Equinties - St Leger day 1

Gm Equinauts

One of our favourite and most profitable meetings gets underway today, Doncaster’s St Leger Festival.

Today see’s a little juice in the ground after the recent rainfall with conditions expected to quicken as the sun shines later this week.

Let’s dive in.

HEADLINE ROUNDUP

AIDAN RIDING SATURDAY

A crude headline to start the day but a funny one - ex-pro jump jockey Aidan Coleman is dating the third fittest singer from The Saturdays, Una Healy.

Previously enjoying three-ways overseas with David Hayes, Una has now made her romance with Coleman public by posting several photos of them on a cruise on to her socials.

In contrary to the old adage ‘once you go black you never go back’, Aidan really couldn’t be more opposite to the former heavy weight David Hayes. There’s about 50kilos difference between the pair but he’s clearly putting his riding skills to good use as they look very happy!

And Racing X is having a ball with it:

GOLIATH PLAN

While the debate rages on about whether geldings should run in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, one thing is for certain - GOLIATH will not be running in the race.

There’s no chance that the rules will be changed for the 2024 race, and even if they did, connections have given their King George winner a route through the second-half of the season that could see him end up in Japan.

Next week’s Group 1 Preis von Europa in Cologne is set to be his first reappearance since Ascot before hopefully taking up the target of the Japan Cup on November 24th.

This means he will miss a return to Ascot on Champions Day, which is a small shame as it’s really exciting to see what he’ll do going forward.

On a pure paper basis, beating BLUESTOCKING, SUNWAY, REBEL’S ROMANCE, AUGUSTE RODIN et al is really good form but whether it was a flash in the pan performance will be put to the test soon, and that’s the beauty of racing.

"The main objective is the Japan Cup and the timing of the Preis von Europa is not bad from that point of view if we want to run him again before Tokyo,” said trainer Francis Henri Graffard.

"I'm not sure there's a perfect prep race because the Japan Cup is around a left-handed track. We would have run in the Foy only if he was going to take in the Champion Stakes in between and I didn't want to do that, I [would] prefer to concentrate on Japan."

Exciting times for what is a very interesting horse.

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