Joey Ramsden
The life of a travelling salesman is never easy and this restless salesman was in Durban last week. It was good to be there and see the horses.
At the moment, we have just a small string in KZN but we will bring the rest up when the trucks finish transporting all the National Yearling Sales horses. It is an unusually chilly and rainy day here today but is now starting to warm up and we are getting the Durban humidity again. We managed to gallop a couple of horses at Clairwood.
Ralph Smoute is very generous with his gallops and it is appreciated. The horses went well and I am looking forward to the season ahead. I promised I wasn’t going to be bitchy but I suppose he has to let us gallop as their top division races are not holding up.
They managed to lose two last week which is extremely frustrating. Unlike Maidens and buses, they don’t come round that often and can totally ruin one’s planning for the better horses which are aiming at the feature races.
It really is not fair. I have always maintained that if people saw you running in two and three runner races, they might get off their backsides and start leaving horses in. This way they won’t lose prize money and cheap races go elsewhere.
Funnily enough, it was one of the local trainers big gripe that we never left behind any top division horses and only brought rubbish. Sadly they have been proved wrong again. It is no good programming a horse when you are not guaranteed certain races to bring it forward.
Again the life of a travelling salesman is never easy. It is Johannesburg yearling sales time and I headed up on Sunday to Johannesburg. I went a day early due to the fact that I went back down to Cape Town in mid week for one day for an insolvency hearing with a former patron. This has dragged on far too long and needs to come to some sort of conclusion.
I am not prepared to put it off again just for the sake of an airfare – even though it really is quite a lot of money. I am looking forward to the next ten days being over. Yearling sales time is always tricky and it will be nice to get back into some sort of rhythm after travelling all over the show.
All the horses are doing well and my teams back home have been brilliant while I have been away. It has been fantastic to win feature races week after week and this is really what the game is all about.
