The Bell Tolls

Courtesy Carrot Club

The number of visitors to the blog trickled past the 45,000 mark yesterday evening, but nothing very exciting to report given such a major landmark. Indeed, Dinner Bell (pictured here) finished in 14th at Fukushima, which was even worse than expected - and expectations were low in the first place! She was an incredible 17 lengths off the pace, so one can only be thankful it was such a short race - just imagine the embarrassment had the 2R been run over a mile! As hoped for, she has been retired from racing as of today. One simply has to accept that not all Thoroughbreds are born racers.

Meanwhile, Miracle Rouge has gone to a different holiday location, with thoughts of running her again in the autumn. As I said before, though, I doubt whether horses that haven't won during the year will be allowed to continue beyond the end of summer. There is no clarification on the situation one way or the other, so I suppose all you can do is wait and see what happens in the coming months.

At least there's a flicker of brightness in the UK, as River Sprit is due to run again next Friday (the 11th), booked for either the Class 4 6:30 at Chepstow or the Class 3 2:55 at York. Both races are over five furlongs, and I really look forward to seeing the results in due course. Great little horse, and a great team behind her...

As I was sitting waiting at the stables the other day (the kids were just riding for fun rather than training, as the ground was awful after the heavy rain), I started jotting down names for the successors to Godiva's Pride. As anyone that knows me well will tell you, I'm not particularly good with making up names, but I thought these were okay: Godiva's Haven, Godiva's Prize, 
Godiva's Spirit, Godiva's Finest, Godiva's Calling, Godiva's Child, and Godiva's Secret. Now all we need are the racehorses to go with the names!