PEPAY LE PUGH

The Bastiman case told us that these trainers are giving horses stuff that perks them right up (legal or not). Imo that's what happened here. The horse is just full of himself. Lay next time if there's any decent oppo imo. The short-term Skeltons.

I thought Dennis was a decent trainer maybe not that good

Just more honest than them, lets face it, it wouldn't be hard.

got good facilities dennis i went there once

PEPPAY LE PUGH, who finished second on five consecutive occasions for David Dennis earlier this year, got off the mark at the 21st attempt on his first run for the Skelton yard, and could not have done it any more easily. He travelled strongly, taking it up approaching the turn in and was under restraint at the line.
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   ' .... got off the mark at the 21st attempt on his first run for the Skelton yard,'

Something not kosher, here.

It stinks to high heav e,

ALL the horse suddenly improving for moving to the Skeltons.

They cannot ALL have previously been with incompetent trainers

I simply cannot have it.

Been on the game for decades - and have never seen anything like this before - other than ...

Ken PAYNE - and his 2-year-olds ... and he was eventually seen off by the Jockey Club - and -

Martin Pipe - and I still don't buy that genius title...

He, too, in his early days, could get complete Donkeys to run through brick walls ... same as this scenario

speed horse..easier to conserve energy over fences, part. when jumping as soundly as he has..that is all imo

Pipes always turned up hard trained and as fit as fire.

looky thought 7/4 the field was easy money..

Been on the game for decades

Thank you for that image of you in short skirt, fishnet stockings and mascara. Put me right off my stride.

The difference with Pipe was that he offered plausible explanations for his success. Not just the weighbridge and the swimming pool and the Canadian hay and the on-site blood testing (which were virtually unknown elsewhere at the time), but the fact he was giving his horses series of short, uphill gallops over the same familiar strip every day. As Tim Forster remarked, after finally, reluctantly accepting an invitation to visit Pipe's yard: all these years, when he'd been searching every day for new, long-distance canters for his horses, he'd been doing it completely wrong - they're cattle, they want familiarity and consistency.

Even the way the woodchips were mashed for the gallop was different, meaning no hold-ups in freezing weather.

The point is, Pipe was offering an explanation for the way his front-runners never stopped galloping, and everyone else ended up copying it.

yeah but you could say the skeltons are young, on the ball, ambitious, lots of money behind them, great facilities etc.

both at it in my opinion. JMO

There's no end of trainers who've offered a list of advantages like that, but their horses found it no easier to get their head in front than anybody else's did. Add 'a bit of a porker' to that list, and you it would be impossible to tell the difference between D Skelton and P Chapple-Hyam. Except in terms of how horses run for them.

I'm not for one second claiming I know for certain that Pipe was never 'at it'. But he did continually and openly offer good reasons why he needn't have been. I've never seen the Skelton yard even hinting at anything as radically different going on at their place which could explain what happens to horses which enter it.

1...............Pipe was offering an explanation for the way his front-runners never stopped galloping, and everyone else ended up copying it.'
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Apart from his son - seemingly.

Isn't a post like this usually the cue for Pipe to start sending out winners? On the other hand, with two winners from nine runners in the last 14 days, at SPs of 3/1 and 14/1, he's probably not too downcast with how things are going at the moment anyway.

The whole point though is that the son is doing the same things his father did. It's just that everyone else is too, including David Dennis. What we'd like to know is what the great big extra thing is that D Skelton is adding to the mixture. With no hint whatsoever as to what it might be, I just feel like I'm having the p1ss taken if I assume that all they're getting fed is clean hay and a bag of Dodson & Horrell.

^   'I just feel like I'm having the p1ss taken if I assume that all they're getting fed is clean hay and a bag of Dodson & Horrell.'
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Could not have put it  better

As I posted earlier ...

'I simply cannot have it.'

if pipe senior was using sth and it got knocked on the head it would explain why pipe jnr doesnt do as well. The authorities catch up eventually.

Fair enough.

Neither of us could know for certain. It's just that with plenty of plausible explanations on offer for MC Pipe's success in improving horses, I never felt I was being taken for an idiot the way I do when I look at how horses moving to D Skelton run.

Put it this way: I used to happily back horses who'd moved to Pipe, because I could understand how and why they'd improve; the man himself kept emphasizing how he did it and how everyone else was in the dark ages (even if there really were more to it than he let on).

With these Skelton nags, on the other hand, I just have to leave the race alone. I can't either back or oppose them when I haven't a clue what might really be going on. I'd either be backing them with blind faith or laying them in naive ignorance, and that's surely no way to pull the punters in to the sport.

^     ' With these Skelton nags...   either be backing them with blind faith or laying them in naive ignorance,...'
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Excellent analogy

One point I feel that I must outline - re father Pipe - is though.

He, too, was getting/claiming disappointing, and often dreadful, donkeys from other yards ... primarily out of the many more Sellers and Claiming races that there were in those days.

Whilst  you could say - and he would claim - that his 'interval Training' 'turned these horses around' ....

Just how many times was he galloping these donkeys in the, often, only a fortnight or 3 weeks that it took from the Seller/Claimer run, to the immediate success for Pipe?

Many must, therefore, have been on the Treadmill - set on full bore - for 23 hours a day to get them so EXTRA 'FIT', in so short a period on time

You only had to look at the same horse in the paddock, before and after, to see what he was doing in those three weeks. For the first time in their lives they were being exercised in a way that turned that bit of flesh that hung either side of the girth strap on every other trainer's horses back into tight muscle. You can do that with three weeks of interval training after the months of what was basically steady pre-training which everyone else was giving their horses.

The first thing a horse did when it entered the Pipe yard, even before it was given a box, was stand on the weighbridge. No one else even had a weighbridge. Trainer after trainer insisted their eye was a better judge of a horse's fitness than a set of scales. And they carried on insisting that was the case for years.

You couldn't do that three-week turnaround now, though, because everyone is already exercising their horses the Pipe way.