Shun Beat

Now here's one for your diary: Beat The Boarder's debut has been confirmed for the opener (1R) at TCK on the 25th, with Shun Ishizaki in the saddle. Being a nighter, the race starts at 4pm, so if you're in the Tokyo-Oi area, please show your support for this new pairing...

Racing In Australia

This little article has been in draft form for most of this year - time flies alright! We've all heard of Black Caviar and the big race of the year, the Melbourne Cup, but unless you live in Australia, you probably won't know much else about the country's racing scene. But with a stake in Raining Dollars now, it's time to talk a little about racing Down Under, so things will hopefully make more sense in the future.

The Australian Racing Board, established in 1998, oversees the racing business, which is basically split into eight regions to make logistics that much easier - after all said and done, it's a big country! As such, we have New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, Southern Australia, Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Northern Territory each having its own administration.

Raining Dollars is in the Queensland area, with Brisbane (with its prestigious Eagle Farm and Doomben facilities), Toowoomba (Clifford Park), Caloundra (Sunshine Coast), Gold Coast, Ipswich, Cairns (Cannon Park), Mackay, Townsville and Rockhampton as the main racecourses, augmented by an awful lot of smaller facilities. If one goes through the whole list of tracks for all of Australia - and there are several hundred - one will notice that lots of tracks have the same name as English racecourses, which is obviously a throwback to the colonial days, as is the racing itself, I guess...

Raining Dollars

It's official - a stake in Raining Dollars has been secured, so we now have a racing interest in Australia, as well as Japan and England. This has sort of been on the cards for some time, but the right horse has come along at the right time (need something new to balance the intermittent waves of extreme boredom and stress caused by work), and the JLH Racing equip is a nice outfit to take the plunge with.

Raining Dollars is a gelding blessed with some interesting blood, being sired by Changeintheweather - an American horse with five wins behind him (including a G1 victory), as well as four seconds and two thirds from 15 races. He was fathered by Gone West from the highly-successful Mr Prospector line, mixed with a measure of Secretariat blood just for good measure. His damsire was perhaps even more impressive, though, as it was Pleasant Colony - a horse that was winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, and third in the Belmont Stakes. Doubtless, his speed was inherited from the great Italian stallion, Ribot, who was his grandfather.

The two-year old's dam was Mindmaster by Mind Games, the latter being an English champion sprinter. Mindmaster was a winner herself before becoming a broodmare, with truly international blood on her dam side, sourced from Australia, France, New Zealand, America and Britain, as well as Canada a bit further back. Noalcoholic, as the damsire, was remarkably successful on the track, so the bloodlines point to a horse that may well be capable of living up to its wonderful name...

PS. Raining Dollars was born in September, which seems odd until you think about the southern hemisphere location. Interesting!

All Quiet

Other than routine training on both the racing and dressage fronts, nothing much happening in reality, although Raining Dollars is getting closer to being a part of the family. We've also learnt that Miracle Rouge should be in action at Chukyo on the 1st December (in a 2000m turf race), and Agua De Vida might be ready for the Funabashi meeting at the start of December, but should be at Kawasaki a couple of weeks later if not. I'll be sure to keep you abreast of entries as soon as they are confirmed. Tomorrow, though, I'll be checking out horsepower of a rather different kind at the Tokyo Motor Show...