Martin Dixon of the Horse Watchers reflects on the operation’s season following big wins in the Golden Mile with Rhoscolyn and Great St Wilfrid with Intervention.

We’re heading towards numerically our best year in terms of winners as we’ve had 28 so far and our highest was 34 in 2023.

We’ve run 24 horses in total, and there have been 15 individual winning horses. Four of those 24 have only run once, so 15 of the 20 horses we’ve run more than once have won.

We’ve won the Lady Wulfruna listed race and the Lincoln Trial Handicap, which was a really good day at Wolverhampton when we had a double in the spring, and then the Golden Mile and the Great St Wilfrid are two significant handicap races that we’ve landed and won really good prize-money.

To win a listed race and two big summer handicaps, as well as some handicaps with nice prize-money along the way, is as good as we could hope for with the type of horses we buy. It’s been an excellent year.

I’d be lying if I said we expected Rhoscolyn and Intervention – two of the old guard – to win the Golden Mile and Great St Wilfrid at the start of the season, but equally they are horses that never really surprise you because they’ve won so many races. If you put them in under the right circumstances with the right conditions, it never really surprises you when they win, for all they might go off at big prices, because they are solid, reliable handicappers that win regularly. There was a lot of satisfaction.

For Rhoscolyn the stars aligned and he got his ground at Goodwood, and with Intervention it was a bit of a last-minute decision to run him. The entries shut at midday on the Monday and I was looking at the entries tracker ten minutes beforehand and it looked like he was guaranteed to get a run and it wasn’t as strong as quite a lot of the other top-end sprint handicaps. We decided to put him in and got the jockey [William Pyle] sorted early because he had a light weight. The draw was fortunate for him as he’s at his best when able to dominate and because he was drawn in stall 1 it fractured the field in a perfect way for him – he essentially ended up in a small-field race of his own (replay below).

In between those wins it was really good to get Royal Zabeel winning on the grass at Newmarket as it showed he’s not just an all-weather horse. He won off a big rating in a reasonably competitive handicap and showed that he could be just as effective on the grass. In his subsequent race at Goodwood, Royal Zabeel was drawn wide and probably ended up a bit too close to the pace, but he actually went strongly and looked like he was still well handicapped. He got a bit tired in the end having been close to a hot tempo, but he ran well again.

Looking ahead

We’re looking forward to Different Tone who is with Rebecca Menzies. He had one start for us with Ed Walker in 2023 when he finished second at Chelmsford to Kyle of Lochalsh who has become a very high-end staying handicapper and won well at Goodwood recently.

Different Tone had a tendon injury after that race and has had to miss a long time. We moved him to Rebecca because she was set up to keep the horse for the period he needed to be off the track and is used to dealing with those injuries because she has a lot of jumps horses. He’s now back in full work and we’re looking forward to running him in October.

We’ve got three horses we bought at the July sale. Hostility has already run and will be running through the next few months and into the all-weather season, and then there’s Moonjid and Latona. Latona is declared for Lingfield on Saturday but unfortunately she has a bad draw, while Moonjid might go to Carlisle on Monday and there’s also the possibility of him going for the Leger legends race at Doncaster after that.

Plans are afoot for the new horses, which is always something to look forward to, and it will be a case of trying to plot the right path with the old guard to hopefully win more races and get us past that 34-winner target for the year.

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