18th March 2017

Vado Forte travelled beautifully for a long way, only immaturity and weakness found him out, he is near on 17 hands and being born in April not even 4 yet. Of course we wanted to win but today was all about experience, he handled the preliminaries better than we expected and will have learnt a lot for the experience.  He is a horse with huge potential and I can’t wait to see him with another year under his belt. Bumpers are fair from the be all and end all, many many top class horses haven’t won bumpers. They are hugely competitive and hard to win. We will see how he comes out of today but my gut feeling is to let him down for a month, get him schooled up and into the paddocks, he will then go novice hurdling in October.

This morning Kimberlite Candy, Russian Service and New Member jumped a few hurdles, Russian Service is declared to run at Ffos Las tomorrow as is Equus Amadeus. They had a fair drop of rain over night so we will take stock in the morning as soon as we have a ground update.  The other horses had quiet canters having done plenty all week.

Ireland got their tails up and spoilt the party for England, I listened to it on the radio and Ireland certainly sounded to play with more accuracy and deserved to win.