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DAVID CARR |
Weblog: What do you mean the Wi-Fi doesn't work? The life of a Racing Post reporter
Just champion at Haydock
This was your chance to discover what it's like to be JP McManus or Sheikh Mohammed, for a few moments at least.
No, Haydock were not handing out huge wads of cash and vast strings of racehorses but they were offering the chance to have your picture taken with the Champion Hurdle trophy, thanks to a joint promotion between sponsors Stan James and the Racing Post.
It was free too, so I had to have a go, posing behind the famous golden bowl set on a silver stand - I looked like a grinning idiot stood behind the world's most valuable birdbath.
(I was given only a hard copy rather than a digital version so I cannot reproduce the image here but after the photographic excesses of 'Movember' I think you have seen more than enough of me for a while).
The Gold Cup was the feature of the racecard advert for Haydock's Cheltenham preview night, which boasts of contributions from Richard Johnson - who was billed as a 'Gold Cup-winning jockey' - and Paddy Brennan - who has the same claim to fame but was instead listed oddly as a 'Coral ambassador'.
Curious that the top whack places, £95 a person, were on 'Long Run' tables, with 'Denman' tables next in the list at £75 a head. Yet the cheap seats - if £58 a go can really be called 'cheap' - were on tables named after five-timeKing George winner Kauto Star.
The organiser clearly had a downer on the greatest chaser of the past three decades.
Can't imagine many of the panellists will be drawing heavily on this card when they come to prognosticate about Cheltenham - with small fields pottering round in desperately testing conditions, today's action was about as different from that which will take place at the festival as it is possible to imagine.
Though there werea couple of clues that novice hurdler Cinders And Ashes might be all right.
The instant turn of pace he showed despite the speed-blunting conditions and - more tellingly - the nervous way trainer Donald McCain paced to and fro through the whole race, frequently turning his back on the action and looking for all the world like an anxious expectant father outside the maternity ward. Behaving exactly as he always does when Peddlers Cross runs - and he's turned out okay.
More smiles for McCain as the day went on and he ended up with a four-timer which took him to 100 winners for the season, almost three months quicker than he did it last season.
And for Simon Marsh, who was presented with a magnificent owl carved out of a tree trunk to mark his retirement as a director at Haydock and three decades of sponsorship by his company Peter Marsh & Sons - though he may still be wondering how he is going to get half a ton of tree sculpture home.
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