This year’s Breeders’ Cup looks set to excite suggests The Tout whilst he concludes that Tuesday’s memorial service for Sir Peter O’Sullvevan was a truly perfect sendoff
The Tout is still reeling from the loss of one of Chelsea’s last great residents, Sir Peter O’Sullevan, who was honored on home turf in Sydney Street on Tuesday. What a man and what a hero and how proud he would have been to have all of his friends there. The likes of Lester Piggott and the Head family from France all put in appearances and with prose from Hugh McIlvanney, Sir Terry Wogan, Joanna Lumley and Rory Bremner, Sir Peter was lauded just as he ought to have been. Arthur Moore summed this true gent up perfectly when he said: “ You loved the horses, you loved a bet, you loved the Irish and we loved you”.
Elsewhere, in a small corner of a foreign field, we reach the conclusion of the flat season in the coming days. It will be played out in Lexington, Kentucky — otherwise known as the “blue grass country” in honour of all of the great thoroughbreds who have been born, raised and flourished there — and it provides a genuinely unmissable spectacle.
Inevitably for regular readers we will focus on John Gosden and Frankie Dettori on Friday and Saturday in The Breeders’ Cup. On Friday Illuminate leads the charge for Dettori and Hannon and on Saturday we pray that Golden Horn, from the death draw in stall one, can round off an amazingly hard eight race campaign that has brought victories in The Derby and The Arc highlighted here in The Steeple Times throughout the year.
Life is fairly humdrum but this weekend will be a bright light at the end of an extraordinary flat racing season. Be sure not to miss it.
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Let’s hope our Sophie Doyle rides a winner with her American jockey license!