While other trainers are busy preparing their horses for the Velka Pardubicka, the first trainer to arrive at Pardubice racecourse has been busy pissing everybody off. On his many previous trips to Pardubice, Charlie Mann - who won the VP as trainer and rider on It’s a Snip in 1995 - has earned a well-deserved reputation for demanding very special treatment and for grossly abusing the generosity of people in Pardubice. The demands that he has been making in return for bringing increasingly underprepared horses over for the Velka have become increasingly unreasonable.

Normally, winning riders in the Velka Pardubicka are heroes for life in East Bohemia. The Czechs dearly love a free spirit, and all other things for free, but Charlie Mann has stretched everyone’s patience with his own idea of a free ride. Even of those of us who were there cheering for him on that memorable second Sunday in October in 1995, and remember it as a truly great occasion, now say that enough is enough.

 In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Brian’s mother famously said, “He’s not the Messiah – he’s a very naughty boy!”