Rain can be a blessing, but it can also produce mud

I was playing Toto on Monday.

That is not a typo and fellow punters can be forgiven for thinking I meant “I was playing Tote on Monday”.

Whilst I was indeed wagering on Monday I also happened to be listening to a song from the American rock band Toto. Them of Rosanna, Hold The Line and seven Grammy Awards fame.

To be specific I was listening to their 1982 release Africa.

The year of 1982 produced its fair share of surprises, among them Jamaican Rhumba won the Rothmans Durban July and I passed matric, but for Toto lead guitarist Steve Lukather the shock of the year was that their song Africa became a humungous hit.

Lukather had labelled the song “dumb” and famously quipped: “I’ll run naked down Hollywood Boulevard midday if that song is ever a hit”. Forty-one years later and that dumb ditty has gone multi-platinum in countless countries across the globe, passed one-billion plays on the streaming site Spotify and remains the bands only no.1 on the US Billboard Hot 100.

Africa features the iconic lyric “I bless the rains down in Africa” and it was those words that got me thinking on Monday.

The Gauteng rains took their sweet time to arrive this year.

For the duration of September and much of October it appeared that somebody, somewhere, somehow had transposed the Turffontein delivery address for that of Kenilworth and Durbanville.

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The arrival of rain on the highveld is always a blessing.

To me, a bear of very little brain, the equation appears simple. Rain + sun = lush green grass.

A quick search of the internet informed me that perhaps this is because rainwater is the ultimate source of nitrogen and when this soaks deep into the soil then nature gets busy. Like who knew? Certainly not me, my 1982 matric biology mark is all the proof you need.

Whatever the science behind it, better going heralds the appearance of high quality racehorses that will grace Johannesburg racetracks during the forthcoming summer season.

Witness a filly like Champagne Cocktail who registered her second career victory at Turffontein on Saturday.

I enjoyed the way commentator Nico Kritsiotis summed up her performance, urging viewers to “pop the corks and have a party”.

Like many of us, Nico can’t help but be impressed with Champagne Cocktail’s action and the ground she covers. Even after only two starts she appears to be the real deal.

Owned and bred by Mary Slack, she’s a full sister to the Hollywoodbets Durban July winner Sparkling Water and being in the care of Mike de Kock, she’s in the best of hands.

Interesting that in interviews independent of one another both Mike and her jockey JP van der Merwe have remarked that she’s the type of horse that gets them out of bed in the morning.

Of course this is horseracing and in our world rainfall doesn’t always result in a rainbow. Sometimes a downpour precipitates a downfall.

Ever the realist, dual Academy Award winner Denzel Washington once put a practical perspective on it when he said “you pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too”.

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Whilst Europe’s best racehorses may not have encountered mud on Saturday’s QIPCO British Champions Day, the going at Ascot was changed to soft after the first race and without doubt was a contributing factor in Paddington’s flop in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes.

The Coolmore three-year-old colt, named after the spectacled bear from darkest Peru, had won four Group 1 races this calendar year but for once the many Paddington supporters missed their train, stranded on Platform 2 with not so much as a marmalade sandwich.

For the record, his trainer Aidan O’Brien has offered what he called a very “legitimate excuse” for the colt’s below par performance saying, “He grabbed the bit and wouldn’t let it go. He didn’t settle for the first half of the race and you can’t do that in that ground.”