|
DAVID CARR |
Weblog: What do you mean the Wi-Fi doesn't work? The life of a Racing Post reporter
My lucky Number comes up
Easy game this, when everything drops right. Even on a busy day like this.
Old Newton Cup and Lancashire Oaks day. Biggest Flat card of the summer at Haydock. Biggest crowd too. Just one man on hand to cover it all.
Yet the feature race went to Number Theory and my old friend Mohan Fonseka, the retired psychiatric nurse from Sri Lanka who got into the sport by listening to big races on the BBC World Service and has now won one himself.
And less than hour before Nathaniel won the Coral-Eclipse at Sandown, his sister Great Heavens teed up a great day for the family as she bolted up by five lengths in the Lancashire Oaks.
If you can't write something interesting about that little lot then you shouldn't be let loose with a laptop.
Plenty of people seemed to enjoy themselves, including the couple of dozen lads who had clearly been well refreshed through the afternoon and started singing lustily before the sixth race.
Nothing unusual about that, except for the fact they treated us all to two renditions of 'Let's Go Fly A Kite' - they hadn't looked like obvious 'Mary Poppins' aficionados.
Nathaniel's hard-fought success may also have induced the odd headache, such was the enthusiasm with which he was shouted home by one member of the Haydock press corps - life would have been much more tranquil had they followed the example of a colleague who saw our room as a place of sanctuary and took a nap here before racing.
Wasn't a good day for everyone. Such as the tipster on the pre-racing panel in the parade ring who made great play of the fact that Johnny Murtagh was coming all the way from Ireland just to ride Testosterone, which meant his mount must be fancied.
A spurious method for finding a winner at the best of times. And one which was rendered even more ridiculous on this occasion by the official jockey change which was made quite a while earlier, swapping Graham Lee for Murtagh who was staying in Ireland.
Everyone was glad simply to be racing today, given that last night's card was washed out along with the concert by Madness (who are clearly a jinx as their planned gig at Carlisle tonight also went west).
With water gushing off the Newton Stand into the exact area where folk would have been dancing, 'Baggy Trousers' would quickly have become 'Soggy Trousers' so any thoughts of staging the concert anyway were soon knocked on the head.
It might have been a goer. They were expecting around 15,000 people and one racecourse employee reckoned that 14,995 of them would have come even without the racing - which rather puts us in our place.
Comments