Every break for rain during the tennis at Wimbledon this week was also a cause for concern for many in the world of horse racing. Sandown Park, which will stage the Eclipse Stakes on Saturday afternoon, is a mere 10 miles from the home of English tennis, just the other side of Kingston upon Thames, and officials here had been hoping for a dry week because parts of the track were under standing water last weekend, the result of one of the wettest Junes on record.
So it is remarkable that Saturday’s action may take place on a surface not much slower than good going, depending on who you talk to. There is hope that this historic race, supposedly a signifier of midsummer, might be something like a test of speed, rather than being reduced to a question of which beast can slog it for longest through the quagmire, as so many other Flat races have been this year.
Time Test is, by common consent, the Eclipse runner most in need of drying conditions. His trainer, Roger Charlton, is reconciled to the fact that he will not get the good to firm he was hoping for but will run him anyway. Having skipped other races because of soft going, the Time Test team have reached the point where they are now simply determined to pull the trigger.
It has been irritating for Charlton to see his plans disrupted by such sustained bad weather but that mood was giving way to something like hope after he walked the course on Friday and improved again after he won a Listed contest with Ayrad. Punters appeared to share that feeling, since Time Test shortened a point on Friday to 7-2 second-favourite behind Aidan O’Brien’s The Gurkha.
“The first two in the betting are rated very similar,” Charlton said. “The official handicapper has got them 1lb apart. Timeform, similar. Maybe we have a slight advantage of not having had a hard race 17 days ago. Who can tell? We’ll see.”
Time Test has not been short of fans since he was such a flashy winner at Royal Ascot last year, on ground officially described as good to firm. The general view that he needs ground like that is based also on his disappointing effort in the Juddmonte International but there might have been other contributing factors beyond the good-to-soft surface and his devotees point out that he won his maiden, at Sandown, on good to soft back in 2014.
While Charlton acknowledged that line of thought, he went on: “I just know he’s a very good horse on fast ground and it would inconvenience the others, perhaps, if it was fast, or they wouldn’t show up. My Dream Boat wouldn’t run, would he, if it was good to firm and maybe not The Gurkha, I don’t know.”
The Beckhampton trainer felt the track was a mix of soft and good, with the worst of the ground around the turn from the back straight. “There are parts where the stick goes in two or three inches and there are parts where it goes in six inches.
“[The jockey] George Baker said it was riding softer than it walks. Up the straight’s pretty good. It’s in good nick. You pay your money and take your chance, don’t you, really? There’s nothing I can do about it.”
The rain came on again as Charlton left the course but it was no more than a 90-second shower. Andrew Cooper, the much-respected clerk of the course here, reported that sporadic rain during the day amounted to no more than 1mm and little more is expected on Saturday, with the going likely to remain good to soft, good in places.
That is a much better outcome than Cooper dared hope for eight days ago, when the course took 45mm overnight for the second time in a week. All in all, Sandown had five inches of rainfall last month, making it the second worst June since he came here in 1997.
“The first storm, we actually coped with quite well,” Cooper said. “There was no immediate issues at all after that. But I think some of the drains and the system as a whole was still coping with some of that a week later when we got another one and that really did tip us over the edge.
“It was actually almost a mini flood across the bend. Where we were planning to run the Coral-Eclipse was under about six or seven inches of water.”
By means of some cunning rail movements, Cooper will steer the Eclipse field around the worst of the mire, using ground that was not raced on on Friday. Jockeys when asked reported the ground rode a bit slower than the official going description, while those who study race-times concluded it was actually a shade faster. Time Test fans must hope that those with the stopwatches are proved right.
