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Does anyone know why he was moved to Roger Varian after a hugely successful season under Archie Watsons care last year?
Hmmmmmmm.
11 runs and only his last was poor.
Won well over £200k and placed in group 1s.
Strange move.
Had he been given a lighter campaign and more strategically placed he’d have had a much better chance of actually winning one not placing
And I’m assuming that’s why the owners switched yards
I’d have sent him to Clive Cox or Charlie Hills personally but they went for varian
“Archie Watson ran him 25 times in 1 season and has very probably ruined the horse”
Well….the runs were spread out over 7.5 months. I suppose that is a long season for a young horse and they might have been as well to pull the plug a couple of runs earlier but OTOH the division wasn’t/ isn’t strong, perhaps they thought to just make some hay while the sun shone with a not- wildly expensive horse that ended up being a bit better than a handicapper.
Watson’s Glen Shiel ran 16 times in just over a year- handicapping all winter, then having 8 more runs in the season proper after a spring break, the last of these being a grade 1 win by a nose.
Outbox posted his best result in July last year on his 10th run since starting in the first week of January. His form declined in November and December and after 16 runs he got a short break before winning a Listed race in February.
Corinthia Knight ran 28 times in 16 months.
Mehmento ran 10 times as 3 year old last year from January to December, with brief pauses for gelding in July and a wind op in September or it probably would have been more.
I assume that if you send a horse there you know it’s going to have to earn its corn. Who knows if Dragon Symbol – or the others mentioned above- had been amongst blue bloods at Charlie Appleby’s, for example, if he would have achieved more or less over a lifetime’s racing than he would have if left with Archie Watson. Of course now if he wins a stack of G1s you could say Watson couldn’t train him to win one; if he never wins another race you could say Watson has ruined him.
Bloody hell, we’ve just had the jumps season with constant criticism of trainers not running their horses enough and then the flat season kicks off with complaints about a horse running too often.
Damned if they do and damned if they don’t really.
Surely every time DS ran last season it was with the owners full consent anyway?
Owner
Mr Yoshiro Kubota
Figures11112222340-7
Earnings £342,068 approx
Including a race at the Curragh (4th) for 15k
Entries
Haydock or Curragh 21 may
Kings stand/Jubilee stakes (Rasc)Think the criticism of the frequency of Dragon Symbol’s runs is misplaced. The runs were well spaced out and always over very short trips. No guarantees at all he’d have bagged a Group 1 with fewer runs. As Greenasgrass points out, Watson can’t really win here regardless of what the horse does from now on.
Tbf if you haven’t got a horse, you can’t expect to win.
Sorry, that was uncalled for.
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Sadly the public rarely finds out what is behind these high-profile trainer changes. I suspect it is more often than not due to goings on away from the racecourse rather than those on it.
I thought at the of the day it was the owners decision whether to run in certain races or not. Not the actual trainer
VF x
I would have thought so as well Viking. However how often do we see trainers entering their horses in separate races even though they have different owners.
I think it was Fred Rimell’s wife, Mercy, who was quoted as saying something like “we find that the less that owners interfere the luckier they are”. “interfere” was probably not the word she used but that was the implication.
I don’t remember many racing quotes but another that will always stick with me is Mick Channon”s; when asked about a certain jockey (may have been Australian – Craig Williams?) ” jockies they’re a necessary evil”.
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