It was very frustrating to lose the Musselburgh card on Monday, as that had been our target for Lady Mendoza for some time. When we lost that meeting, we decided to give her an entry at Ayr (Thursday) just to keep our options open. We wanted to leave it as late as possible to decide whether to declare her or not, so we could track the declarations and see how strong the competition was going to be. I did suspect it would be a very strong race, as we hadn’t had any jump racing up north for a while, so there were plenty of trainers with nice horses wanting to run.

When it became apparent that the Ayr race was going to be a strong contest, we opted to bypass that and look towards the races over the festive period. We have given her two entries on Boxing Day – the 11.45 at Newcastle and the 11.52 at Wetherby - so it will just be a case of monitoring conditions, and other horses who might be entered in the same race. We’d like to find the most winnable opportunity we can for her, so although the racing over Christmas is very competitive, hopefully she can get her head in front and get off the mark for us.

She’s been in good form at home. We’ve had her cantering away, and will look to do some more fast work with her this week to get her nice and fit ready for her run. We took the opportunity to give her her flu jab last week when the racing was off, so she’s come out of that all fine, and we can now look forward with her.

Hopefully later this week, we’ll have some more definitive news about where she’ll be going next, so we’ll keep everybody updated.

Rebecca Menzies