In the 16:45 at Ayr, e/w Gabrial The Devil. Bit of an unlucky horse, so hope his luck can change today!
Can anyone explain to me how Summerghand ran off 97 again today? He won a big handicap off 97 at York a month ago, got put up 6lbs to 103, ran 5th in a listed race last time out and was seemingly dropped back to 97 for today. Seems very lenient to me - or was today’s race an early closer?
What did you make of that QM? Maybe 6f a bit too sharp now given her pedigree? Still thought she would walk this. A bit disappointing, I thought Race video
3rd 16/1. Ran a fine race from the front. Reluctant to criticise on horseracing generally, but honestly, the guy doing the commentary on Racing TV's video replay was just awful. (Quite often it's a different commentator to the one doing the live broadcast on ITV)
Can't have been as bad as one I heard recently (can't remember where). The excitement in the final furlong was almost too much. Something like "Horse A is in the lead, now horse B is ...... And horse B has won." Took me a while to recover
Mystery solved - he carried a 5lbs penalty today so obviously the weights were fixed before his York victory. Smart performance.
Fair play to Brian Ellison for getting Nietzsche back in the winners enclosure. Nearly 4 years since he won the Greatwood handicap hurdle
The short answer to your question, in my opinion, is that Queen Me simply did not settle and the first two furlongs were too fast. I do not want to crab Richard Fahey’s winner Barefoot Angel just because it was 20/1 (clearly much better than its previous Carlisle win) but the other principals in the betting all failed to perform for different reasons leaving the race looking a bit suspicious. Both the winner and the runner-up came from off the pace so it simply may have been too fast early and Queen Me did see off the rest. I think they will stick to six furlongs for now and go looking for one of the back end juvenile fillies races. I see that Oddy figured out that the Ayr Gold Cup is an early closing race so Summerghand ran off his old mark of 97 with a 5lb penalty for his York win. That was about the only race where my pick did not finish third as both my bets at Newbury were third! The key to winning was just back Roger Varian but I did not know that on Saturday morning.
