Blog Twelve - Monday 23/05/2022
I saw an interesting story where a boy was asking his father for the secret to life. The father simply said “the cow does not give milk.” “What are you saying?” asked the boy incredulously. “As you hear it son! The cow does not give milk, you have to milk it. You have to get up at 4am in the morning, go to the field, walk through the corral full of manure, tie the tail, hobble the legs of the cow, sit on the stool, place the bucket and do the work yourself, that is the secret of life”
It touches home with me, being a grafter. When I left school, I became a groom in England and worked my way to Assistant Trainer and rode a few winners along the way which was also hard work to get rides, and then I trained on my own and won at the highest level. All this took hard work and I had to go and get it. I then became a airline pilot and started the training while still doing horses and that was hard graft again to get into that airliner seat, something with a less than 1/200 chance when you set out to become a pilot. Most don’t make it. It’s hard graft and gruelling. This brings me to the current situation and time of my life, starting up training in the UK and immigrating and moving our whole lives due to the sadly unreported situation in South Africa. I’ve had to really get in and work twice as hard as I’ve ever worked and fight ten times as hard as I’ve ever fought and show hunger that I didn’t even know existed, but we are finally running horses in races in the UK and so happy with our start. We have had a 5-4-3 place from 3 runs with a horse who wasn’t doing well and was inconsistent that cost £2k, but we seem to have him in a good place. Mr Fayez ran twice for us last week and ran so well being 4th at Brighton on Tuesday and 3rd at Lingfield on Saturday. This has come from literally sweating blood and tears and even though I am a Gr1 winning trainer, I can’t tell you how excited we got, our whole team, at Lingfield to run 3rd in a lowly 0-65 handicap, but it was the most satisfying feeling seeing it all working. We only have the one horse ready to race, so for him to earn prize money in all 3 starts over the past few weeks has been extremely rewarding. We really are looking forward to getting a little more support and a few more horses to race so that we can show what we are capable of, but in the meantime we are getting up and doing the hard work and milking that cow ourselves so to speak!
Our Kitty Barney who has a huge following has settled in well after his first week and it feels like we’ve had him our whole lives. He is such a character and has fitted right in.
We also managed to get a new lead pony named Hugo Boss and you’ll see lots of pictures of him on our social media. He is there to lead the string of horses and be the trainers hack in time. He really is beautiful.
It was a nail biting Sunday with the Premier League coming to an end and the last day never disappoints. Great result for Leeds and Man City. Man City showed their class coming back to win after being down and gone and Leeds fought hard and stayed up. I was particularly excited about Leeds, as I have some good friends and family who would not have taken going down too well, so I’m happy for them. Well done.
There are as always lots of sales ahead and we are looking for a few horses to join us and any support is welcomed and will be much appreciated. We have open boxes and space for more horses.
I leave you with this last thought; a little progress each day, adds up to big results.
As always, until next Mondays blog, stay in touch with daily updates following our social media.