Suprise Package is in the 2.05 Punchestown on Tuesday and Freedom to Dream is in the 2.35pm race
This wasn’t supposed to happen. There is very little point (I think you will agree) in having a Summer horse and a Winter horse if they are both going to turn up at Punchestown on the same day in November. That being said, I can’t wait for Tuesday as my entire string will be running 30 minutes apart.
It’s a funny thing but as stoic as I try to be, there is something pretty special about owning not only one but two racehorses. I am incredibly lucky and to have them run on the same day is special. In fact, it’s making me emotional just writing it. I come from a working class background and never went to college but, as one of my Harvard MBA direct reports once said ”considering you’ve had no formal education you’re quite intelligent”. It was always a dream to own a racehorse and with Bay of Freedom and now Freedom to Dream and Suprise Package I have exceeded my dreams.
Of course, Peter may still decide that the ground is too quick for Freedom to Dream after his 697 day break but probably not after reading the previous paragraph! I am joking; we will do what is right for the horse. I have been like a crazy person for the last two weeks clicking on Naas weather reports every 10 minutes; going to dozens of different sites until I found the one which forecast the most rain. There really hasn’t been any and our last hope was possible showers on Saturday; that was going to make the difference between if we declared or not. I started off with Met.ie as I had been obsessed by their 7 day radar tracker for a few days. I watched their current radar tracker for the three hours when the showers were forecast and when rain was indicated, flipped over to the current conditions forecast on Weather.com and Accuweather so that their ‘current conditions’ chart could, indeed, confirm it was raining. Every time it said ‘cloudy’ and I would go back to Met.ie. Eventually, Worldweatheronline gave me the current ‘rain’ symbol I was looking for and I gladly took the 0.2mm it offered.
I had mentioned my preoccupation with the weather to Peter when we spoke after the entries were out. I even admitted that my normal ‘day before entry call’ never happened because I was nervous he was going to tell me he wasn’t even entering Freedom to Dream. He sounded like he was really keen to run him so that gave me confidence and, in fairness, the ground had seemed pretty safe at Punchestown’s meeting last weekend and there was no drying going on.
There were never any such concerns with Suprise Package so I was delighted that, when I checked at around 8pm Ireland time on Saturday, Peter had already declared both horses despite the declaration time not being until 10am Sunday. This, by the way, is not typical. He normally leaves it pretty late and I suspect he giggles to himself imagining me lying in bed refreshing the declarations page on HRI from 3am – 5am US time. And, unfortunately, his imagination is entirely correct.
The declarations part of the HRI-RAS site is endlessly fascinating to me. Over the years, I have, by a process of deduction, learnt the various trends of many trainers. John Ryan goes really early, Henry de Bromhead is not far behind but then you have the Mullins/Elliott psychology going on with neither declaring before 9.30am and waiting to see which horses the other has declared. Now, bear in mind that the site just tells you how many horses have been declared and not which horses. It does refresh every minute so you can see changes in numbers but that’s about it. Basically, Elliott and Mullins are playing a game of cat and mouse where both the cat and the mouse are invisible!
Another ‘only in Ireland’ thing you notice by avidly following the declarations page is the random but pragmatic changes in maximum field sizes. As an example, since entries the maximum field has been 18 for all races on Tuesday with the balloting sequence being based on that number. At 9.30 today, the maximum suddenly increased to 20 for races with more than 18 declared; by 9.50am it had increased to 22 runners. I imagine someone sitting at HRI, fingers poised, with his/her manager looking over their shoulder acting like they’re at an auction: “Go on! Another grand should do it” and when it doesn’t “OK, one more grand and that’s it!”
At this point, you may be saying: “what about your two horses and what chance do they have?” Well, let me change the habit of a lifetime and be pithy in my analysis:
I have no idea how Suprise Package will run. He is working as well as ever at home and it’s a hop, skip and jump to Punchestown so not much time to get wracked by nerves. It’s a decent little race and, on his best form, he has a chance. Irishracing.com has tipped him or, more precisely Tom Weekes has. I hope he still has a job on Wednesday morning
Freedom to Dream has been off 697 days, we have not really been able to gallop him on grass as we would have liked. He did run in a schooling hurdle at Tipperary a few days ago (that was his second) and he finished 4th in an average event when we were just getting him a bit of fresh air. The ground is probably not as soft as ideal and there are a couple of well regarded horses from the aforementioned de Bromhead and Mullins yards. I can only say that we want him to come back safe, have ice cold legs on Wednesday and then we can really press on. That being said, I think he will still do himself justice.
Tuesday will be a special day for me and the only sadness is that Kim will not be there to enjoy it with me. She will be coming over to England later in the week as we are celebrating my mother’s 90th birthday next weekend, but the fact is, that she simply doesn’t have the Paid Time Off (PTO) to come across with me for the racing. Listen to this my UK and Irish friends: Kim has 29 days of PTO each year. That includes vacation, sick time and all Bank Holidays; it would be the equivalent to just over two weeks in Britain!
I have exceeded my self-imposed 1000 word limit but I have one more thing to say: I have no insight or knowledge of this ‘banned substance’ scandal in Ireland. It is not good for Irish racing and there’s no doubt it’s been a tough year for racing with the Elliott photo, the Panorama abattoir programme and now this issue with aspersions being cast on pretty much every Irish trainer. I don’t know many trainers but the one thing I do know, and regular readers will already know this, is that I have total trust in Peter and that I have had since we first met over 8 years ago. It is the most important element in any owner/trainer relationship and becomes even more important when those two parties are 3300 miles apart. From the time he bought and paid for a horse for a total stranger (me) to telling me that he bought a horse by mistake (Freedom to Dream) to the way he, Ber and the entire family care so much about the horses and racing there has never been an occasion not to trust.
I wanted to say that because I truly believe it. Of course, I may have inadvertently made it even more difficult for him to pull Freedom to Dream out of the race now!
Let’s hope they both come back safe and well this time; we don’t want any more leg or heart problems!