AROUND THE WORLD
Volume 1 | Week 8
🏆 TOMMY’S REPORT
Four stories. Four corners of racing.
One sport that never stops surprising us.
Sometimes you go looking for racing news and find something much better: people.
A 70-year-old Jamaican champion discovers what winning feels like from the other side of the saddle. Japan packs another dream for Paris. Willie Mullins somehow finds himself training two winners with exactly the same name. And in New York, one of racing’s great old homes opens its gates to a completely new era.
The Race Day Co passport has another four stamps in it.
🇯🇲 Jamaica: At 70, Fanna Wasn’t Finished Yet
There are easier ways to spend your late sixties than going back to school.
Winston “Fanna” Griffiths apparently wasn’t interested in any of them.
For decades, Griffiths was one of the great names of Jamaican racing. Five jockeys’ championships. Eleven Derby victories. More than 40 Classics. And 1,663 winners, making him Jamaica’s winningest jockey.
He stopped riding in 2015.
That could quite comfortably have been the end of a remarkable racing story.
Except Fanna wasn’t finished.
At 68, he enrolled in the Jamaica Racing Commission’s trainers’ programme, graduated, and started again in an entirely different corner of the racing game.
Then, on 20 September at Caymanas Park, came Alaeddin.
It wasn’t Jamaica’s biggest race. It was an 800-metre maiden.
But when Alaeddin crossed the line first, his 70-year-old trainer had his first winner.
Nine years after riding his final winner, Fanna Griffiths was back in the winners’ enclosure.
Only this time, he walked in.
There’s something rather lovely about that.
Racing had already given Winston Griffiths one extraordinary career.
At 70, he decided there was still room for another one.
Race Day Co thought:
Perhaps retirement is sometimes just changing saddles.
Read the original Jamaica Observer report - Read More
🇯🇵 🇫🇷 Japan: The Race They Cannot Stop Chasing
Every racing country has races it treasures.
Japan has one it desperately wants to win.
The Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
For years, some of Japan’s finest thoroughbreds have travelled halfway around the world chasing victory at Longchamp.
They have come agonisingly close.
But the Arc remains unconquered.
And now Japan is coming again.
Admire Terra and Meisho Tabaru have arrived at Longchamp ahead of the 2026 Arc, carrying another generation of Japanese hopes with them.
And aboard Meisho Tabaru will be one of the great figures of Japanese racing.
Yutaka Take.
Take is 57. He is preparing for his 12th ride in the Arc, and Meisho Tabaru gave him another Grade 1 victory when winning Japan’s Takarazuka Kinen in June.
That makes this about much more than two horses travelling to France.
It is about persistence.
Japan has become one of the great powers of world racing. Japanese horses have travelled successfully across the globe.
Yet Paris keeps saying no.
So they keep coming back.
Different horses. Different trainers. Different years.
Same dream.
Somewhere beneath all the form guides, sectional times and breeding theories lies one beautifully simple reason why the Arc matters so much.
Japan hasn’t won it yet.
And in racing, sometimes the race you cannot win becomes the race you want most of all.
Race Day Co thought:
Some trophies sit in cabinets. Others live in a nation’s imagination.
Read the Racing Post report from Longchamp - READ MORE
🇮🇪 Ireland: Love Me Tender… Meet Love Me Tender
Willie Mullins has trained an extraordinary number of horses.
Apparently, somebody decided remembering all their names was getting too easy.
At Listowel this week, Mullins won with Love Me Tender.
Then the following day he won with…
Love Me Tender.
No, somebody hasn’t accidentally entered yesterday’s result twice. 😂
They are two different horses.
The first, a German-bred four-year-old, won a maiden hurdle by 20 lengths on Wednesday under Paul Townend.
Twenty-four hours later, Mullins saddled his French-bred Love Me Tender in a beginners’ chase.
With Harry Cobden aboard, that Love Me Tender won too, by five and a half lengths.
Same trainer.
Same meeting.
Same name.
Different horses.
Different days.
Two victories.
International racing allows horses bred and registered in different countries to occasionally carry identical names, which is why racing records distinguish these two as Love Me Tender (GER) and Love Me Tender (FR).
And somehow both ended up in the Willie Mullins yard.
Then both won at Listowel within about 24 hours.
Elvis would surely have approved.
Race Day Co thought:
If Willie Mullins ever acquires a third one, perhaps Love Me Tender (Please Specify) would save everybody some trouble.
Read about the unusual Listowel double - READ MORE
🇺🇸 New York: They Rebuilt Belmont. They Kept the Memories.
On 18 September, the gates opened again at Belmont Park.
But this wasn’t simply another opening day.
After three years of redevelopment, one of the great homes of American racing had been substantially remade.
Belmont first opened in 1905.
The old grandstand eventually grew into a vast monument to the age when enormous crowds poured through American racetrack gates.
The new Belmont is deliberately different.
Its main building is roughly 300,000 square feet, dramatically smaller than the previous 1.25-million-square-foot structure, while opening considerably more of the site to green space. Four newly constructed racing surfaces include a one-mile Tapeta track designed to help Belmont host racing through winter.
Yet among all that glass, steel and engineering, somebody remembered something important.
A racetrack is also made of memories.
Belmont’s racing artwork and murals were preserved. Historic wrought-iron gates and fencing were saved. Even the old Japanese white pine associated with Belmont’s paddock and logo was protected during construction.
And perhaps the nicest little twist belongs to Roger Cettina.
Cettina went to Belmont as a teenager and became a lifelong horseplayer. Decades later, as a senior construction executive, he became involved in rebuilding the very racetrack he’d grown up visiting.
Imagine that.
Walking into the racetrack of your youth wearing a hard hat and helping build its next century.
The new Belmont opened on 18 September.
The horses came back.
The people came back.
But the wonderful thing about old racetracks is that some of the people who aren’t there anymore somehow come back with them.
Race Day Co thought:
You can rebuild a grandstand. The memories don’t need rebuilding.
Explore the new Belmont Park through NYRA - READ MORE
___________________
🏁 FROM TOMMY
Four stories this week, and barely a finishing order between them.
A Jamaican jockey beginning again at 70.
A racing nation still chasing the one prize that keeps escaping.
Two Irish horses answering to precisely the same name.
And an American racetrack discovering that sometimes the best way to preserve history is to give it somewhere new to live.
That’s why we keep looking around the world.
Because racing isn’t only about who won.
Very often, the better story is why somebody still cares.
