At The Races

This morning Tom was a guest of Matt Chapman on ATR's Racing Forum. He had a horrible journey to the studio at Old Street because the Sunday train service from Hungerford to Paddington was non existent and he was worried about the affect of the London Marathon on the traffic in central London. So having lost time waiting on the platform in Hungerford he ended up driving to Hammersmith and getting the tube through to the City. Having planned to arrive with over an hour in hand, enough time to compose himself, he only arrived with minutes to spare.

Whilst Matt was generally very kind to him he did ask a number of searching questions about Tom's attitude to various issues like the level of prize money, the 'cleanliness' of the sport, the fairness of Tony Dobbin's last winner on Thursday and asked Tom to identify a sure-fire winner in 2008. He named Flying River, the 2yo he bought for his staff to share, as the most certain one to find its way to the winner's enclosure.

It was great to see clips of Tom's race riding days including winning rides on Caracol and Oliver Cromwell. Tom paid tribute to Martin Pipe for the skills, experience and training he gained whilst at Pond House and said that he had no intention of taking up training himself until he worked with Mike De Kock in Dubai and was hugely motivated to take up training by the quality of horses Mike had under his care.