WELCOME

Welcome to our Strong Flavours Catering Raceday.

For those of you who are unsure, Strong Flavours are our caterers and have been a for a good few years now. They’ve been excellent partners and alongside working closely with ourselves, they do hospitality at theatres, fine dining, event catering and a vast array of weddings – we’d be happy to recommend them very highly and hope Nick, Graham, Leo and all their guests have a fantastic day with us today.

Speaking of fantastic, I think that is an appropriate word to describe one of our team members in Tommy Churchyard who is departing after today and heading off for pastures new. He’s been a great credit to himself and grown into the role superbly. He’s a big loss to the team here, but we wish him every success both in his new role and future career.

And in a similar vein, I’d like to wish Craig Staddon every success in his role as Chief Executive here at Plumpton – he’ll undoubtedly be great and there is a quality team behind him and so I’m sure that things are only likely to improve! Officially I don’t leave until February 27th, but we’ve been working together for a couple of weeks now and so this will be my last official “Welcome” before handing over the reins. I’d like to say a huge thank you to all the staff, both Plumpton’s full-time staff and casual staff, our partners and the Board for all the support I’ve had throughout my tenure which has hopefully resulted in Plumpton being a good place to go for the last 5 years.

Swiftly moving onto today and what looks a pretty good card. Luckily we have been able to have the option of watering in the lead up to this fixture, but it is not something that we really want to be doing in any way at the beginning of February! There is plenty of moisture underneath and so it is just the top section of the surface drying out, so you have to be quite delicate in not over watering and be being quite strategic about it but Marcus and the team have, as ever, done a great job on this front maintaining predominantly Good ground, with some Good to Soft in places. Our feature is the £23k Novice Handicap Chase and it has a rating of 0-125. Of the 6 runners, 4 of the 6 are rated above 120 (in fact 3 are rated exactly 125!) and so for the grade, it is as good a race as you could hope for really. The question we all have to ponder is, which of them is ahead of their mark today?

It was also some high class stuff at Newbury on Saturday and whilst undoubtedly some trainers want to use it as a stepping stone to Cheltenham, it was a quality day of action on its own with over £376k in prize money. We were also nicely represented in the biggest race (Betfair Hurdle) as of the 17 runners, 4 had strong connections with Plumpton with Glory And Fortune, Highway One O Two and Aucunrisque having all won good races here, whilst Master Chewy was a game second to the exciting Hansard this season. So it was with absolute delight we saw Aucunrisque battle it out and take the victory for Chris Gordon and Nick Scholfield, but also for Julian Head who is such a great supporter of ours – I’d say I hope they enjoyed it but with those connections, we absolutely know they did! It just goes to show that you do see some real quality on our hallowed turf, we just don’t always know how good until the future comes!

And so to the future! Thank you for supporting me during my tenure and please support Craig during his – its been a pleasure and I hope you all have a fantastic day’s racing.

Best Wishes,

Dan

Dan Thompson Chief Executive