Peter De Beyer’s moment of joy
The CTS Book 2 Graduates Race produced an amazing result for my mate, Sean Tarry. It was a great ride from Pierre Strydom. But it was even better for breeder, owner and buyer extraordinaire, Peter de Beyer. He bred the winner, not only with his own mare but with his own stallion. Nothing gets better than that and the satisfaction he must have felt would have made the stake cheque – I think – pale into insignificance, writes Joey Ramsden.
Well done, Sir. It keeps the rest of us going in the vain hope of doing the same!
Time to start watching the night racing in Joburg as there is sure to be some smashing stuff coming up. I know a few Cape trainers who have gone up there and after this weekend, we will decide if we are going to raid up there with a couple of our horses. Time just goes by so quickly: one minute it is the Cape season, which is so busy it just flies by, then it is the Joburg season, before we head off for the long trek to Durban and Summerveld. And there goes another year ticked off one’s life.
Quiet
Things are quiet at the stables. Many of our horses are on the farms, enjoying a well-earned rest. It is the best time of year for a holiday; the weather is perfect and some of the horses are in the best place possible, Drakenstein Stud, otherwise known as Utopia. I only wish I could get a bed there for the night myself.
It has been a quiet week but we won with an extremely nice imported High Chaparral filly, Casadesus, owned by Ridgemont Stud. We are quite long on High Chaparral. He was an amazing racehorse and it is a right privilege and pleasure to have a few of them in the yard. Training horses to get a mile to ten furlongs is I suppose what it is all about and to have a chance to do that is a real privilege. Fingers crossed for Casadesus and her future as well as all the others still munching away in their stables.
Straits Of The Nation
It is difficult not to comment on the state of the nation at the moment: not the State of the Nation address itself but it is incredibly sad and pathetic to have a leader in whom one has absolutely no confidence in his leadership, his honesty and integrity or his governorship and is totally blind and ignorant as to what is going on around him. It makes one want to cry.
I think what sums him up was his pathetic chuckle after the whole debacle and just getting on with one of the weakest speeches I have ever heard in my life. If that is the best we can conjure up, then the country is pretty close to a crisis and we should not be sleeping well at night. It all goes hand in hand with the Speaker of the House in parliament getting into a name-calling game with the EFF about cockroaches. Any other government in the world and they would have been fired immediately. But not here; jobs are for life and the dirtier, more dishonest and unpleasant one is the better one’s chances of climbing the government ladder. Please, Dear God, make this situation change as quickly as possible so we can have a true leader and someone to look up to.
Cup Run Over
Sadly, it is the end of our Cup run as the Hammers were thrashed by West Brom at Albion. Football, whether we like it or not, is really a game about managers and what Tony Pulis has managed to do the Baggies in turning around their form is truly remarkable. His incentives, I know, are massive and he must be chuckling all the way to the bank.
They look more than capable of being mid-table finishers, or possibly even higher. They certainly looked a far superior team to the Hammers. As for Aston Villa, they are basically unwatchable. I feel sorry for our great South African owner, Jim Lewis, who I know is a huge fan of theirs.
It was good to see an FA Cup game played on what looked like a pitch of old with Brad City knocking out Sunderland. We had Louis van Gaal moaning about a pitch the other day which looked like a carpet to me. Heaven knows what he would have thought of the surface at Bradford’s grounds. Seeing these managers whine and moan and cry with hundreds of millions of pounds worth of players really does make one sick. While I might be a slight closet Manchester United fan, they are slowly creeping down my order of teams worth watching.
www.joeyramsden.com
