Big Occasion At Carlisle

There are four meetings taking place this afternoon, with three on the flat at York, Bath and Wolverhampton as well as a jumps card at Carlisle.  The stable goes all the way up to Carlisle with just one runner, Big Occasion who makes his chasing debut in quite a warm looking novices' chase under Tom Scudamore.  Big Occasion's long suit is stamina and he certainly won't mind the soft ground - Carlisle is a stiff track at the best of times so in testing conditions you are going to need to stay very well.  We also have a runner on the level at Bath this afternoon as Vergririo competes in the one mile handicap at 12.30pm - Simon Pearce takes the ride.

Hoping for an action replay! Big Occasion wins at Carlisle last season

There are four meetings taking place this afternoon, with three on the flat at York, Bath and Wolverhampton as well as a jumps card at Carlisle.  The stable goes all the way up to Carlisle with just one runner, Big Occasion who makes his chasing debut in quite a warm looking novices' chase under Tom Scudamore.  Big Occasion's long suit is stamina and he certainly won't mind the soft ground - Carlisle is a stiff track at the best of times so in testing conditions you are going to need to stay very well.  We also have a runner on the level at Bath this afternoon as Vergririo competes in the one mile handicap at 12.30pm - Simon Pearce takes the ride.

The ground was certainly testing at Exeter yesterday and I thought that our young lads did okay in the conditional jockeys race with Ladyie finishing best of ours in fourth.  The bottomless ground certainly had most of the fields sorted out with some of the races nearly one minute slower than the standard time!  The three mile chase took 6 minutes 40 seconds - take it from me, that is not very quick.  I would imagine we will see a similar story at Carlisle this afternoon.

*****

Martin spent an interesting morning yesterday down at the County Ground in Taunton, home of Somerset County Cricket Club where he had a long discussion with Daz Veness (who is taking the English Performance Squad to South Africa) and Ian Brewer, who are the coaches for the team.  As you can see from the pictures, they have some great facilities available to them.  Martin took a photograph of Daz demonstrating one of the new exercise bikes...he was invited to have a go himself but lacked the fitness!

  
Above left: (l-r) Somerset coaches Daz Veness and Ian Brewer and right: Daz demonstrates one of the new bikes

Martin was also taken through preparation training technology and loading as welll as targets for individual players.  It was a fascinating morning and similar in some ways to the training regimes and targets of racehorses - preparation, practise, building up certain muscles and cooling down afterwards.  Similarly diet is also vitallly important for body weight, injuries and recovery etc.

It was a most enjoyable and informative morning and hopefully they will respond by visiting us one day to see the running of David's yard.

*****

There has been an interesting series of articles in the Racing Post this week about big gambles and tomorrow they will be talking about Unsinkable Boxer who Martin trained to win the Pertemps Hurdle at Cheltenham and the Sefton Novices' Hurdle at Aintree.  He was a monster of a horse and won both races with his head in his chest...the only danger was falling over getting down to the bookies to collect your winnings!  Or maybe I should have waited until after the race was over?!

*****

This sport is all about opinions but some are harder to listen to than others and I have to disagree with Pricewise (Tom Segal) when he says "I make no bones about it, he is absolutely the best jockey I've ever seen over jumps and he's been great to me" - he is talking about Ruby Walsh.  I make no bones about it, A P McCoy is in a different league to any jockey I have ever seen before - his record speaks for itself and he's been great to me...isn't our sport great?!

*****

England take on San Marino in a football international tonight and are 1/100 favourites with the layers.  It should be shooting practice for the England team and they really should be looking at putting seven or eight on the board against them.