29th January 2016

Disappointed doesn’t get any where near describing how I feel this evening. I’m a realist and know that days like today happen to everyone. However, it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. Singlefarmpayment went into the race in what I believed to be great shape. His blood test yesterday was A1, his feed bowl has been licked clean after every meal, he’s tried to kick me every day when I’ve scraped him off after exercise and squealed today when I was brushing him after I’d saddled him at the races. I was expecting him to win or certainly run another to the line. When all said and done, he didn’t run a race at all and something is a miss. Davy said he was never happy with him from the moment the tapes went up. I noticed he was very relaxed at the start which isn’t him and he hardly sweated in the prelimaries. We have driven ourselves demented worrying about his profuse sweating in the past and I have been heard to say “the day to worry is the day he doesn’t sweat”. I’ve watched the replay and he seemed to go to the post with enthusiasm, I was happy enough until he missed the fifth hurdle and from there on in he was on the back foot. Amiral Collonges, the joint favourite pulled up with us, for now, I am going to blame the drying ground. The physio is here tonight and tells me the 4 horses she’s treated so far look better than any other horses she’s treated today. After todays flop, we’ve also had the vet in tonight to scope a filly that is running over the weekend, thankfully, she is whistle clean.

Having had a nice article in The Daily Telegraph it would have been nice to have capitalised on it with a good winner, it wasn’t to be. We will dust ourselves down and get on with the job.

We sent a horse named Proximo to Exeter a good few years back, he had trach washed clean 2 days before his run, he ran stink and trach washed filthy the day after his run. We will trach wash Singlefarmpayment on Monday and see what we have. I don’t expect to find anything as he doesn’t strike me as a horse who’s sick. It has to eliminated.