Bay At Bangor

Shallow Bay is the stable runner this evening at Bangor in the conditional jockeys' handicap hurdle.  He was a decent flat performer and boasts plenty of good placed form over timber - he will be partnered by Tom Bellamy who takes a very useful 8lbs off his back.  Our conditional is getting a quite a few opportunities now and his claim is particularly useful to reduce the burden of runners with plenty of weight.  There are four other meetings on this afternoon with action from Musselburgh, Yarmouth and Ffos Las on the flat and another jumps card at Ffos Las.

I see that it is former jockey Mark Perrett's 50th birthday today.  Mark rode plenty of winners for Martin during his career and he must be one of the few jockeys to have ridden a Cheltenham Festival winner, plus a winner at Royal Ascot.  Do you know the names of them?  The answers will appear in this column tomorrow if James in our office knows the name of them!  Mark also rode a Scottish National winner for the yard when producing an inspired effort aboard Run For Free.

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Talk about give a horse a good name...Only Ten Percent, owned by football agent Barry Silkman won yesterday on the all-weather at Southwell - Silkman backed his horse at 7/1, but it's SP was 15/2 - it sounds to me as though that has cost him almost 10%!

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Maybe England's cricketers have been beating second rate opposition?  They were absolutely stuffed by the South Africans in the first test match yesterday - some of our players seemed to think that it was a limited overs game and not a five day match...where is Geoffrey Boycott when you need him?  Watching CSI if his interview on Radio 5 last week was anything to go by - the Yorkshire legend was in the middle of an interview when he decided that his favourite show had started and promptly cut the interview short leaving the presenter talking to a dead telephone line - I had never witnessed anything like it before.

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Just in case you have been living on another planet for the last few months, there isn't long now until the start of the Olympics.  When I was just a kid I always remember looking forward to the games.  I don't seem to be so excited about them these days - it must be my age!