Galway Festival: day five

The Galway Festival continues this evening with one hurdle race, one chase and 5 flat races on the card, and this time the flat races take precedence. Main feature is the valuable Guinness Handicap over 1 1/2 miles at 19.50 CET with 18 runners. As is to be expected, this is wide open, but ex-German Heavenly Blues, trained by the shrewd Ted Walsh and ridden by up-and-coming Chris Hayes, looks very dangerous off a relatively light weight. He has also been running with credit over hurdles, like several of the runners here, e.g. Tony Martin´s Salute Him (Mick Kinane) and Jessica Harrington´s The Last Hurrah (Niall McCullagh), while Forthright (Daniel Loughran/ Seamus Heffernan), who won the race last year, cannot be left out of calculations. T he 3yo maiden over the same distance at 20.25 looks like anikther straight match between the powerful Aidan O´Brien and Dermot Weld stables, whoi are represented by Mikhail Fortune (Seamus Heffernan) and Matters at Hand (Pat Smullen). While O´Brien has been cleaning up in Goodwood this week, Dermot Weld has been making hay here and can score yet another Galway festival victory to the 200 he has already in his amazing track record.