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Having declared The Way You Dance on good to firm ground the previous lunchtime, it was hoped that forecast rain would leave the ground no worse than good on the day of the race, but sadly this was not to be.

The rain started with the Surrey car of Phil, Peter, Sarah and Cath only just leaving the South East and a text from Gerald who was making his way up from Cheltenham with Susie confirmed that it was raining hard in the West as well!  Neil called at around 10.30am having spoken to the clerk of the course and we did discuss briefly whether to pull TWYD out of the race.  There were two problems with this, one was that the course had not yet officially altered the ground description (it was still being call good until after the first race!!!) and the second being that Neil was keen to get a novice handicap run in as this qualified TWYD to run in any handicap race in the future.  It was decided that we should run in the hope that TWYD would handle conditions, but if not that we would not give him a hard race.

Our group of 8 was completed by Anita and Ray and we all met in the bar / restaurant at the course where we took refuge from the heavy rain.

We were up in race two so we made our way to the pre parade to see TWYD saddled by Neil, Mike and Billy.  Neil was far from confident having walked the track as he thought it was genuinely soft ground.  Having tried to make other excuses for The Way You Dance’s previous performances on softer than good, there was some small degree of optimism as we sent Sean off to the start with instructions to settle on the inner and see how TWYD was enjoying it and to look after him if he was struggling..

It was unfortunately pretty obvious that struggling was the order of the day very early in the race.  Carrying his head very high, he was not fluent over the jumps and was never really going well.  Sean kept him going into the home straight but then pulled him up as he had no chance of making the places.

As we expected, Sean said that he had hated the ground and could not jump out of it and that TWYD had tired very quickly.  A disappointing outcome given that hopes were high earlier in the week, but no long terms damage done and we can come back when the ground is more suitable.