Master Sabina’s win for me in the Summer Cup was a dream come true.  Nothing to do with the R1,2 million stake for first prize or the betting money won, but for me it was a dream that started many years ago.  My first horse Sabina Park was a superstar who had the bad luck to race not only with injuries and then a heart problem, but also a race season that was cut short due to a horse flu that saw all horse racing stop in Gauteng for 4 months when she was at the peak of her career.  She had faster finishing times in her last big win than the subsequent winner of the July Handicap, Greys Inn, recorded on the same day at the same track and distance.  A truly talented horse whose brilliance was never truly acknowledged other than in the R3 million I was offered to sell her to Australia.

Unfortunately, in South Africa unless you win one of the big one’s people never really understand how good your horse is and Sabina Park may well have been the best horse I ever owned, but also the unluckiest.  A documentary was made at the time and aired on Tellytrack which featured me and her over 3 episodes and ended with me saying I would breed with her and I would one day be very proud of her children.  Master Sabina is that child and he like his mother has been somewhat unlucky.  Unlucky in losing the Summer Cup 2 years ago to a horse who at level weights was probably the best of the year, Yorker, when having far more bad luck in the running of the race than he did.  He ran three wide and battled his way through the field while almost catching Yorker, who had a clear run with the gaps all opening at the right time for him.  Unlucky to not take part last year when we fancied him to beat the first Triple Crown winner in 20 years, Louis the King.  Just knowing he was in the class of those two was enough for me to know he was a superstar, but friends and others don’t seem to “know it” unless you win one of those big three races – somewhat ironic given they are handicaps and not necessarily about who is “best”.

One year later and not at his very best he was still good enough to win the 2015 Summer Cup.  His first Grade 1 victory, the biggest race any of my horses has ever won and the first Grade 1 for his mother also.  So for me Saturday had nothing to do with money at all – it was all about the dream coming full circle for me and Sabina.  Master Sabina may never win another race in his already amazing career but he truly made me happy and proud on Saturday to not only own him, but have bred him also.  Thanks to Geoff Woodruff and his family for an amazing training feat in bringing him break after a one year break and only one warm up run, to Gavin Lerena who missed out on the ride last year when Master could not run due to his ligament injury and produced him at the right time in a big field, to Carl de Vos and his team at Varsfontein Stud and the Kalmanson’s who own the stud, to my friends who have had to endure years of me telling them this horse was truly a champion and would win a big one - and to Sabina Park and Jet Master for being the best of the best and producing a magnificent foal back in 2009.

It was not surprising to hear that the President of France has said that they need to reconsider some of their laws.  The fact of the matter is that at the moment terrorists are exploiting the freedom and rights given to the citizens of some of the freest countries in the world to attack them.  It raises an interesting dilemma as to what to do and there are always those, especially those who have never been affected by such forms of violence and believe that civil liberties must never be trampled upon or never touched and there will always be governments who believe that they need to be in order to keep the people safer.  Of course, those very same governments often use those laws against the people, and we have no finer example of that than our previous apartheid government in South Africa who exploited all sorts of legislation, designed to purportedly combat the terrorism, to attack anybody who opposed their government.  

So it is probably an even more sensitive subject in South Africa, but one cannot help but feel in these ever changing times that governments will  have to keep a closer watch on people, they will have to monitor internet traffic, text and mobile calls and I am not sure that those who have exposed these programmes are really “heroes”.  The bottom line is most of these terrorists come from secular states, where there is almost no freedom, and they use the freedoms and the civil liberties of those countries they attack to walk around with impunity and not be subject to spot-checks, or having their e-mail or calls intercepted.  That is one of the thoughts and debates one has to think about in a time where one is seeing more and more global terrorism from groups like ISIS and of course another aspect will be the fact that governments around the world, particularly those that are targeted or feel that they may be targeted, will have to devote bigger amounts of government expenditure towards more security police, more surveillance equipment and specialists and all of that comes at a cost to taxpayers.  Apparently to monitor somebody 24/7 requires a team of approximately 15 people and France alone has a few thousand people on suspected lists.  So expenses are going to rise dramatically but one cannot see however how anybody can say at the moment that one can skimp on security.

This Saturday is the Summer Cup.  It is one of South Africa’s big three races and the other two include the July Handicap and the Met.  This is the third consecutive year that Master Sabina has made the field, confirming that he is one of the top horses in South Africa.  Two years ago he came a very narrow second and last year, a few days before the race for which he was second favourite he got injured.  It was a huge blow to me and he has basically been off for a year until a run a few weeks ago where he came fourth in the warm-up race.  

He was drawn well at 7, he is well weighted and he will give me a good chance to once again try and win the Summer Cup.  The course, Turffontein, certainly suits him and hopefully he will have luck in running.  The one big worry that I have, and why I cannot be that confident, is that a lot of people talk about the ‘second run after a rest syndrome’ and essentially this is his second run after one year off.  In a second run after a rest a horse often runs a flat race, and does not put in as much effort as he or she does in the first or third race after a rest and normally a horse is at its very peak, when coming back from a rest in its third start.  It is one thing to be short of your very best when you are up against moderate opposition, but when you are racing most of the best horses in the country that may just be enough to find him out.  His next target will be the Met, but I am hoping, given that his mother, Sabina Park – my first racehorse - ran twice in the Summer Cup, that its second time lucky for Master Sabina this year.  Yes, he has been in the field three times, but he never actually ran last year due to the injury.

I was quite shocked to discover that VW, after misleading everybody about their motor vehicles, has now finally decided to offer some gift cards to all the owners that have been affected.  It is outrageous, after they have been involved in the fraud, they suddenly want to offer $500,00 or $1 000,00 to people to let them off the hook.  You will recall that they had basically cheated on their emission tests with more than 500,000 Volkswagens in America alone failing emission tests, and that would relate to countries around the world.  The exhaust fumes in fact emit up to 40 times the nitrous oxides allowed by law and of course this relates to a whole number of vehicles manufactured by VW which would include Porche as well.  

To give people $500,00 or $1 000,00 is simply disgraceful and it is akin to what happens with the train authorities in South Africa – PRASA - when people are injured by the trains.  Apparently, the resale values of Volkswagens with 2 litre diesel engines have already fallen 13% since mid-September and basically people around the world that bought Volkswagen manufactured vehicles based on fake emission tests.  In many respects the cars don’t even comply with the rules of their country.  The VW brands also of course include Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, Porche and of course Volkswagen as well as Ducati motorcycles.  The fraud was so bad that essentially what Volkswagen did was to put in a software code in their diesel models which had what they call a defeat device coding that as soon as it detected that an emissions test was being conducted, the vehicle would alter emission controls for better compliance, but once it started driving normally the emissions would go back to the much higher levels.  The company has already issued a profit warning saying that it has set aside $7,27 billion to fix up the fraud – but while there will be some desperate people who will jump at the gift cards, they are going to face so many legal cases around the world that one has to wonder whether $7,27 billion is going to be enough to cover it, because people are going to suffer real losses as the full impact of trying to resell Volkswagens on a second-hand market is eventually realized.

A report by the World Health Organisation has said that eating processed meat can raise the risk for humans to get colon cancer.  There is also evidence that eating red meat again can be bad for you, but the evidence seems to be more clear-cut when it comes to actual processed meat.  By processed meat they mean meat like hot dogs, corn beef, the various slices of meat that you can get at a delicatessen including ham, etc.  The more processed meat you have, said an expert at the Agency, the greater your risk of developing colon cancer as you get older.  The risk is so high that they have put processed meat in the Group 1 category which is a category reserved for items where they say there is sufficient evidence to show that they cause cancer and other members of Group 1 would include smoking tobacco and exposure to asbestos!  They say that smoking tobacco and asbestos are more dangerous – which is somewhat of a relief, but the very fact that it is in the same group means that processed meat is best avoided.  

On the other hand, it is amazing that so many people have made such good money out of selling processed meat to us, because although it is not true of all processed meats, such as bacon, many processed meats are in fact the undesirable parts of an animal, which nobody would buy in a butchery, and putting them together and then making one pay more for it!  The WHO defines processed meat as anything which is transformed to improve its flavour or preserve it and that would include, for example, biltong if in any way flavourings are added.

I have been trying the new iPhone 6S recently, and while it is an improvement on the 6, I cannot say that it is a dramatic improvement.  Every phone has improvements every year and I think the improvements that make this a must have phone would depend on what you do with the phone.  If you are recording a lot of videos, for example, of your child and you want it to be relevant in years to come, then you need the iPhone 6S, because it now films in 4K resolution which is obviously four times better than the quality of the previous version.  I like the live photo feature also which means that when you go through your pictures and you press on it the picture starts moving, essentially showing you a video of what happened about 1½ seconds before you took the photo until about 1½ seconds after you took the photo and so it essentially makes your photos, while they are being seen on an iOS device live complete with sound!

Apart from that, the 6S uses a superior chip, the A9, and the camera has been upgraded from 8Mp to 14MP which, for a phone, is really breathtaking and it is putting into one’s hands these days the kind of cameras that professionals were buying for R30 000,00 only 3 or 4 years ago.  So, the videos are going to be better, the pictures are going to be better and everything is going to run a bit faster, but it is not truly dramatic.  The big feature that everyone has made a big song and dance about, which is the touch or 3D feature of it, is not that dramatic to me.  If, for example, you are going through your e-mails and you press a little bit harder on one of the e-mails it pops up while you are still holding it so that you can still read it and the phone has learnt to detect, depending on how hard you push the screen, to open it up for you or to just open it up partially, etc.  I am sure more applications will come along that take advantage of this in the future, but right now I cannot say that that impresses me. To me the main purpose for getting the phone was firstly a wife who does not mind using the previous model so when I upgraded she gets my old one and secondly, I really liked the live photo and in particular the 4K video.  If somebody for example asks  me now  what video camera to buy to make videos of their children, I would say it really does not matter – as long as it is 4K, but you cannot do the 1080HD anymore when something four times better is available and will obviously stand the test of time better than the 1080.