Cheltenham Weekly Update
Hi All
I hope you enjoyed the Irish whitewash on our UK horses at Cheltenham this week! (the rugby wasn’t much better either for the English among us!) Thanks to Nicky for organising a 50+ strong ‘guessing’ competition which Steve and I finished way down the field! Good fun for only £20 and well done to Tony in Hong Kong for landing the spoils and also fantastic to hear that he’s donating most of the winnings to a local youth charity called KELY – Kids Everywhere Like You.
Steve and I went to see David Menuisier at the Coombelands Racing Stables, in Pulborough, West Sussex, last week, once of the home of the legendary Guy Harwood and Dancing Brave. Despite the fact we didn’t get offered a coffee, we enjoyed a tour of the state of the art facilities which he shares with Amanda Perrett (Guy Harwood’s daughter). David is obviously a trainer going places, with his star Group 1 winning filly Wonderful Tonight (Le Havre) sure to be one of the highlights of the coming season. He shares a lot of the same ideals as us, liking similar sires who are progressive horses and will run over a mile, he’s patient, and he’s not afraid to travel overseas for races. Being French, that’s his go to place, but he’s raced all over Europe, plus also in places like Japan, Canada and Australia.
Not a great deal of news from our horses, we have a owner’s zoom call with a very entertaining Charlie Fellowes on Wednesday – 6 pm – he’ll give us the Surrey Knight rundown and what’s it’s like to have a horse in the Melbourne Cup !
The Jumps season is not over for the syndicate owners of Gran Luna and Surrey Quest so now that Nicky has finished with Cheltenham we’ll be discussing with him the plans for getting those on to the track in the next few weeks.
Steve and I are going to George’s this week to nail down the plans for Surrey Princess and Surrey Mist. No new news re Surrey Gold, and following chats with Joe, and listening to what Hughie said about starting too early in a long season, we’ve decided to wait for the turf for Surrey Pride. Joe is not convinced we’d see him at his best on the all weather and so we’ll aim for Epsom on April 20th when hopefully some racehorse syndicate owners will be able to be present.