Passing Of Bryan Westcott

We were all extremely saddened to hear of the passing of Bryan Westcott at the weekend.  Brian was a well known and respected racing personality in the west country and he and his wife Ilva ran the South West Racing Club for many years.  They would work tirelessly and dedicated their time and energy into giving great enjoyment to many people.  Bryan organised numerous trips through the years, including a visit to France with a certain David Pipe (then aged nine) and they were always popular and well received.

Bryan was also involved in the ownership of Flying Officer who won four races and gave us a great day when taking us to Royal Ascot in 1983 - sadly he didn't win, although we were successful in the race with Right Regent.  More recently Bryan and Ilva owned winning hurdler Idian Mix and they were enthusiastic and gracious owners to have in the yard.

Bryan will be sadly missed by all of those that he has given so much enjoyment to throughout the years and his passing is a great loss to the racing fraternity in the South West of England.

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I think we had more rain in the west country than I can ever remember yesterday...well, that is what it seemed like anyway!  They had 26 millimeters of the wet stuff at Pond House and I see that Ascot are expecting plenty more rain yet ahead of the Royal meeting that kicks off tomorrow.  If the ground does turn up soft, I am sure that you will see a completely different set of results to what would otherwise have been the case.  The two year old races will be particularly difficult to unravel as most of them will never have experienced such conditions - let's hope it doesn't get too wet otherwise it will make a mess of all the ladies outfits.

Talking of Royal Ascot, I see that there were 40,000 packets of white chocolate candy consumed at the meeting last year.  What I would like to know is, who counts all the packets and how do they know that they were all eaten?!

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I see that Steve "Yarmy" Dyble is suffering from injuries caused by a horse crushing him at Leicester on Saturday night.  Yarmy is a really nice man with a great sense of humour, and he is absolutely amazing with horses.  Indeed, he is the one that helps get tricky horses into the stalls and I'm sure that there will be one or two at Ascot this week that will miss him (including Frankel).  Let's hope that he recovers quickly.

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Former stable jockey and eight times champion Peter Scudamore is 53 years old today.  Peter still looks the same to me as he did when he was riding - many happy returns Scu!