Moments of the Season – Fleur Du Pommier

Over the last few weeks we have been looking back at the 2019/20 point-to-point season and highlighting some ‘Moments of the season’. This latest video in the series recalls the victory of FLEUR DU POMMIER in a red-hot maiden at Larkhill in January 2020…

Fleur Du Pommier’s maiden-race victory at Larkhill in early January marked her out as a very useful mare.

She beat a lovely young prospect called Red Buccaneer, who although big and backward came from Fran Nimmo’s excellent academy and would have known his job, while third-placed Bawnmore won next time out at Horseheath for trainer Tom Ellis and his wife Gina Andrews. Bawnmore also followed that up with a very good second to the hugely promising Minella Wizard (rec.7lb) on a second visit to Horseheath, while Red Buccaneer was sold for £35,000 at Tattersalls’ Cheltenham January Sale and is now set for a career under Rules with trainer Henry Daly.

Not that Fleur Du Pommier’s success was a one-off for she followed up in her members’ race and then landed a restricted contest at Milborne St Andrew – the runner-up, Premier Magic, scored for Bradley Gibbs’ stable next time out at Didmarton.

Her three successes, all under Alex Edwards, pay a huge compliment to the skills of Wiltshire trainer Harriet Waight, whose success in the previous season with Coco Live marked her out as one to note. Both horses are trained by Waight for a partnership involving herself and farmers Stan and Sally Rawlins, who are unstinting in praise for their neighbour.

Stan, whose annual input to the maintenance of Larkhill point-to-point course amounts to hundreds of hours, says: “Harriet uses such different methods – she has no all-weather gallop, but uses the ranges [on Salisbury Plain] to work the horses. One day they go to one place, the next they go to another. Last summer they were both turned out at her farm with 12 bulls and they seemed to love it – but they are a herd animal.”

Stan Rawlins, who cannot believe his luck in finding Fleur Du Pommier

Stan bought Fleur Du Pommier at Ascot in June for £3,000. He says: “She was bought for peanuts and won three times. I cannot believe it, you couldn’t dream it. People told me I’d gone mad, and Sally thought I’d paid too much, but we knew she was genuine and we knew her history because we are friends with Paul [Thompson, her former trainer].”

Bred by former trainer Jim Old and his long-standing patron Wally Sturt, Fleur Du Pommier ran six times in 2018/19 for Thompson in the colours of the late Godfrey Maundrell, and showed more than a glimmer of ability without winning. At seven, and with Waight’s skills, the glimmer became a halogen bulb, although Fleur Du Pommier was pulled up at Larkhill on the final day of the season in an Oriental Club owner/trainer conditions race.

Stan says: “She bled a little that day, although she has done it before once the spring pollen starts rising. She’s fine now. We’re too old to think about breeding from her – it’s a labour of love, but I suppose if she went on and became very special we might think again.

“I absolutely love point-to-pointing, but we do it in a small way and we’re in it for fun. And it’s been real fun.”

Fleur Du Pommier with winning rider Alex Edwards and joint-owners Harriet Waight and Stan Rawlins on the right