The End?

Naturally, Larressingle drew the outside gate (14 of 14), which is hardly surprising at all if you've been following the blog for any length of time. Of course, Carrot Club will never query this, or any other odd coincidences, for this is Japan. No-one questions anything - heavyweight bills, overly long spells away, poor performances, strange results (including those that are sometimes very strange, as in fishy), or consistently bad gate draws. The only consolation was that the main rival - on paper, at any rate - drew gate 13, and at least we had a decent jockey this time. Starting as a firm favourite (with odds at 2.2), the problem was the other Carrot horse in gate 13 had a superior one, who timed his race far better. Second again! And if that was the last run, Larressingle will now be dropped for next year, despite it being a better horse than the winner, and despite being by far the best of my batch of JRA nags. I guess with Ogata-sensei retiring soon, the timing is good to draw a line through another one. I'd rather get rid of Perfumer, Massabielle, War Chronicle and Rush Attack (Belle Plage, too, in reality), but the rules state that keeping junk is fine as long as it's the members' money that's being wasted to keep Northern Farm in clover.

PS. Like me, the trainer isn't particularly impressed with the performance of the jockey (nowhere near as bad, or downright fishy, as the Miura ride, but it seemed like a half-baked attempt to me), so Nakayama is now being lined up as a final fling (the 10th September is the first of the batch of meetings). Next up, Another Door on the 30th. Having earned just 225,000 yen in four races, it needs to improve by a remarkable amount if it is to do anything worthwhile. I don't honestly think it will do any good - it's certainly a ridiculously poor animal for 16,000,000 yen! No news on Phosphorus either - it definitely does't take this long to recover from being gelded. The horse has had more holidays than I've had in my entire life, despite being around for ten times longer.