IN a follow-up to last week’s piece on Paddy Young, the Banbridge-born jockey and his team of Exercise Riders won the Real Rider Cup at the Plantation Field horse trials near Unionville, Pennsylvania on Sunday. Luckily all the show jumping, both for the three-day event and the Real Rider Cup (a fundraiser for the Retired Racehorse Project) was on ‘surface’ as the weather, which had been bad in the run-up to the event, turned nasty again on Sunday.

It was a great weekend for the Young family as while Paddy returned to competitive action his wife, Leslie, sent out the Irish-bred Alshibaa to win a $30,000 maiden hurdle at the High Hope meet in Lexington.

Ridden by Waterford-born Kieran Norris for Ballybristol Farm, the four-year-old New Approach gelding scored by one and a quarter lengths from Motivational whose trainer, Jack Fisher, was also competing in the Real Rider Cup. Leslie purchased the good-looking Alshibaa at last year’s Tattersalls July Sale in Newmarket where he came up in the consignment from his breeder, Shadwell Stud. The previous month, the brown gelding had won a three-year-old handicap at Leicester on the last of five starts for William Haggas.