February 1st, 2024.

We have a new member of The Crowd team, well two in fact.

ALICE WHITTINGHAM (wife of ex-trainer HARRY) and LOTTIE COUGHTRIE who work together on Thoroughbred Solutions, will be supporting us with admin in the background and some more interesting projects. They both know the racing world very, very well and will be big assets for us across 2024.

The first real benefit we will see from ALICE will be regular updates on how the trainers we are working with are doing, alongside their Crowd work.

Here is the first one, the weekly review of the runners from the trainers we work with and the horses included in our string, looking at the period up to the end of January 2024.

OLLY MURPHY

Winners:

27th January – Roccos Inspiration @ Uttoxeter

27th January – Wolfspear @ Uttoxeter

27th January – Here Comes McCoy @ Uttoxeter (For THE GOLD AND GREEN!)

30th January – Borodale @Chepstow

31st January – Transatlantic @ Leicester

31st January – Grandads Cottage @ Leicester

Placed Runners:

23rd January: The Wolf – 3rd @ Leicester

23rd January: Made for you – 3rd @ Leicester

25th January - Heard That – 2nd @ Wetherby

25th January – No Risk des Flos – 4th @ Wetherby

25th January – Oakley Dancer – 3rd @ Wetherby

27th January – Benign Dictator – 2nd @ Uttoxeter

27th January – Strong Leader – 3rd @ Cheltenham

29th January – Kilbarry Hill – 3rd @ Plumpton

30th January – Barlovento – 3rd @ Chepstow

31st January – Bennettsbridge – 4th @ Leicester

Olly’s yard is in red-hot form having recorded 6 winners in the past fortnight and a heap of runners placing too. Despite plenty of abandoned meetings earlier in the month, they have now made up for lost time and are operating on a comfortable 24% strike rate. It was a real thrill to see Here Comes Mc Coy get his head in front at Uttoxeter on Saturday, as part of an impressive treble on the card for Olly and his team that day. His first winner for Crowd Racing and hopefully plenty more to come…

Pictured - Olly doing his model poses for a Racing Post feature.

NOEL WILLIAMS

Winners:

31st January – Royale Dance @ Leicester

Placed Runners:

22nd January – Lucky Rose - 4th @ Warwick

30th January – Haston Clermont – 2nd @ Chepstow

Noel and his team have had a solid start to the year so far with 2 winners on the board for January from 10 runners (4 of which were placed) at a 20% strike rate. The most recent of which - Royale Dancer winning in the colours of the Noel Fehily Racing Syndicate, who soared to an impressive 8½ length victory in the Golden Miller Mares’ Handicap Hurdle over 2m4 ½ at Leicester on Wednesday. Noel has welcomed our newest recruit to the Crowd Racing string recently, Maximum Effort who had his opening run in our silks last week. He finished a solid 5th , we are learning more about him with each run, and we look forward to starting him off in handicaps before long.

DAN & CLAIRE KUBLER

Winners:

23rd January - Andaleep wins at Southwell (AW) under Simon Walker in the Amateur Jockey’s Handicap (Class 4) over 1m3f

Placed Runners:

30th January – Elterwater – 4th @ Southwell

Dan & Claire had a good week last week with just the one runner – Andaleep going out to win at Southwell on Tuesday, his 7th victory since joining the team at Sarsen Farm. They have then had 2 other runners this week both finishing 4th and 5th respectively. The yard currently holds just the 1 entry next week – Rothay Park at Lingfield on Monday, so a relatively quite spell with fewer runners, as might be expected at this time of year.

However it won’t be long now until their Cambridgeshire winning Stable Star – Astro King returns to the track with entries later this month – definitely one to keep an eye on with the Winter Derby later this month on the agenda, and Al Rufaa is being looked on as a runner for the Lincoln at the start of the turf season.

Pictured ANDALEEP after winning and ASTRO KING on gallops.

REBECCA MENZIES

Rebecca has had a very difficult spell of things of late, not only have a number of fixtures been abandoned due to the adverse weather but this has also impacted her gallop, and therefore somewhat hindered the yards daily training regime. She has had a handful of runners so far this week and a large number of upcoming entries over the coming days, so hopefully their fortunes will start to turn now and they can start to get back on track. Amongst a number of her entries to pick out she has Mister Moodles who looks to line up in the Scottish Supreme Novice’s hurdle at Musselburgh, victorious when last seen at Doncaster in December, it would be good to see how handles the step up in class in this feature race on Sunday.

There was more in depth news on the gallop challenges encountered by the yard in the recent post about running plans for the 3 we have in the yard.

CAMILLA POULTON

Camilla reported last week that she has had “a very quiet few weeks and the horses not being 100%”. This week she had a few more runners and plenty more new prospects are on the horizon. On her social media this week she mentioned “we have a very new & young team in this season which is exciting but also can take a while to really get going and knowing what every horse is going to be needing etc. but we are sure we have some nice exciting prospects coming up and will be firing again very soon.” Runners aside she also has some exciting news that the team are soon to be expecting a foal from Eliza Poulton's mare Sweetheart (mum of our star in waiting TOUCH OF THUNDER) – watch this space!

Pictured - Happy horses on the South Downs

GOLD AND GREEN CROWD

Winner:

HERE COMES MCCOY - 27th Jan - Uttoxeter

Placed:

SIEMPRE ARTURO - 18th Jan - Wolverhampton

We are entering a quiet couple of weeks for Gold and Green runners, but at least we go into it, off the back of a winner in HERE COMES MCCOY and another good run from SIEMPRE ARTURO, finishing second.

We had hoped to get SIEMPRE on the track again, but a bad scope kiboshed that plan, and we now look to the 14th Feb onwards for another batch of runners, including Dec, McCoy, Siempre, Max and Thunder.