Japan, November 2024

Less then 24 hours after touching down in the U.K after Del Mar I retuned to Heathrow to depart for Japan. First on the agenda was making my way across country via a bullet train to shoe Charyn for the upcoming Kyoto Mile Championship. A special thankyou must go to the JRA for their help in gaining me access to the quarantine facility where as you would expect the guideline are very strict. All tools used had to be listed and weighted prior to their departure with the horse a week earlier.

Afterwards I flew to Hokkaido in the North Island to begin a ten day stint with Northern Farm that would comprise of three different locations spread around Japan. The trip was a wonderful opportunity to see for myself the structure and scale of the organisation and how the Japanese racing and breeding structure works. It’s quite different in many ways to what I’m used to in the U.K, especially in relation to the interaction between horses in full and pre-training.