Author Profile
Name:
Mike Moon
Biography
Mike Moon has worked as a journalist for 40 years, on newspapers such as The Witness, the Rand Daily Mail, the Sunday Times and Business Day.
He has been a freelance writer and editor in recent years, working for a broad range of organisations and publications in various parts of the world – covering subjects as diverse as macroeconomics and cricket.
Following generations of horse racing-mad Moons, he owns a couple of thoroughbreds, and has a fanciful notion that a bag of oats is a pension fund instalment.
The Geegees column is The Times’s entertaining weekly look at the world of horse racing – not just for racing fans, but anyone fascinated by the weird, touching and amusing stories this colourful game abounds in.
We're going back to the races after that brief crossing to the football.
HERE are words to a song you might hear tomorrow if you switch the telly to football:
The infield of Kenilworth Racecourse in Cape Town is an expanse of beautiful Cape Flats sand fynbos.
The dream factory that is horse racing has delivered another compelling tale.
Imagine you're making thingamajigs in your garage, flogging a few here and there, eking out a living when suddenly you discover millions of new customers who desperately want your widget.
A Free State farmer glanced up on an early autumn evening and saw a ball of fire hurtling through the sky. He made out a large aircraft in terrible trouble, its starboard wing ablaze.
When Dodgy Derek won a pile of money on Mike de Kock's horses that famous night in Dubai back in 2003, he bought himself a racehorse. Well, a part of a horse, probably near the tail, though he insisted it was a nostril, the bit that wins.
A man dashed onto the Greyville turf and tried to match strides with galloping horses this week.
Cape Town scallywags sometimes like to bad-mouth Joburg and its fine folk.
Tens of thousands of people will spend next week in a big, muddy field in England yelling dementedly at horses and riders as they career around in frantic pursuit of apparently nothing.
The rank and file of South African racing is feeling a bit left out, with dozens of the richer people in the local game off in Australia buying expensive horses.
Switcharooney. That's what Wayne Rooney has called his new arrival - a thoroughbred colt he bought for £63000.
We have all been known to get a trifle impatient with Australians and their hubris about sporting prowess.
IN AN effort to persuade a racehorse to run faster, we upgraded his accommodation - giving him a posh new stable, with attached paddock and a lovely view of the Suikerbosrand.
Igugu's victory in last weekend's J&B Met at Kenilworth was one of the most courageous performances seen on a South African racecourse in quite a while - and I'm surprised we haven't made more of a fuss of it.
When my golf caddy Josey murmurs, "It's all about pace, Bubba," it's time to be very afraid.
Next week 350 horses will arrive in the Cape Town city centre. That's probably more horses gathered together than the dorp has seen since the Boer War.
Jockeys are known to be wiry and tough, but Piere "Striker" Strydom took it to the extreme in the L'Ormarins Queen's Plate at the weekend.
Can a cloud have more than one silver lining?
Horses make mugs of us all. That's a saying owner-trainer-breeder St John Gray uses in discussing Dancewiththedevil.
"In the summertime when the weather is high, you can stretch right up and touch the sky."
The colt was born in 1994 on the farm of Hugh Jonsson, who kept a few thoroughbred broodmares alongside the fresh produce in the lovely hills of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands.
Jockeys suffer a lot, poor things. Eating lettuce and bean sprouts while trying to stay alive is bad enough, but they're also on the receiving end of much loathing and malicious humour.
Australians refer to their land as "The Lucky Country", and when you think of Bryce Lawrence and some cricket umpires down the years, you tend to agree.
The racing world is whipping itself into a lather over jockeys' riding crops.
Has anyone ever seen Chuck Norris and Mike de Kock together in the same room? Thought not.
RACING suffers on the image front, with a common perception that it's a bit dodgy.
He was a face of football on telly. Then suddenly he was the face of rugby. At heart though, he's a racing man.
"The luck of the draw" might have come from saloons of the Wild West, with the outcome of a poker deal, or draw, deciding the fate of money on the table.
A stick of dynamite should be placed under the grandstand at Turffontein. I'd like to light the fuse.
I had a rather profitable encounter with the famous Irish jockey AP McCoy last week.
Education and horse racing are not often bracketed in the same sentence.
Kimberley was once a lot more than a hole in the ground. It was arguably the most important place in South Africa, and possibly even the world.
The L'Ormarins Queen's Plate is getting a Yankee connection.
THE good racehorse "will find you", so it's pointless searching too hard for it.
A neck-and-neck race between two Ants is the main game in town.
A SPIV with a pencil-thin moustache and a cocked fedora hat is the caricature of the villain in horse racing.
Racing is full of chance, luck, fate, serendipity and curious happenstance - as was evident at the Durban July last weekend.
TOMORROW'S Durban July is really all about one horse: the three-year-old filly Igugu, whose Zulu name means "jewel" or "treasure".
THERE'S nothing like a bracing winter morning to make one feel alive.
As you give, so shall you receive.
