The turf
Tale of two Toms
Robin Oakley
It is not only with insurance policies and Hollywood marriage contracts that you need to read the small print. It would have been an infinitely more profitable day last Saturday had I bothered to work down the racecard on the third race, the Kempton Park for Weddings Handicap Hurdle, to the point where it declared: 'Blinkers worn for the first time by No. 1: Time and again we have seen horses fitted for the first time with the unsightly aid to concentration improve out of all recognition.
As a part-time racing man who still earns his crust mainly in the political world I was not aware, like some of my Press Room colleagues, that Norman Williamson had returned from riding Josh Gifford's Mr Markham last time out, and giving him a fair old belting in the process, to declare that the horse hadn't tried a yard. But I did know that Josh is most reluctant to fit on his horses what some still call 'the rogues' badge' and had I spotted that he had done so, for the first time with the classy topweight, I would have been inclined to invest Another opportunity missed.
After Mr Markham had strolled to victory at 14-1 the trainer told us: 'You know me. I don't like putting blinkers on them but after what Norman said I didn't have any option.' Mr Markham had a nasty fall over fences last year but Josh says he won't be frightened of putting the ten-year-old back over the bigger obstacles. Mr Markham has had a pop over fences recently at home and seemed happy enough to do so. Let's hope the handicapper gives him a chance.
I was, however, able to cheer home Majlis, the Tom George-trained winner of the Lanzarote Hurdle, whom I had backed at 7-1. Owner Terry Warner, one of the most amiable and open men on the racecourse, has jumpers like Rooster Booster and Lord Brex spread around four stables with Paul Nicholls, Philip Hobbs and Ian Williams handling his horses too. Unusually: for an owner he considered his horse fairly handicapped, as Majlis was, at just lOst 61b. Terry Warner wasn't fussed that Tom George had preferred to be at Wincanton, saying that the trainer had fancied the chances of Cobbet there. That seemed enough of a hint to play up my winnings but luckily I was too late to back Cobbet, who only finished third at 3-1.
The two most impressive performances at Kempton were those of Burning Impulse in the novices hurdle and Heros Collonges in the novice chase. Heros Collonges was the consolation purchase for John Hales when he couldn't buy Japhet, another star from the yard of French trainer Guillaume Macaire. You are 'appy?' I heard Macaire ask the owner, basking in Barbados, when he phoned through to the unsaddling enclosure. I should hope he was. Heros Collonges, a seven-year-old who started serious racing only last year, made the Sunbury Novices Chase a procession. And Macaire knows where he is heading eventually. Tor me he is a National horse,' he declared, You heard it here first.
Burning Impulse earned a 16-1 quote for the Triumph Hurdle at Cheltenham on his debut over timber. A horse with enough speed to win over a mile on the flat but out of a staying mare, Isle of Flame, he looks a great prospect for Paul Webber and for owner Patrick Delaney, a Dublin solicitor who paid 120,000 guineas for what Webber describes as the nap of the Horses in Training Sale. Confidence was clearly running high. The owner's wife, we were told, was doing serious damage in Bond Street even before the off. Alas, Mrs Oakley, currently languishing in a Dublin hospital after major surgery, would have been pushed to do serious damage in the corner sweetshop with my day's profits.
But if it was a thin day for me in the end spare a thought for poor Tom Scudamore. All the racecourse dogs were barking for Londoner, owned by the free-spending David Johnson, trained by Martin Pipe and proclaimed by the champion jockey Tony McCoy. who was riding elsewhere, to be 'a certainty'. Having learned from various sources that the owner had had a hefty bet on Londoner for Cheltenham, that the Kempton engagement had been chosen in preference to four other entries and that Londoner, a quality horse on the flat when trained by Henry Cecil, had been 'jumping like a stag' at home, I broke my normal rules and invested solidly on the odds-on chance for his first jumping experience. Alas, when he came round the first bend and saw a hurdle ahead of him, Londoner executed a swerve and sidestep that would be the envy of any Rugby centre and deposited his young rider on the other side of the hurdle with no chance of the partnership staying intact, Then in the handicap chase chosen as a seasonal debut for the Pipe stable's National candidate Blowing Wind he and Scudamore made such a hash of an early fence that they were soon out of contention and trailing the field, Scudamore is a talented rider who has all the right advice from his father Peter. His day will come, but it was not this one. Ironically the rider of Burning Impulse was young Tom Doyle, who contested last year's amateur title with Tom Scudamore until financial pressures forced him to pull out and turn professional. Although he is used by such canny trainers as Noel Chance, Webber and Roger Curtis, Tom Doyle is not getting anything like the quality of rides his former rival does. His name simply does not ring the same bells. But here is a young jockey who makes the bad ones run for him as well as the good ones. He deserves a break and, hopefully, after Saturday's tidy finishing in a televised race be will get more opportunities.
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