t be happier with either her or Elvis going into Sunday’s Silver Salver semi finals and thankfully they are in different qualifiers. I would like to Elvis trap a bit quicker up against genuine sprinters but the fact that the track is so well prepared, with the bends banked, it means he can drive into them and keep racing.
I am considering taking Elvis to Poole for the Golden Crest. Ideally, I would like to get a trial into him but there isn’t enough time. I’ll make a decision in the next few days.
So its fingers crossed for Sunday. If I could guarantee that Lily Allen was doing all the presentations, you could have a win double on our pair now.
At least we have a name for one of the girls from the next litter – Queen Lily.
I was delighted with King Turbo’s trial at Nottingham on Monday – a 29.76 (+30) run for the 500 metres. He was left flat footed at the boxes on a 5.17 sectional, which I view as being about 17 spots slower than he should have done.
I have been accused of being a bit luke warm about going to Nottingham with him but there are reasons for it. For a start, when I have been there in the past, I have been critical of the hare driving. That was certainly not the case the other night, for my trial or any of the others. It was excellent.
Secondly, I blame myself for not being better organised. I used to think that because it was a big track, it was easy to run. But then I started to look at how other trainers prepared their dogs for Nottingham and I realised that it is a place where the dogs need a few runs to get it right.
So often good dogs are turned over by locals who know their way around and I won’t be making that mistake. So going forward I plan to be thorough in preparing my dogs there with trials and races every Monday.
I rate Pat Rosney as a great judge at Nottingham and he was very positive about Turbo’s trial and I expect he will have at least another two trials before we think about the race.
Overall, I am delighted to have the chance to run Turbo in the Derby and owe a big debt of thanks to Rachel Corden for changing the rules. I think Nottingham will host a superb Derby.
We are on a bit of a high at the moment because I handslipped King Sheeran and King Lennon at Central Park last week and both went exceptionally well.
Sheeran broke his hock at Nottingham last October and Lennon has had an ongoing problem with a nail which now seems to be resolved. If they go as well in their next handslips, I’ll be starting to think about sprint trials.
We also gave King Idol a 480 trial at Central Park on Sunday. He clocked a 28.82 (calc) for the 480 metres which is a great run for a pup.
We also have Queen Beyonce trialling back after a short lay-off. Why wouldn’t I be excited.
It was a relief to see the work starting at Swindon. It is one of my favourite tracks, if for no other reason than the people. It is very much like Henlow, everybody speaks to you. It is such a friendly place.
I would be hopeful of having a runner or two in the Produce Stakes which is putting a bit of pressure on me. With pups coming through, I know we are going to have to move on some of the older dogs. The nightmare is that we sell on one who then comes back and beats us in the Produce Stakes Final.
Can you imagine it?
The boss (Brendan Keogh) would be unbearable. He would put me on hourly speed dial just to abuse me.
As I have explained before, when we were on the flaps we had to bend a few rules to win, just as the tracks and the bookies would bend them to get us beat.
As anyone who knows Liz and I would know, the welfare of the dog always had to come first. We would never want any dog to come to any harm just to back a winner. Some people would be less scrupulous when it came to ‘stopping’ a dog, but that was for their conscience.
So how do you make a dog run slower without doing it any harm? We hatched a plan that involved Liz’s mum – weighted racing jackets. If you could give the dog some extra weight to carry, you could slow them up. Horse racing had been doing it for 200 years.
But there were two problems. Firstly, you couldn’t do it in such a way as to endanger the dog by causing it not to stride properly and go lame. Second, you had to be subtle so it wasn’t obvious to anyone watching.
Fortunately Liz’s mum was a fantastic seamstress and she created some jackets that we could add weight to – upto four pounds – and it wouldn’t be obvious because they were so well tailored.
It was an absolute brilliant idea. We could take a dog with the weighted jacket on a Thursday and it would run eight lengths below form and then run it again three or four days later without the jacket and get your money on.
There was an extra bonus that we weren’t expecting. Run a dog three or four times in a weighted jacket and they muscled up as though they were on steroids, they looked amazing.
We did it for ages and made good money betting. We almost came unstuck once when a dog burst out of its jacket in a trial at Carfin and ‘Big John’ who was at the traps went to pick it up, was surprised by the weight and dropped it. He turned to Liz who said, ‘if you make such a fuss and everyone finds out they will all be doing it”. He said “I’ll just be checking all yours from now on”
Like all good games of cat and mouse it had to come to an end. We eventually noticed that the bookies spotters were paying too much attention to our dogs on parade and we realised that we had been found out. They suddenly started pushing our dogs out in the betting when they spotted the padded jackets.
But we still had one last shot at it. We ran the dogs in the weighted jackets but replaced the weights with thin polystyrene. They looked just the same as the weighted jackets and when they pushed the prices out, we took them to the cleaners again.
