For someone who hasn't used my knowledge, we are of similar mind.  I don't usually play in the handicaps, they are absolute minefields. The Ascot Stakes is over the Gold Cup trip and it's dominated by jumps trainers and horses. The money has come for Willie Mullins's horse MY LYKA with Ryan Moore on top. When he raced in France he was fourth in the Grand Prix de Chantilly, albeit beaten 10 lengths, but Group form in a handicap is hard to ignore. I prefer the Chester Cup third ZANNDABAD (like you). The Wolferton is very trappy. I like BOTANICAL on form but the ground is a big concern while BOLD DISCOVERY has the form but also has a 5 lb penalty for a Group 3 win. My idea of an each way shout is ASTRO KING at 14s. The Copper Horse over 2800m is one of the new handicaps - KYLE OF LOCHALSH is declared as a reserve in this which is why he's been allowed to be doubly declared but he will almost certainly go for the longer race unless two or three frop it of this one. I agree it's a pain. My each way play here would be INTINSO for the Gosdens again around 14s. He was behind BAGUE D'OR (first reserve) at Newmarket this time but is 4 lb better off for a couple of lengths and I think the extra 400m will help.

The Ascot and the Copper Horse are both handicaps, the Wolferton is a Listed.  The Coventry is a Group 2 but the gap between that and the three Group 1 races is significant. I don't know why the Queen Anne carries roughly 10% more prize money than the King Charles III and the St James's Palace.  The two most valuable races of the week are the Prince of Wales on Wednesday and the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee on Saturday with first prize pots of £567,000 (that's only just over NZ$ 1 million) so compare that with your top races let alone the top Aussie races and it's embarrassing.

At Riccarton on the 10/11/54 Glenlee ridden by Clem Bowry won R3 the NZ Oaks and her full sister Glenkay won R4 the Metropolitan Handicap ridden by Brian Wood.

You will see the stable junior driving the horse most starts so there are a few conditions that come with the deal .

That's a bargain Dynamite 

There's a shortage of jumps riders not jumpers.

He has a handy one called Red Lion in Hong Kong also... a multiple group performer that ran a GR.1 2nd in the Champions Mile last start.

The comments recently have been all over the place, from no comments to the shit aussie 20m 6th from 12 starters shit to ran on from back.  I backed Vow And Declare win and top4 on Saturday, comment gave him no chance. I saw his previous race and in my opinion he was just warming up over the 2000m on a sift track ,which he is not suited to. Saturdays race was 2200m on a Good 4. Last start on a Good 4 he finished 4th (flying) at Flemington (Cascadians last win before retiring). The only thing that surprised me was why he wasn't in the 2 mile race earlier in the day. (Being a Melbourne Cup winner might put his weight too high?).

I totally agree and have never bet on his horse - didn't pick up on the time Peter Davis drove him. But conversely heaps to be made off George Eliot. Likewise their are plenty of professional driver that aren't worth a pie either and usually it comes down to respect on the track as to what sort of run you are going to get. We all know or should know the drivers that have earnt the respect and will be given the lead but more importantly we know the ones who have no respect and have to rely entirely on luck or horsepower

Frankel has been acknowledged to be an elite sire for so long now that it’s easy to forget the brouhaha that once attended every stage of his second career at stud.   Never in my professional lifetime has a horse’s progress as a stallion been monitored so obsessively. In fact, after he retired to Banstead Manor Stud in 2013 the Racing Post launched Frankel Watch. No pressure there, then.   A double-page splash around the first day of the breeding season marked the fact that he had settled into his new surroundings, had already shown an appetite for the job at hand by successfully covering a test mare, and was about to be mated properly for the first time with the great Midday that morning.   Just over a fortnight later, the news of the first mare in foal to Frankel – Coolmore’s dual Group 3 winner Chrysanthemum – was eagerly reported across the racing and bloodstock media.   But that wasn’t enough to slake the thirst of racing fans for Frankel news so soon after the charismatic colt had retired unbeaten, recognised as possibly the best racehorse of all time.    There was no way they would be able to wait until the following year when the mares would foal for the next update on their hero, and so Juddmonte’s then general manager Philip Mitchell kindly and patiently spelt out the details of the young sire’s debut breeding season to Racing Post readers that July.   He reported that Frankel had covered 133 mares and that, of those, 126 had been scanned in foal at a rate of 95 per cent. The figure was all the more impressive for the fact that six of the seven mares not in foal had been pregnant before suffering early foetal deaths.   His stellar first book had included 38 Group or Grade 1 winners and 26 dams of Group or Grade 1 winners, with two mares, Zee Zee Top and Zomaradah, fitting in both categories. Juddmonte had sent him 24 of its own mares.   Soon after came news of the first mares being covered to southern-hemisphere time in Newmarket that summer, including John Singleton’s top-class pair More Joyous and More Strawberries, and a few months later came the announcements of the in-foal European mares being catalogued for the breeding-stock sales.   One was Chrysanthemum, who was knocked down to Haras Don Alberto for 800,000gns at Tattersalls that December, although she was upstaged at the auction by Oaks heroine Dancing Rain, who also had a positive pregnancy to the dual world champion, and was sold to Godolphin for 4,000,000gns.   Frankel Watch resumed in 2014 with the arrival of the first foal, a bay colt out of the by-then household name Chrysanthemum, at Coolmore on January 11. A scramble ensued to procure pictures of the world-famous newborn.   That was only the first male progeny, though; clearly a separate report was needed when the sire’s first filly, a daughter of the well-bred Sadler’s Wells mare Song, was born at the National Stud a short time afterwards. Photos of her were widely circulated.   Proud breeders continued to dripfeed news of bonny Frankel foals being born in the early months of 2014. A particularly sweet picture of Danedream doting on her freshly born filly took up most of the front page of the Racing Post one day that January, demoting an important industry story about FOBTs to a narrow strip.   At that point, most people had seen only selected pictures of Frankel foals, but that all changed in June when it was revealed that Qatar Racing would sell a colt out of Crystal Gaze with his dam at the inaugural Goffs London Sale. As recalled in Friday’s Good Morning Bloodstock, footage of the pair being sold made the BBC News at Ten. They really were heady times for racing.   The sale of the Crystal Gaze colt did little to dampen enthusiasm for the bulk of the commercially bred Frankel foals who came under the hammer later in the year, although many experts at the sales gave them a bit of a tepid reception. The filly out of Finsceal Beo topped the Goffs November Foal Sale at €1.8 million, at least.   Frankel Watch in 2015 concerned itself with the second-crop foals – yes, in this case, even they were newsworthy – and the first yearlings to go through the ring. Again, the market’s surprising coolness towards them was a major talking point of the time, although the €1.7m sale of a filly out of Alexander Goldrun at Goffs provided some welcome headlines.   The excitement surrounding Frankel’s first two-year-olds was already incredibly high in the spring of 2016 and it was cranked up to 11 when his very first runner, Chrysanthemum’s son Cunco, won on debut for John Gosden at Newbury in mid-May, despite acting a little coltily in the preliminaries.    A first stakes winner came not long after, when Juddmonte homebred Fair Eva bolted up in the Princess Margaret Stakes at Ascot in July, and a debut top-level scorer was recorded before the end of the year, as Soul Stirring, a Japanese-foaled daughter of Stacelita, took the Hanshin Juvenile Fillies.   In the following year Soul Stirring also became Frankel’s first Classic winner in the Yushun Himba (Japanese Oaks). Later in 2017 Cracksman, who had gone close in the Derby and Irish Derby, became the sire’s first European Group 1 winner in the Champion Stakes.  He became champion sire in Britain and Ireland for the first time in 2021, and regained his crown last year, when Cracksman supplied the unbeaten champion Ace Impact from his own first crop.   Seven years and 140 black-type winners since Fair Eva – Delius became the latest when scoring decisively in the Prix du Lys at Chantilly yesterday – Frankel is no longer scrutinised as a sire. It is now taken for granted that he is an outstanding source of top-class horses and will likely be a breed-shaper.   There was one more significant landmark he passed yesterday, though, as Sparkling Plenty became his first Group 1 winner as broodmare sire with a smooth victory in the Prix de Diane for Patrice Cottier.    Jean-Pierre Dubois’ homebred filly is by Frankel’s studmate Kingman and is a sister to Jersey Stakes winner Noble Truth out of Speralita, a half-sister to multiple Group 1 scorer Stacelita, who provided another of Frankel’s ground-breakers in Soul Stirring.   Sparkling Plenty could evoke memories of Frankel’s early days as a sire again today, as she is set to go under the hammer at the Goffs London Sale, which was illuminated by the sire’s first sales foal a decade ago this year.   Frankel’s brilliance as a sire, and his potential importance as a sire of sires and broodmare sire, is heartily deserved for Juddmonte, who launched the career of its own son this year, Chaldean, and will have a stockpile of daughters to breed from now and in future.   The late Khalid Abdullah’s operation was, after all, so open and generous in sharing Frankel with his fans and bloodstock industry enthusiasts after he retired out of the public eye 12 years ago.    The team at Banstead Manor Stud went over and above in sharing news, pictures and videos of the horse, with even a few lighthearted moments here and there. I particularly enjoyed Frankel wielding a broom, cheering on Britain’s curling team at the Winter Olympics in 2014. Even now, Frankel's handler Rob Bowley will happily help visitors to the farm take a selfie with their hero.   Admittedly, the Racing Post’s Frankel Watch sometimes felt a little OTT, recording his every mating and movement and then the actions of all his early progeny in the ring and on the track too.   But looking back now, I miss it.   It seemed to unite everyone in cheering for a common cause (except a few Sea The Stars loyalists, although they and Frankel fans really don’t need to be mutually exclusive). Better that than the constant snark and self-congratulation seen on social media these days.    There are still some diehards conducting their own Frankel Watch on Facebook and Twitter, like those Japanese soldiers who kept on fighting in the jungle long after the end of World War Two, and I salute them. Their love of the horse is what racing and breeding should all be about. P.S. Thank you Martin Stevens for allowing me to copy and paste. The photo is of our Joan the punter in the competitions.

How often do we see Ads on TV promoting Wellbeing? Yet we are now Bombarded with Ads promoting Taxpayers funding slime making huge sums with 'Vaccines that don't work, don't give any reasonable long term efficacy and create adverse reactions that are long term and potentially life threatening ...cancer rates are rising and these peopke pushing mammograms and screening with 50% at best results are taking breasts off Women that could keep them..... wake up, it's YOUR call make better decisions

Planks the Guy who pushed Masks  in NZ which are proven to be BULLSHIT. ... If you believe anything Plank says from Now that's your problem

George Simon said at Te Rapa, that Nabba also had a nasty fall at the trials last week, I agree a week off race riding might be a very good idea.

Get that Pertu$$i$ Vaccine into you. Got to be good for you

What happens? Legal loopholes protect all those who rely on the system... Laboratories  funded by the very people producing the dodgy therapeutics thrust upon those ultimately suffering after paying for their use through governments 'supposedly' answering to medical experts funded by Billys Boys...Wanker... You need to watch The Corbett Report Who is Wanker Gates

Health New Zealand Capital, Coast and Hutt Valley has reported an increase in Covid-19 cases in recent weeks , Hospital and specialist services group director operations Jamie Duncan said a dedicated ward was opened to accommodate Covid-19 inpatients . This is the first time the hospital has had a dedicated Covid-19 clinical area since 2021, Duncan said.  Covid-19 modeller Professor Michael Plank has said the country’s sixth wave is likely close to its peak but a tricky new variant already accounting for a third of cases could see it roll on into winter. The latest Ministry of Health figures showed there were 5230 reported cases of the virus nationally over the week to June 9, along with 354 cases in hospital and 20 virus-attributed deaths.  

After taking Fortus to the rail last Wednesday a week off would be the smart move

All these issues arise from using standing starts to handicap horses. There are alternatives. We could adopt what the French do or we could lead the world by developing a mobile HCP system using technology (lasers etc). Why keep using a 100 year old method?

I watched that race as well, with the two horses out the back I thought it must have been a handicap race, it was not where I would have expected to see unruly horses, at no time were they actually lined up and standing. It used to be that there were only two reasons to be on the unruly, 1- the stipes sent you there as punishment for bad behavior, 2- trainers request, to get you away from the tape and have more room to get balanced and gaited without horses from behind unsettling you. Now we have a third reason, you don't want a stand, you want a mobile, and the starter and R?B will let you get away with it! The only horse that came close to a stand was the 1 horse, the outside 3 or 4 horse were one length in front of the inside horses on release, it's a misrepresentation to even call it a standing start. 

The two trainers I own horses with in Sydney are both set monthly fees all inclusive ….. $2200 per month