SCOTLAND stages its richest Flat meeting of the year this week when the three-day Western Meeting (sorry, the totesport Ayr Gold Cup Festival) runs from 2.10pm on Thursday through to Saturday’s final event at 5.45. It is a 22-race spectacular which should peak on Saturday afternoon at 3.35 with Europe’s richest sprint handicap, the £120,000 Gold Cup.

A total of 118 horses remain in the big race ahead of tomorrow’s five-day declaration stage and, as usual, there will be plenty of owners and trainers who will be left disappointed. The first 28 in the weights will contest the Gold Cup, with the next 28 horses declared on Thursday being eligible to contest the Silver Cup on Friday at 2.35 as some sort of consolation.

It’s been well documented that no home trained runner has been victorious since Roman Warrior in 1975 and the main candidates to end that run are Ian Semple’s Appalachian Trail (8-13) and Jim Goldie’s Orientor (9-5). However, the best chance of any kind of Scottish victory probably lies with current ante-post favourite Borderlescott (9-5), this year’s Goodwood Stewards’ Cup winner, which is owned by three Scots, Jimmy Edgar, Les Donaldson and Scott Kernacha.

A 13,000 guineas yearling out of a mare picked up for £500, Border lescott has won seven of his 16 starts, but if David Chapman resists the temptation to run stable star and 2003 Gold Cup winner Quito under top weight of 10-3, Borderlescott will be forced to share top weight of 9-10 with Orientor and The Kiddykid, surely leaving all three vulnerable to a better handicapped rival further down the weights.

Whatever you fancy on Saturday though, take a close look at the outcome of Friday’s Silver Cup to assess the likely consequences of the draw.

back on track

NEWBURY’S card on Saturday also features a £100,000 handicap, this time an all-aged affair over a mile-and-a-quarter. The race could see the return to action of a long absentee, Godolphin inmate Northern Splendour, a four-year-old who won the last two of his three races as a juvenile at Redcar and then Nottingham in 2004.

Absent throughout 2005, this Giant’s Causeway colt, out of a Diesis mare, looks set for an interesting end to the season as he also holds an entry in the two-and-a-quarter mile Cesarewitch at Newmarket in mid-October, the second leg of the Autumn double which is nine furlongs longer than the Cambridgeshire, a race which you would think he would be better suited to given the 10-furlong trip he’s warming up over on Saturday.

Last Sunday’s Group One win in France for Librettist confirmed that Godolphin look set for an end of season blitz on some of the bigger prizes in Europe. This comes after the terrible spring and summer suffered by the Dubai and Newmarket-based operation, seemingly due to an unmanageable sickness afflicting the horses trained by Saeed Bin Suroor.

Apart from the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes-bound Librettist, the boys in blue have been gradually getting themselves back in the mix, with Sunday Symphony’s victory at York on Friday coming hard on the heels of important wins for Desert Symphony and Sanchi during a rare midweek turf meeting at Southwell.

Godolphin also have one of the largest strings of two-year-olds in training but a glance through the entries for some of the biggest races of the autumn, such as the Middle Park and Cheveley Park at Newmarket, the Fillies’ Mile and Royal Lodge Stakes at Ascot, the Dewhurst at Newmarket and the Racing Post Trophy at Doncaster, show just what a poor season the operation has been having. From 85 expensively-purchased and home-bred two-year-olds listed as being in training at Bin Suroor’s Newmarket base, the entries for the races listed above reads 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 and 0, with numbers for the same races from the Aidan O’Brien yard, which houses the prospective stallions and broodmares owned by Godolphin’s biggest rivals, Coolmore, reading 8, 5, 3, 15, 41 and 44.

Remarkably, in 2006, Godolphin has had only one juvenile on the track, the Rahy filly Mizzle, who has failed to draw any comparisons with her illustrious dam, the Prix Marcel Boussac winner, Loving Claim, when third and sixth at Yarmouth and Kempton.

The official line is that they have all been so affected by the stable’s health problems that only a few will make the track in the coming weeks and even fewer will be supplemented for the big races already mentioned. That would leave an unthinkable 50 or 60 unraced three-year-olds to prepare for the Classics in 2007, a prospect that even the ultra-patient Sheikh Mohammed couldn’t possibly contemplate.

There will surely be the usual round- up of other trainers’ tried and tested horses to give Bin Suroor some serious Classic ammunition but the good news for Carluke trainer Ian Semple is that his stable-star Big Timer would appear, for the time being anyway, to be staying where he is.

A winner now at Ayr, Ripon and York, the gelding has been purchased to stay in the yard by Semple’s Belstane Stables landlord Gordon McDowall and will try his luck in a couple of valuable back-end events in the United States before returning to Scotland for his three-year-old season, a campaign which will sadly preclude the Classic races due to the removal of that most important part of his anatomy.

C’est la vie.