THURSDAY at Punchestown this week provided conditions that were definitely more Shackleton than spring-like. I love the festival but cannot remember being colder than I was for parts on Thursday. If Richie Galway and his team there decide to follow Lansdowne Road and Highbury by selling the naming rights to a commercial enterprise, it was a perfect opportunity to pitch to those local operations Kildare Chilling or QK Cold Stores.

On occasions such as this, it must be impossible to judge the best dressed lady because most of the contestants look as if they have been denied access to a weather forecast… or a mirror… or both. As a father of a teenage daughter I spend quite some time these days in lively debate about “appropriate dress” and I wish that she could have been there on Thursday to see the positives in my argument.

From the Goffs stable area I had an excellent view of arrivals and I would not be surprised if the first aid room had to deal with some cases of hypothermia. I would have taken a short price about one lady, whose excessive use of the fake tan bottle was matched only by her desire to display its results. Ibiza meets Cherokee would best describe the look she was after, though an eskimo theme would have been more appropriate. I hope she found somewhere warm to spend the day.

Unfortunately that warm place would not have been the 60,000 square feet of the Exhibition Centre. I do not know if the person responsible (doubtless “a consultant”), had confused the racecourse with a runway but, at the end of the 1990s, somebody decided to build an aircraft hangar at Punchestown Racecourse.

It is a building completely at odds with the landscape and its chances of blending into its surroundings are not assisted by a colour that is an unhappy marriage of hay and mustard. But here is the really puzzling bit - somebody then decided to locate it just far enough from the racecourse hub to render it completely useless to racegoers. A spectacular, modern, well-serviced, sheltered space that sits within touching distance and yet serves only as a the kids play zone on Saturday of the festival.

Goffs are guaranteed to sell a decent winner at Punchestown because the opening day involves the Goffs Land Rover Bumper, which is exclusively for graduates of our flagship National Hunt Sale. This year’s winner was the Robert Tyner-trained Coeur De Lion in the colours of Brendan Keogh. Kildare-born Keogh is better known in greyhound circles and he lives in Kent where his main business is the construction of railway station platforms.

The vendor’s prize, a brand new and highly desirable Land Rover Discovery Sport was won by my neighbour Norman Williamson, who sold the gelding last year for €75,000 at the sale. Apparently the television coverage referred to his wife as Wendy, when Norman is actually married to Janet (who has a sister called Wendy). Norman’s nickname – Storming Norman – was taken from one famous general, the USA Gulf war commander General Schwarzkopf, but that is not grounds for confusing his domestic arrangements with those of the infinitely less commendable “general” of the Dublin underworld.

Justice for Zabana and Jones team

MUCH of my week is spent focusing on the sale that Goffs hold on Thursday. Only 20 horses are catalogued but this all happens on Monday morning, after which pedigrees and catalogue pages have to be prepared, the entries marketed and the catalogues printed and distributed. When Goffs were located in Ballsbridge, there was a Punchestown Sale held there every year. Now that the company is just ten minutes away we hold it in the parade ring at the racecourse.

The best horse to emerge from the Punchestown Sale came 50 years ago, at the 1966 renewal, when L’Escargot was sold as an unnamed three-year-old. He won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1970 and 1971, and then the Grand National in 1975, when he denied the great Red Rum a hat-trick of victories. That made him only the second horse (along with Golden Miller) to win the two greatest races in the English steeplechase calendar.

L’Escargot was sold at Goffs by Betty Brogan to the legendary bloodstock agent Tom Coooper, on behalf of Raymond Guest, the American Ambassador to Ireland. Although Tom Cooper died back in 1990 he was nevertheless closely associated with a happy victory on Wednesday, with the victory of Woodland Opera, who is owned by Tom’s widow Valerie and daughter Diana as well as their friend Carolyn Waters.

He is out of Mrs Cooper’s great mare Opera Hat, who won 15 races including a Grade 1 at Aintree and 9 successes at Naas. Apparently her third dam was actually trained by Tom Cooper’s father. Although she never won at Punchestown, I remember her running there in 1998, finishing third behind Big Matt in the day’s feature race, The BMW Chase, over two miles.

public ride

That was the year that I made my only attempt to ride in public when taking part in the charity race, organised each year by James Nolan. In those days the charity race was the closing event of a three-day festival. However I could not wait until the day of the race itself so chose to walk the course during the BMW.

The favourite was Edredon Bleu and he was followed in the market by Klairon Davis, who had won the Champion Chase at Cheltenham two years previously. Both horses fell in the race and, I found myself leading Klairon Davis back up the final straight. It was an extraordinarily wet year and no faller on that ground could be anything other than filthy. By the time I returned the horse to his handler, most of the mud on his head and whatever came out of his nostrils was ingrained in my hair (which I still had) or all over my upper clothing.

I was however very happy to see those Klairon Davis colours winning on Tuesday. Anybody who follows racing closely knows that there was nobody more deserving of a big winner than Chris Jones. Zabana, reappearing for the first time after a debacle at the start at Cheltenham, finished his season with a commanding performance in the Grade 1 Champion Novice Chase and was greeted in the winner’s enclosure as warmly as any horse this week.

Having visited the Jones yard where Andy Lynch trains the horse, I know what a “small-team” effort it is and I hope that they all enjoyed the win as much as their supporters. Better still, Zabana was bought at the Goffs Horses-In-Training Sale from the Aga Khan for just €31,000. The agent that day was Kevin Ross who had a memorable Goffs Grade 1 double on Tuesday – he bought Boylesports Champion Chase winner God’s Own at the Land Rover Sale for just €17,000.

Kevin was also the Goffs agent who attended Largy point-to-point last Saturday. The interestingly named Getabird won his four-year-old point-to-point that day and made €200,000 at the Goffs sale during the week, ensuring that Colin Bowe has topped the Goffs sales at both Aintree and Punchestown.

For most punters this week it has not been so easy to make money. I asked one man yesterday how he was getting on and he replied “I’m holding my own”. As we were, at that particular moment, stood next to each other in the gents’ lavatories, I replied: “I’m very glad to hear it.”