Doug Watson earned his seventh UAE trainers' championship at Al Ain Racecourse on Friday evening, claiming the victory with 40 wins-one more than three-time champion Ernst Oertel, despite his yard being compromised by a COVID outbreak early in the season. Watson now stands alone as the trainer to have won the most UAE training titles; he was previously tied with Satish Seemar on six.
“We have such a great team at home, both the owners and the staff,” Watson said. “They have been fantastic and everyone works seven days a week and we went through the COVID situation and thankfully everyone's okay from that and things have gone well [since]. It was tough right down to the wire.”
Highlights for Watson's Red Stables for the season included two wins on Super Saturday: Midnight Sands (Speightstown) in the G3 Burj Nahaar and Canvassed (Ire) (Shamardal) in the G3 Mahaab Al Shimaal.
“I just really want to thank our team and especially Dion McFadden and all of the people who helped saddle our horses when we couldn't. We missed two weeks with COVID and then weren't able to attend the races the third week when our horses could finally run. None of us could go, but we got a few wins there and one day we even had 19 horses running up the [Jebel Ali Racecourse] hill. It was a great team effort.”
Not a subscriber? Click here to sign up for the daily PDF or alerts.
