Summer Holidays are over!

With the change in the weather we have seen the majority of our horses return from their summer breaks. It's been a freakish couple of months with endless sunshine and long summer nights, there is no doubting that the horses have enjoyed their downtime but with the lush green grass now replaced with burned off yellow grass its timely that there summer holidays are now over.

We've only had a handful of runners since our last blog and NOT A ROLE MODEL has been flying the flag for us in his usual gutsy manner! He put in a super round of jumping at Newton Abbot to resume winning ways on the 26th of June before lining up in the listed summer plate a handicap chase at Market Rasen on the 21st of July. This was a step up in grade but we thought he deserved to take his chance off bottom weight in what is one of the biggest races of the summer campaign. He was able to make the running and was still there fighting it out at the second last but wasn't able to go with the front two down to the last fence eventually finishing a gallant 4th staying on again at the line. One of his owners Steve Howells made the long trip to watch and Roley certainly didn't disappoint giving us all a run for our money!

Powerstown Park put in a good performance finishing 2nd to the very well handicapped horse Tidal Watch who went on to notch up a hat trick of wins. He's a horse who loves decent ground and we plan to run him towards the end of the month where he will hopefully get another opportunity to get his head in front for his owners The Ipsden Invincibles!.

We have all of our horses back in now all of which are doing their pre training work, some have gone to Mark Palmers who does such an amazing job at prepping horses based 10 minutes outside of Lambourn with the majority of horses at our base in Cardiff where we are making the most of the excellent hills to build up muscles ready for when we want to start cantering in the coming weeks.

Two weekends ago we were able to get the whole of the Luke Harvey racing club together for a Sunday afternoon visit to see ROYAL MAGIC who's been enjoying his holidays in the beautiful countryside in Monmouthshire along with IWILLDOIT.

Luke himself was on TV duties so sadly couldn't attend and even the heavy rain couldn't stop us having a fantastic day with the opportunity for everyone to get together once again and talk about the season ahead with RM. A huge thank you to Stan and Mary Brown for putting on such a wonderful day and for having the horse looking so well!

We have two runners tomorrow at Newton Abbot, Go on Mayson will have his second start over hurdles, he is in good form at home and hopefully he can put in another good performance in the maiden hurdle. Torhousemuir is having his first run back after a break in the handicap chase, he is going nicely at home and should come on for the run.