Great to have you back Workrider, we need a little sanity here at the moment. He's been riding a few for Paul Nolan lately but that wouldn't necessarily help his cause as Paul's aren't finishing well for some reason.

Delighted for the lad.

It goes from bad to worse for the lad with the Potts horses announcement for Cheltenham.DT Hughes (RIP) passing was another thing that wasn't good for him.

I hope the guy gets on a few decent spare ones at the Festival and gets back up to somewhere near where he was.

A lot of people in the game don't appear to have forgiven him for taking the Giggy job....

Thanks to Sweeney in the Indo, on Jockeys...

After winning the RSA Chase on Presenting Percy, Davy Russell looked to the skies and held his hands up in tribute to his mother Phyllis, who died last week. Interviewed by ITV shortly afterwards, his tribute had an awkward unpolished sincere beauty about it which will stay in the mind for a long time.
No-one had more winners at the Festival than the man from Youghal who, as he closes in on 40, has never ridden better. The effort and strain of the jockey's life is carved in Russell's features more than most and watching his string of masterly performances I can't help remembering the abuse he got after apparently punching a horse at Tramore a few months ago.
Most of the social media outrage junkies who rounded on Russell probably hadn't even heard of him before the incident became a two-day wonder. He was the latest target for our modern equivalent of the Two Minutes Hate described by George Orwell in 1984. Once they'd finished venting their spleen against the jockey, they'd have moved on to the next bete noir. And Davy Russell? He'd have got back to work.

Are any sportsmen more subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than jockeys? Last year's Festival was expected to witness a big breakthrough for the under-rated Mark Walsh, selected to ride JP McManus's leading horses in the absence of the injured Barry Geraghty. It never happened, a fall in the opening race of day two saw Walsh ruled out of the remainder of the Festival where he had never ridden a winner. This year he scarcely figured in the previews.

If you'd told Mark Walsh on Wednesday morning that he'd break his Cheltenham duck in that day's Coral Cup, he'd hardly have believed you. He didn't even have a mount in the race. Yet the reshuffle prompted by the injury to Ruby Walsh saw his namesake handed Bleu Berry which he piloted expertly to victory at 16/1. Swings and roundabouts.

Ruby Walsh's injury underlined again the precarious nature of perhaps the only job in the world where an ambulance tails you as you go to work. Five years ago Bryan Cooper won three races at Cheltenham and the future seemed to belong to him. A cruel run of injuries has meant that this year the 25-year-old was merely a peripheral figure.

It really is the toughest trade. No matter how good they are, jockeys know that there is a pain schedule which has to be filled out in their career. Yet, interviewed as they line up at the start or as they've just finished, they are the most sanguine, the least precious and the best mannered of all professional sportsmen. They are a breed apart.

No it wasn't Punch, I was on the second, and was sure I'd won, on reflection it was a smasher of a ride from Bryan and he looked shocked when he was called the winner...

Wouldn't read Eamon Sweeney, I have seen him in a prior article concerning Douvan, admit that he doesn't know sh!t about racing and that the first meeting he had ever attended was last season when Douvan won the Hilly way in Mallow. More generally, his articles seem to consist of him making a tonne of bland virtue signalling statements ending with him taking some proprietorship about a cause the rest of us all understood the virtues of about 18 months ago. He is the drizzling sh!ts.

On topic, Cooper is door-nail dead career wise, there are people with 80-90% of his talent that are willing to hurt themselves to win. The beginning and end of it for me. He should go to England, do like Brian Hughes, Cooper could ride 200 winners per year mugging off the Northern jockeys. I think I'd crack 100 up there granted ordinary luck and my weight being in order.

Maybe he won't have to after all?,fine treble today.

I wish him all the best..