Epic struggle

It was lunchtime at a Church school and there was a large dish of rosy apples. A nun placed a note on the fruit: ‘Take only one: God is watching.’ Further down the line was a dish of biscuits. ‘Take all you like,’ one child was heard telling another, ‘God is watching the apples.’ That child surely grew up to be a bookie, and at this stage of the Flat season they are cramming the cookies while we punters flounder, trying to discover which yards have got it together despite the cold spring and which three-year-olds have trained on through the winter. At Kempton on Saturday, the only time I got the form right was on the station platform afterwards when most huddled behind the four-car stop to shelter from the rain and we few bold spirits marched to the platform end and got a seat when a longer train came in.

There were two consolations. One was that the quality of the racing did not suffer in the least from the fact that Kempton’s Easter meeting is now held on the all-weather Polytrack rather than on grass. A decent field of three-year-olds contested the Sportsman London Mile Qualifier Handicap and the first four home — Archerfield Links, Scot Love, Bomber Command and Namid Reprobate — should all pick up a decent race or two this season. The other consolation was that none of the rest of us needs a winner on the days trainer Clive Brittain has one: the pleasure radiates from him in waves across the unsaddling enclosure. Carrying the 9st 10lb top weight, Clive’s 20–1 shot Kandidate took the £31,000 first prize for the Coral Rosebery Stakes after coasting through most of the race. Both Seb Sanders, who rode him on Saturday, and Ryan Moore have been telling the trainer that the horse would stay the 1m 2f and the beaming Clive gave credit where it was due.