The end of the season - 27th April 2014

As the season draws to a close, I'm delighted that we have achieved our best season numerically with 20 winners (and 22 seconds!) with the highlight obviously being our first Cheltenham Festival winner with Present View.  We'll continue to have a handful of summer jumpers, but now we will start the annual steam cleaning of the boxes, the painting and general tidying up of the yard.  We'll be sending a few to the sales, and we've got quite a few orders to buy, so we're in for a busy summer.....which will hopefully mean we can build on this season and move the yard forwards in the 2014-2015 season.

We have already been recruiting for next season, and our latest buy is a horse called Detroit Blues. He is a smashing looking 4 year old chestnut gelding by Tobougg out of a Swain mare who was the half sister to Kalu, who won a grade 3 over 1m1 on the flat, and she was a half sister to leading stayers Double Trigger and Double Eclipse. Detroit Blues has all the attributes to make up into a seriously smart racehorse - he won his sole Irish schooling bumper with an impressive turn of foot as his pedigree would suggest, and he won his only Irish Point at the grade 1 pointing track of Dromahane, where he showed admirable stamina. 

Our last two runners of the season both finished 2^nd at Huntingdon last week. It was slightly frustrating that Dark Lover was beaten but it was still a pleasing run, and I think we learnt a lot.  He was very new to us, having just arrived from Paul Nicholls’ and it wasn’t ideal to run him so soon, but it was our last chance to run in a novice before the end of the season.  I was very pleased with how he jumped - although too slowly for a sharp 2 mile event, it was clean and careful, which bodes well for when we go hunter chasing in 2015….and a possible tilt at the Aintree Foxhunters!!

Breaking Bits ran another cracker to be 2^nd again - he has to be one of the most consistent horses in training, and I suppose the 2lbs he went up for finishing 2^nd at Wincanton and a lost shoe would have combined to be the 3 lengths he was beaten!  He jumped well again and had most off the bridle turning in, but the winner had the turn of foot between the last two flights.