Monday Musings | geegeez.co.uk

Monday Musings: An APT Comparison?

22 November 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Last March, as Rachael Blackmore urged her mount in the Cheltenham Gold Cup to close on stablemate Minella Indo and Jack Kennedy up the hill after the last fence, she would have been excused for saying: “A Plus Tard” or “see you later” in the English version, writes Tony Stafford.

The comment might have been Lostintraslation for some – the much-fancied horse of that name pulled up two from home that day – but after last weekend when both latter horses won major races, the path appears set for a march to greatness for the Henry De Bromhead seven-year-old.

Lostintranslation’s easy win in Ascot’s Chanelle Pharma Chase signalled another pointer to the revival in form of the Tizzard stable – soon by all accounts to have son Joe’s name rather than dad Colin’s above the stable entrance. That effort, though, could not compare with the Irish-trained horse’s performance in running away with the Betfair Chase at Haydock Park.

Most enjoyable for British racegoers as the Irish won this coveted Haydock autumn feature for the first time, was that A Plus Tard carries the colours of Cheveley Park Stud, the principal UK-owned breeder which every year produces top-class animals. With more than 100 mares and in excess of 110 in training every year, Flat racing is the bread and butter. Jumping is the winter release.

Under the careful management of Chris Richardson the stud has fuelled on the enthusiasm for jump racing of Patricia Thompson and her late husband David. The couple won the 1992 Grand National with last-minute buy Party Politics, trained by Nick Gaselee and ridden by Carl Llewellyn, and in recent years built up a select team of high-class jumpers in Ireland.

A class apart though is A Plus Tard and although only a seven-year-old he has just entered his fourth season as a steeplechaser, and still has only 12 races over fences (five wins, five seconds and two thirds) on his record.

Much of the talk before Saturday’s race surrounded the possibility that Bristol De Mai would equal the achievement of Kauto Star who won the Betfair four times in the first decade of the millennium with one unseated preventing an unblemished five-race record.

Bristol De Mai, trained for the last eight seasons by Nigel Twiston-Davies and, like Kauto Star, an early acquisition from France after precocious efforts over hurdles, has won three. Initially he beat in turn Gold Cup winners Cue Card and Native River. He was narrowly beaten in the race in 2019 to Lostintranslation before outstaying multiple Grade 1 winner Clan Des Obeaux last November.

As with those two multiple Betfair victors, A Plus Tard started in France. Whereas Kauto Star had already raced nine times (winning three) before his dramatic step up in form to win a four-year-old Graded hurdle at Auteuil when a 36-1 shot in late May, A Plus Tard never raced at that level. His moment came on his fifth and final start (and second win) when collecting a 40k to the winner 4yo handicap early in April 2018 there.

Like Kauto Star and Bristol De Mai before him A Plus Tard switched quickly to chasing, running as early as November of that year and finishing runner-up in a field of 13 at Gowran Park under Blackmore – the first of the 11 races in which they have combined.

Remarkably, three races on and less than four months after that initial association the now five-year-old ran away with the 20-runner Close Brothers Handicap Chase. The only horse of his age in the race, he did so giving weight and a 16-length thrashing to Grade 1 hurdle winner Tower Bridge with 18 other decent performers trailing far behind.

His next run brought defeat in third over three miles at Punchestown at the end of his busiest season with De Bromhead. He was restricted to only three races the next winter, sandwiching defeats on reappearance and when a close third behind Min in the Ryanair Chase at Cheltenham with a first Grade 1 triumph at Leopardstown over Christmas.

And last season was another cherry-picked campaign of just three races. Again Leopardstown provided the one win, another at Grade 1 level over Christmas but this time without Rachael who partnered instead Minella Indo, who fell before the race warmed up. Darragh O’Keeffe was the lucky man to step into her shoes. Back on A Plus Tard in the Gold Cup as chronicled at the start of the piece, second place to her stable-companion and other regular partner came as their rally up the hill was a little trop tard.

There is an uncanny symmetry about aspects of the early careers of Kauto Star and A Plus Tard. Both started in France and showed precocity. Certainly in the case of Kauto Star, he burned bright for many seasons. De Bromhead’s deliberate planning for his young improving star’s career offers hope that his will also be long-lasting

The Knockeen, County Waterford, trainer has run him sparingly and, with a horse of such talent, there is no need to go searching away beyond the top prizes. I would be surprised if he turned out more than four times, with Punchestown a possible after Cheltenham, especially if he wins the Gold Cup this time. Next will likely be the normal trip to Leopardstown for a Christmas hat-trick attempt.

Minella Indo, who comes from the parallel universe of Irish jumps talent, the point-to-point field, is the De Bromhead version of Paul Nicholls’ Denman. That great chaser was a contemporary of and in terms of merit almost exact counterpart of Kauto Star and he too came from the Irish pointing field.

Kauto Star was by 29 days the senior and in terms of their careers with Nicholls earned almost twice as much as his colleague and rival, collecting £2.2 million from 19 wins in 31 chases. Denman won 14 of 24 for £1.14 million

When Kauto Star won his first Betfair Chase as a six-year-old he was rated 173. Afterwards he even once touched as high as 190 but mostly was rated in his prime in the 180’s.

Although at seven a year older at the time of his first win in the race, A Plus Tard is rated 1lb lower at 172. It is worth reminding ourselves of the ease of his win, and on faster ground than is normal for the Betfair Chase.

Bristol De Mai and Royale Pagaille kept each other company for more than two-thirds of the race on Saturday before Royale Pagaille got the edge in that private battle, with A Plus Tard always tracking them going easily. He was sent to the front three out and, pulling away all the way home, the finishing margin of 22 lengths over Royal Pagaille could have been much greater had Rachael wished.

Remembering just how impressive Royal Pagaille (rated 163) had been in the Peter Marsh Chase over the same course and distance last January, it was salutary to see a similar disrespectful beating being handed out to him. The winner must be raised for the win although Kauto Star’s rating as he won successively his first Betfair, Tingle Creek (two miles) and the first of his five King Georges brought very little reaction from the handicapper.

There was definitely a hint of Kauto Star in the speed with which A Plus Tard disposed of his 2019 Close Brothers rivals at Cheltenham, and again as he cosied up to Royal Pagaille before asserting. This was an exceptional performance but there is still that stable-companion and last season’s Cheltenham defeat to avenge before we declare him the best of the bunch.

Rachael Blackmore also had to make a painful (at least it looked that way beforehand) choice between A Plus Tard and her 2021 Cheltenham Festival winner Bob Olinger when that horse also made his seasonal return at Gowran Park, again with Darragh O’Keeffe as the beneficiary.

Bob, the deeply-impressive unchallenged winner of last season’s Ballymore Novice Hurdle at the Festival, was appearing for the first time since and enjoyed a nice school round to defeat useful yardstick Bacardys (Willie Mullins). This was the champion trainer’s first try at assessing the likely threat to his own best novice chasers later in the season. It might have dented his optimism a bit, but he usually pulls one out of the hat!

One Saturday winner who will offer some hope of a domestic success at the Festival is the Nicky Henderson-trained but Hughie Morrison nurtured and developed grey, Buzz, who followed his Cesarewitch success with another dominant effort in the Coral (to you and me Ascot) Hurdle.

While there is an intermediate distance race for the top-class chasers (the Ryanair) at the Festival, two and a half mile hurdlers are forced to drop back to the minimum for the Champion Hurdle or stretch to three miles and a bit for the Stayers. Otherwise they can wait for Aintree which does cater for them.

I think the level Aintree circuit would be perfect to utilise Buzz’s Flat-race speed and he would be meeting horses partly used up trying either of the possible Cheltenham options. But then, who can resist the lure of Cheltenham? Certainly not, it seems, James Stafford and his Thurloe Thoroughbreds syndicate.

Buzz races for the partners but, with a portion of the proceeds of their victories going to the Royal Marsden, Buzz will always have a feel-good factor going for him.

Never mind additionally that James did casual shifts for me ages ago at The Daily Telegraph and thereafter always greets me on the country’s racecourses as “Uncle Tone”. I can think of worse forms of address – indeed I’ve received a few in my time!

- TS

Monday Musings: Skeltonham

15 November 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

The 2021-22 jumps season – in a sort of foreplay since the end of April – began on Friday with three days’ intense action at Cheltenham, writes Tony Stafford.

The top five protagonists for the jump trainers’ championship, always supposing that Messrs Mullins, Elliott and De Bromhead do not intrude on a private domestic issue, have positioned themselves nicely for imminent take-off.
At this stage Fergal O’Brien leads the way with 72 wins and £622,548. Paul Nicholls is second on £561,628 from 60 winners.

Dan Skelton, boosted by the weekend, is on £531,752 from a modest 39 wins to date; Donald McCain has £466,295 from 65 and Nicky Henderson, well up to scratch with 50 wins, is lagging a little with £397,633 in prizes.

A couple of seasons ago, Dan and Harry Skelton, emboldened by the lavish support of their father Nick, Olympic show jumping gold medallist and icon of his primary sport for the best part of half a century, would have been the numerical summer pacesetters in the title race.

The trio knew that having a base in Warwickshire worthy of housing the best of bloodstock, would need a trigger to attract owners in a sport where they were accustomed to turning to Nicky Henderson or Paul Nicholls if they wanted their horses trained in the UK. The Skeltons needed numbers and the summer, with the best horses out at grass, was the time to put them on the board.

Even some of those two perennial champions’ owners had already gravitated to the better prizemoney and overwhelming superiority, talent- and numerical-wise of Willie Mullins and Gordon Elliott over in Ireland. It appears that the latter’s gauche blunder in being seen grinning and brandishing his phone to the camera astride a fallen horse on his gallops has been forgiven if not forgotten. Memories are long – practicalities are instantaneous.

The Skelton team has now clearly made it to the big league as their principal five challengers over the weekend emphasised. Meanwhile the mid-summer void has been comfortably filled by Fergal O’Brien, formerly assistant to Nigel Twiston-Davies and more recently a tenant of his.

The building of a new yard a few miles away enabled the breakaway from Twiston-Davies and was the catalyst for a major step forward last season when he broke 100 winners for the first time.

After two 60’s in a row, the next two campaigns realised 49 and 63 before 104 at 18% and £796k prizemoney in 2020-21.
Such has been the forward momentum that as we enter winter, O’Brien leads both winner and money categories. That reflects a 60k cushion, but Nicholls, Skelton and Henderson all have more obvious candidates for the very big pots which always define the season’s champions.

Fergal’s stable strength has been nicely augmented by the addition of around 60 horses that the BHA’s favoured barrister, Graeme McPherson QC, has bequeathed (not exactly, but you know what I mean!) to them. McPherson was more the money man than the day-to-day trainer, and graceful withdrawal from the licensee position in favour of giving it official satellite yard status is bound to have beneficial results.

Already several former McPherson horses have shown improved form since the merger and if Fergal intends maintaining his fast pace – 11 wins in the last fortnight – he needs the extra ammunition.

He stepped in with the Listed bumper winner Bonttay on the Saturday of the meeting and as she and stable-companion Leading Theatre led a big field up the hill you could imagine both being high-class jumpers further down the line, an opinion the trainer upheld with a snatched comment: “two lovely fillies” as he walked by. The stable seems to have a bigger proportion of fillies than any of their main rivals, but that merely confirms assistant and partner Sally Randell’s assertion that “they are cheaper to buy”.

Success attracts owners, as the Skeltons illustrate, and now new owners are flocking to the softly spoken Fergal. They had a new owner with them at the sale after racing on Friday and he came away with lot 1, Poetic Music, a debut winner of a Market Rasen bumper for John Butler, at £60,000. “She was our number one at the sale too. I’m delighted we got her”, Sally said.

Two-horse races rarely capture the attention of the racegoer, but Friday’s two-and-a-half mile novice chase in which fencing newcomer My Drogo, a brilliant unbeaten hurdler last winter for Dan Skelton, was meeting Henry de Bromhead’s four-time chase winner Gin On Lime.

The younger Gin On Lime, a mare, had penalties which should have ensured My Drogo’s favouritism and so it proved, the home runner 4-9 with 7-4 against Gin On Lime.

Then at the second-last fence, when Skelton was manoeuvring his mount to challenge on the stands side, he hit the fence hard and could not maintain the partnership. Meanwhile on the inside, Gin On Lime also blundered but as she started to sink to the floor Rachael Blackmore did a passable impression of all those rodeo tricks she must have seen in cowboy films and simply stayed glued to the saddle.

The mare recovered her equilibrium with Blackmore soon back in charge and they set off to the final obstacle which Gin On Line crossed with no further problems. Blackmore had been the darling of the last spectator-limited Cheltenham Festival and here, with the aid of her main supporter De Bromhead, was revealing a new sphere of excellence.

If day one was a major setback for the brothers Skelton, on Saturday the wheel of fortune turned with another spectacular run by Third Time Lucki, the first domestic candidate for the Arkle Chase and a welcome one with all that talent waiting to reveal itself on the other side of the Irish Sea.

Maybe it was a job only half done, but two exaggerated celebrations of Harry Skelton as he crossed the line in front twice in succession yesterday showed how much it all means to win at the home of steeplechasing. First he was in splendid isolation on the always-talented Nube Negra in the Schloer Chase and then the long-time absentee West Cork got the better of Adagio and No Ordinary Joe after a battle up the hill in a high-standard Greatwood Hurdle.

Winning big handicap hurdles with horses after a layoff has been part of the Dan Skelton DNA for some time and West Cork was a prime candidate for such a project. Absent since his second in the Dovecote Hurdle in February last year behind Highway One O Two, he had been dropped 5lb for that Grade 2 second place from the 139 he had earned by his easy defeat of a Nicky Henderson 1/3 shot at Huntingdon.

That generosity by the handicapper was the final piece in the puzzle for the stable whereas top-weight Adagio, only a four-year-old, had been assessed to the hilt on his form of last winter. The third horse No Ordinary Joe pulled hard from the outset yet was still there with a big shout starting up the hill. If Nicky can get this unexposed type to settle better there is no limit to the potential of J P McManus’ gelding.

Nube Negra’s victory, emphatically pegging back one previous Queen Mother Chase winner in Politologue and ending the hitherto unbeaten course record of Put The Kettle On, the reigning champion but one who was never going yesterday, was deeply impressive.

It certainly was not lost on the bookmakers, who promoted him to near the top of this season’s market on the two-mile championship, nor on the younger Skelton, who not satisfied merely with standing in the saddle and pointing to the crowd as they crossed the line, then sated his elation with a rapid-fire first pump. He might find it harder to peg back Brian Hughes this winter, but as he says, he has some great horses to ride.

Some jockeys win a championship and simply want more. Harry Skelton will take another one if it comes, but he’s not going to do the running around riding out and touting for rides on other people’s horses. Why would he with animals of the ability of those Cheltenham mounts?
- TS

Monday Musings: Breeders’ Cup Digest

7 November 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

It has taken 362 runs from 126 individual horses and many thousands of motorway miles in their distinctive royal blue vans to earn the Charlie Appleby stable £4,827,062 in win and place money this year, writes Tony Stafford. Thus he enters the last seven weeks of 2021 with an unchallenged situation, guaranteeing his first trainers’ championship in the UK.

It took six horses on a single day <if you count UK time, which for the purposes of the starkness of the comparison, I am> walking the few hundred yards from the Del Mar international barn in the backstretch to the saddling area and back, to add £2,690,000 (55.7% of his entire UK endeavours) on November 6 alone.

Purists will point to the last on Friday at 7.30p.m. (daylight saving kicked in a week later in the US than the UK) and the two on Saturday, but in any event they were all comfortably within a 24-hour time-frame. The clocks went back in California at 2 a.m. yesterday earning the team from Moulton Paddocks a theoretical extra hour in bed. I doubt if any of them even bothered to turn in at all!

Six runners made the walk to potential equine immortality, two adorned with the pre-race red hood which denotes a trainer worries sufficiently about his horse’s temperament to defuse the potential problem of walking through the boisterous crowds that line the route to the saddling boxes.

The red-hooded pair were in Friday’s Juvenile Turf, Albahr, drawn two and next to stable-mate Modern Games in one, and on Saturday in the Mile, again on the Turf track, 2,000 Guineas runner-up Master Of The Seas, drawn one with his better-fancied elder stable-companion Space Blues in three.

Connections of many of the other European contenders would have enjoyed the chance of running from those plum draws around the tightest of tight circuits. Conversely, in the aftermath, the ever-measured Appleby said: “When they do get drawn there on the inside, they potentially can have a much longer wait and therefore more time to get upset if that’s their character.

“We had no inkling that the horses would behave in this way and it is something we’ll have to address when we get home. Happily both horses, and riders Frankie Dettori and James Doyle, are fine. Frankie especially was lucky to be dragged from Albahr and it’s unfortunate that the stalls man who helped him, got an injury from the horse.”

From a dual assault on three races, only their runners in the Turf produced the full complement from the stalls, with seven-year-old Walton Street (Doyle) actually a shorter price at the departure than Buick’s mount, Yibir.

Both horses had been sent to North American on September 18 for their previous races. Walton Street was off first in Canada (10.35 p.m. UK time) for the Grade 1 Canadian International at Woodbine which he won in a canter by almost six lengths.

Ten minutes later (10.45 p.m.) it was Yibir’s turn at Belmont Park and he comfortably put away six fellow three-year-olds in the Jockey Club Derby Invitational. This race as yet carries no official Grade category – it was merely a very valuable Conditions race – and Yabir beat a field including Bolshoi Ballet, who finished sixth on Saturday.

That made it more than £500k for the two September 18 races in ten minutes. Yibir’s strong finish in the Breeders’ Cup Turf to peg back Broome, who had raced into what looked like an invincible lead in the straight, alone earned a second-best prize of the weekend of £1.5 million and change.

All three Godolphin winners won convincingly. Modern Games and Yibir both came wide under Buick from some way back and finished very strongly. Contrastingly, Space Blues was always close to the lead and held off a late challenge to win by half a length. He had been singled out by Appleby as the likeliest winner and in fulfilling that prophecy has earned a deserved place at stud after 11 career wins from 19 starts. As a son of Dubawi he will have every chance of making a success as a stallion.

The best Coolmore Ireland position was Broome’s second to Yibir on a day when Japan, the country, not the horse who was fourth to Yibir, posted (like London buses) its first two wins at the Breeders’ Cup. Broome all this year has worn the silks of M Matsushima, a partner in the five-year-old along with the Magnier, Tabor and Smith triumvirate. [Coolmore did record a score, via Wesley Ward, more of which anon]

A son of Australia, you would imagine Mr Matsushima might want to stand the horse in Japan one day. The racing fraternity will be euphoric after trainer Yashito Yahagi’s double that almost matched the exploits of Appleby and Buick. Japan is spectacularly the best-endowed racing authority in the world. While its industry traditionally has been inward-looking, these so-visible wins will provide more of their top owners and trainers with the confidence to target the biggest prizes all around the world.

Easily the more authoritative of the Japanese triumphs was the fast finish provided by Loves Only You in the Filly and Mare Turf race, extended this year to 1m3f to take account of the configuration of the Del Mar Turf course.

It hadn’t helped Audarya’s attempt at a second successive win after her victory over 9.5 furlongs at Keeneland last year. William Buick – guessing wrong for the only time over the two days – dropped her in from her widest draw, got across nicely and in good position on the rail only to run into an equine brick wall turning for home. In the circumstances, fifth and 40-odd grand would have been consolation for the Swinburn and Fanshawe families.

Love’s route could hardly have been worse, three wide all the way. She had the class to strike for the lead in the straight but was soon challenged and in the end could manage only fourth as Loves Only You brought her earnings within a UK Group 1 success of £5million. A five-year-old daughter of Deep Impact, she has a wonderful turn of foot.

No UK-based jockey has as strong an association with Japanese racing as Oisin Murphy, who spends as much of his winters – and collects as many billions of Yen – as he can riding over there. His association with Deirdre, now a seven-year-old on whom he won the 2019 Nassau Stakes at Goodwood, was a comparable breakthrough to Saturday’s at the time.

Oisin was seen congratulating the Japanese rider Yuga Kawada straight after the Filly and Mare Turf and two hours later he joined the party in his own right, partnering Marche Lorraine, also a five-year-old, in the Distaff on the dirt track.

This race was supposed to be a private affair between some fast locals, but they went much too quickly, cancelling each other out and all giving in before the straight. Oisin could be seen halfway down the back going best, his red cap moving forward while his mare, a 50-1 shot, was still under restraint. That collapse up front meant he got the lead too soon and in the end it took a triple champion’s ability to keep her going for a short-head verdict.

I loved the day’s final race, the Classic, where Knicks Go beat Medina Spirit, and I also very much enjoyed Life Is Good, runaway winner of the Dirt Mile and Golden Pal, flying winner of the Turf Sprint, the last named for Coolmore America and Wesley Ward.

Also, I’ve never seen a horse running in a million plus dollar race but not for betting purposes. The former favourite too, Modern Games bolting up to a chorus of boos from the crowd who had been obliged to give back their tickets for refund as the horses waited to go. [Worse still, our esteemed editor had ‘singled’ Modern Games in the last leg of a Pick 4: his sole option re-routing to the non-winning favourite in the race!]

No boos from the Doncaster crowd on the final day of the 2021 turf season at Doncaster. John Butler’s Farhan, the 9-2 favourite for the season’s final big event, the November Handicap, ridden by Hollie Doyle, bolted up. The only piece of luck was that the three-year-old son of Zoffany squeezed in exactly as number 23 at the foot of the weights. The triumph (and landed gamble) was delivered with military precision by trainer and rider on probably Hollie’s last year not to be asked to ride at the Breeders’ Cup.

Butler has another important assignment this week. On Friday Poetic Music, an easy bumper winner on debut at Market Rasen, is lot number 1 at Tattersalls Cheltenham post-racing sale. A big filly, she looks the type to figure in black type juvenile fillies’ races for the rest of the season. So bid away – you will be making someone very happy!

One happy camper – and he always has winners when in the US for the Breeders’ Cup – was my already mentioned editor Matt Bisogno, who runs the Geegeez syndicates. Their mare Coquelicot was an easy winner at Chepstow last week, adding a first jumps success to three including a Listed in bumpers. The only way is up, Matt!

Monday Musings: The New Phar Lap?

1 November 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

A lot of my friends are setting out today for the trip to the beautiful racecourse of Del Mar, just north of La Jolla (and Torrey Pines golf course) in Southern California, close to the wonderful City of San Diego, writes Tony Stafford. That makes it not too far from the border with Mexico and Tijuana, where locals make their brass selling cheap religious items to unwitting tourists by the roadside.

Some of the above-mentioned pals, not just content with a week where the Turf Meets the Surf – Bing Crosby 1937 – will then tootle down the road to spend a second week at Palm Springs. Nice work? Hardly, if you can get it!

In recent years it has been possible to leave the US right after the two days of Breeders’ Cup excitement onto a flight that crossed the international dateline but arrived in Australia in time for “The Race That Stops the Nation” on the first Tuesday in November.

This time the Melbourne Cup will proceed without some of its usual adherents as it precedes its international counter-attraction. In 2020 it was staged with severe Covid-induced restrictions. Fourteen of the 24 runners started out in Europe, eight – including the winner, Twilight Payment – were still trained there when setting off for the always difficult journey and preparation.

Joseph O’Brien trained the winner and he will be back again, his now eight-year-old Australian-owned marvel this time as top-weight carrying around 9st2lb (58k), 6lb more than last year.

He shares second favouritism with the Andrew Balding-trained Spanish Mission, of whom there were serious doubts as to participation as the new veterinary rules flexed their theoretical muscles. He is safely in the list, but I would imagine the vets will have the same sort of scrutiny right up to the morning of the race that caused Hughie Morrison’s 2018 runner-up Marmelo to be being excluded from the 2019 renewal. Marmelo was strongly fancied having won the Doncaster Cup last time out but the local veterinarians differed with the opinion of the trainer and owners’ vets who consistently pronounced him sound.

Astonishingly, with half the 24-strong field for Tuesday - officially announced with draw yesterday - emanating from Europe, these two will be the sole European-trained contenders. Both have top form this year, Twilight Payment finishing second to Sonnyboyliston in the Irish St Leger and Spanish Mission running a close second to Stradivarius in the Lonsdale Stakes at York in August.

Nothing else is coming. No Aidan O’Brien, whose sadness at losing his 2019 Derby hero Anthony Van Dyck with fatal injury in last year’s contest might have swayed him against sending any of his better-class stayers at the end of an arduous campaign.

Another trainer persuaded by potential queries from the beefed-up vets’ panel to make an early decision against sending his best horse was Charlie Fellowes. His Prince Of Arran, an eight-year-old contemporary of Twilight Payment’s, had been third, second and third again in the last three Melbourne Cups.

The place money amassed from those heroic challenges exceeded £1.5 million towards Prince Of Arran’s career win and place earnings of just over £2 million. In retrospect, the decision, while probably agonising at the time, now looks fortuitous as on all this year’s form the gelding would have struggled to make an impact.

Last Monday when talking about Joseph O’Brien’s latest Australian exploit in winning the Cox Plate, I also referred to the previous winner of that prestigious weight-for-age race. That was the beaten 2019 Investec Derby favourite Sir Dragonet, third at Epsom behind ill-fated Anthony Van Dyck.

The colt had also been a creditable sixth in last year’s Melbourne Cup, just a few days on from his Cox Plate exploits. These excellent performances came from his new base at Warwick Farm, where he ran under the banner of the hirsute Ciaran Maher, one of the most successful of the domestic trainers over there.

At least Maher, who has four of the 24 in tomorrow’s field, has a British element to his stable which has three bases, two satellites apart from Warwick Farm.

Six years ago, a young Englishman, son of a long-standing and much respected Newmarket trainer, like so many before him, tried his luck in the Antipodes. So impressed was Maher in his young pupil’s diligence and innovation that in 2018 he added the name of David Eustace, son of James and brother of Harry who now runs the family stable back home, as joint-trainer.

That means we have an English trainer with four runners in the great race to add to Andrew Balding. Only the legendary Chris Waller, trainer of Winx but yet to win the Cup, matches their representation. Waller is less likely than Maher/Eustace to win as the partners’ Floating Artist (11-1) and Grand Promenade (14-1) are the next pair in the betting.

But this will be a Melbourne Cup with a couple of differences. For me, never getting there – that was always the province of fellow Telegraph man, “Aussie Jim” McGrath - invariably meant staying up all night to see the show on telly.

On Tuesday when I went to Tatts Horses in Training sale watching the Australians make their ever-more expensive buys for next winter as they jousted with the Saudis for new middle-distance talent, I happened to run into John Berry.

He has been an integral and vital part of Melbourne Cup nights with his encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian and New Zealand form and I asked him if he was all set for Tuesday. A sad look came into that made for radio face – sorry John – as he related that the invitation always comes well in advance. As this October it hadn’t he feared he would, like me, watch it on the sofa.

Unless there was an oversight in the Sky Sports office, Newmarket’s former Mayor seems to have gone the way of so many other Sky staples – the latest being Jeff Stelling who announced he will be going, too, at the end of the year. Can’t be much fun getting old, can it?

The other big difference of course, unless you haven’t heard of him, is a locally-trained five-year-old called Incentivise who until April 11 this year had the career record of three runs and no places, never mind wins.

He was a 17/1 chance for his fourth race but won that by three lengths and he went on to win another five races, all by wide margins in the next few weeks.

At season’s end it was decided that he needed to be moved to Melbourne as the Covid rules would have been complicated had he remained in his original base in Southern Queensland. He was transferred to top handler Peter Moody whose brief was to campaign him at the Melbourne Spring Festival.

The move also needed a new jockey for the same reason, and the gelding turned up with Brett Prebble at Flemington racecourse on September 11 for the Makybe Diva Stakes. This first Group 1 challenge commemorates Australia’s greatest staying racemare, the only triple winner of the Melbourne Cup. Her hat-trick was achieved between 2003 and 2005.

They made all the running, winning by half a length. Incentivise followed up in another Group 1 on October 2. Two weeks later he achieved what was by common consent from the experts and public alike, the most impressive performance in the Caulfield Cup in living memory.. He won that race by a very easy three lengths and few observers in Australia believe he can be beaten tomorrow. Nine wins in a row since April 11 yet still receiving 2lb from the top-weight? His price of 7-4 almost looks generous!

Australians hanker after another Phar Lap, the hero from the 1930’s who was their between-the-World Wars equivalent of Seabiscuit in the US. After their past-sell-by date cricketers’ performance in the World 20/20 group qualifying match against England, they could do with a modern-day hero, human or equine.

I confess I cannot see him beaten. As to the Breeders’ Cup it would be nice if James Fanshawe could repeat last year’s victory of Audarya and win a second Filly and Mare Turf at Del Mar. I have a friend who has an interest.

Siobhan Doolan, highly-talented horsewoman and grand-daughter of Wilf Storey, had earmarked a Fanshawe horse in last week’s sale, the yet to win but lightly-raced four-year-old gelding Going Underground. Like Incentivise he made a slow start to his career, not appearing until late on as a three-year-old in December last year. Sadly, there the similarity ends, but the young lady is very happy with her nice-moving purchase since getting him home.

Siobhan made a discovery about him. Whether it’s correct or not I will try to find out from the horse’s mouth but I won’t ask until next week as James never likes to talk about his horses before they run.

This is the question. Is it true that Going Underground was a galloping companion with Audarya this summer? Should it be true it would be a nice thought that her £5k buy in a very tough market might have helped a horse win another Breeders’ Cup race. Siobhan will be preparing him in the mornings for his imminent campaign before settling down to her bloodstock insurance work. Good luck Shiv – and grandad of course!

Monday Musings: from Luxembourg to Oz

25 October 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Luxembourg’s emphatic success in Saturday’s Vertem Futurity, the final Group 1 race of the year in the UK, reminded us not to under-estimate the power of the Aidan O’Brien team, writes Tony Stafford.

As he conceded after the victory, things have been going rather less his way than we have come to expect, but a year in which St Mark’s Basilica, Snowfall and now this feasible 2,000 Guineas alternative to the Charlie Appleby two – Native Trail and Coroebus - have been around, it is hardly the disaster it was being painted of late.

More of Luxembourg later but eight hours before the big race at Doncaster, a ten furlong Group 1 race, the private property of that unforgettable Australian mare Winx between 2015 and 2018, was being decided.

The Ladbrokes Cox Plate, run at the tight Moonee Valley racecourse in Melbourne, is universally known as Australia’s principal weight-for-age race – the even more valuable Melbourne Cup is a handicap. Joseph O’Brien, already winning trainer of two of the last four Melbourne Cups, as against his father’s still frustrating blank in the race that stops Australia on the first Tuesday of November every year, took the £1,700,000 first prize on Saturday morning with the three-year-old colt State Of Rest.

As befits a race of its value, the opposition was stern and the second and third home, the joint-favourites at 13-5, fully deserve such a description. It took a full 20 minutes’ deliberation from the stewards to decide that Craig Williams’ objection to the winner and his rider John Allen on behalf of short-head runner-up Anamoe would be rejected. Third, staying on, was the champion mare Verry Elleegant, veteran of both successful and less so Group 1 tilts with William Haggas’s globe-trotter Addeybb among 12 wins from 30 starts.

Moonee Valley might not be Verry Elleegant’s favourite track, but the five-year-old had to concede only 1lb to her three-year-old rival (actually she counts as only a year and a half his elder because of the difference in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere breeding seasons. Anamoe, who had won a Group 1 two weeks before, the £678k to the winner Caulfield Guineas over a mile, carrying 9st as the 11/10 favourite, was foaled seven months after the winner. He received 16lb from the O’Brien horse and while the same age, will not actually be three years old until next month.

Topically, Saturday was the anniversary of State Of Rest’s final run as a juvenile when finishing fifth behind subsequent Irish 2,000 Guineas winner Mac Swiney in last year’s Futurity. He had a busy time running six races between June and October of his juvenile season and was probably ready for a quiet spring.
O’Brien delayed his comeback until the last week in June when he tackled a one-mile Listed race at The Curragh.

Conceding 10lb to both the winner Fourhometoo and runner-up Khartoum, he struggled to get a run until the last 100 yards, then flew home and would have galloped right by those mid 100’s rated and race-fit rivals in another few strides.

Until Saturday, there had been one more run, a highly-ambitious challenge to his father’s beaten Derby favourite Bolshoi Ballet at Saratoga. After Epsom, Bolshoi Ballet had gone some way to restoring his reputation with a win the following month at Belmont Park and the Saratoga Derby, a Grade 1 worth £390k and run over 9.5 furlongs at the Spa in mid-August at the time looked his for the taking. Its timing for the younger O’Brien was ideal as it gave State of Rest time to recover from his returning Curragh exertions.

Understandably, dad’s runner was a shade of odds against while the main dangers according to the betting were Jessica Harrington’s Cadillac at 9/2 and Charlie Appleby’s Secret Protector at 5/1.
Having looked back at the Curragh comeback third and the way he finished the race it seems inconceivable that State Of Rest could have been allowed to start at more than 20/1 in that company. The betting clearly suggested the home team was nothing much, yet here was a horse already worth a rating in the mid-110’s starting that price – and he had legendary East Coast rider John Velazquez in the saddle to boot.

The outcome was a one-length win in the colours of Teme Valley Racing, while Bolshoi Ballet was only fourth and the other raiders were further back. The win was much to the elation of the owners’ Racing Manager Richard Ryan, who has a wealth of experience in many facets of the racing industry.

Ryan was the long-term assistant to the late Terry Mills, who made his money in the waste disposal and demolition businesses. Many Epsom habituees ascribed much of the stable’s success to his quiet and ever discreet right-hand-man. Then after Mills’ death and son Robert’s brief spell at the helm, he left Epsom and worked the sales, before joining Ian Williams as assistant.

In that period and then since relinquishing that full-time role he has continued to unearth good horses for the trainer’s clients. Now he represents Goff’s at auctions as well as his role with Teme Valley and also maintains a close relationship with Williams.

To run horses trained in Europe for major races in Australia was always akin to a military exercise, but Joseph outlined in detail the extra hoops that are required post-, or rather, where Australia is concerned, mid-Covid. Those, together with the increased veterinary procedures imposed after Derby winner Anthony Van Dyck’s fatal injury in last year’s Melbourne Cup, have caused a number of UK trainers to abandon proposed Melbourne Cup challenges this winter.

Anthony Van Dyck’s demise took some of the family gloss off Joseph’s success with the seven-year-old Twilight Payment in the Cup last year. At least Aidan can point to his own Cox Plate seven years ago with Adelaide, now a stallion in Australia, while last year’s Cox Plate winner Sir Dragonet spent his formative years, indeed all his races before the Cox Plate, at Ballydoyle.

The beaten 11-4 favourite in Anthony Van Dyck’s 2019 Derby, he ended his time with O’Brien with a second to the great Magical in the Group 1 Tattersalls Gold Cup at The Curragh in July last year. His first run under Chris Waller’s care brought his Cox Plate win at the main expense of another former stable-companion Armory and he was then sixth in the Melbourne Cup, although his form this year has been nowhere near that level.

Doncaster’s confirmation that Luxembourg was indeed a potential Classic horse was underlined on Saturday as he drew steadily if not spectacularly away from three nice horses. Sissoko (Donnacha O’Brien), was just under two lengths behind the winner and only narrowly in front of another of Teme Valley’s (with Jock O’Connor’s Ballylinch Stud), the Roger Varian colt Bayside Boy, and Hannibal Barca inches back in fourth. This made it ten Futurity victories in 24 years for O’Brien enabling him to match the late Sir Henry Cecil’s record within the precise same time scale.

Brian Meehan had been bullish when we spoke on Saturday morning about the place chances of Hannibal Barca and it looked for much of the last furlong that the 50-1 each-way taken about the Sam Sangster-owned colt would collect. Sadly though track position on the far side as they came up the middle probably didn’t help rider Paul Mulrennan on the run home.

I’m going to the sales on Tuesday and it will be interesting to look into the box scheduled to be housing Hannibal Barca who until Sam and Brian wake up after the inevitable party they had for getting the 55,000gns son of Zoffany to a rating of at least 110, they will almost certainly pull him out. Then again they might let him have a spin round the ring with a big reserve. That would be nice. I’ll be there boys – and how I love a show!

Jumping proper started again with two days of Cheltenham and record crowds for the October meeting. The last time they had a crowd at Cheltenham, in March last year, the blame game merchants pointed to that largely outdoor gathering as a major component in the spread of Covid-19. With figures going up again that fixture is again a possible target for criticism, but the 76,000 crammed in at Old Trafford to watch Liverpool demolish Manchester United would potentially be a larger worry I would have thought. The maladies for distraught home fans might extend beyond Covid!

The most impressive Cheltenham performance for me was the flashy chase debut of the Skeltons’ First Time Lucki. A 144-rated hurdler after three wins from seven starts adding to two out of four in bumpers he looks destined for a much higher level over fences.

His jumping was fast, accurate and spectacular. At no time did Harry Skelton have a second’s concern and the eight lengths and the rest he had over some good horses in this initial novice chase could easily have been doubled had the champion jockey wished. Allmankind was similarly impressive for the brothers at Aintree yesterday.

That man (Harry) is going to be very hard to beat in his attempt at a second title and brother Dan might be an outside bet for the trainers’ title. Admittedly Fergal O’Brien is setting a very fast pace already up to 60 and if some of his potential stars waiting in the wings come through he could figure in the argument too.

Meanwhile Hollie Doyle, faced with what had looked a daunting calendar year record score of 152 for a female jockey she set in 2020, has passed it with two months to spare. Her initial title will not be long delayed.

Talking of titles, Johnny Weatherby, long-time Queen’s Representative at Ascot has been knighted. Was it Arise Sir John, or Arise Sir Johnny? I’m not sure if anyone’s taking money on it – it’s a bit like those bets on the Queen’s hat colour every day by those bookies before racing attracting once-a-year racegoers on the way from the main entrance to the grandstand. I’m sure they have their card marked! Psst- it was Sir John!!!

-TS

Monday Musings: Champions

18 October 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

An epic Champions Day at Ascot on Saturday definitely settled one major argument and all but decided another, writes Tony Stafford. In all honesty though, Murphy versus Buick and Appleby contra the Gosdens were the sideshows to an overwhelming afternoon for the Shadwell Estate Company, Jim Crowley and William Haggas.

There was a tinge of irony in the fact that in the week after the announcement of an admittedly expected but still shocking major reduction in the number of horses in the blue and white colours of the late Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum, Shadwell won half the races.

Most – me at the head of that particular queue – expected a John and Thady Gosden benefit. But in the opening stayers’ race, Stradivarius suffered another defeat at the hands not only of Trueshan but 50-1 shot Tashkhan who came through late to give Brian Ellison a scarcely credible second place.

So once again Hollie Doyle was the nemesis for Frankie Dettori. He had accused racing’s favourite and most talented female rider of setting an inadequate pace on a pacemaker when the pair were riding for Aidan O’Brien in the Prix Vermeille on Arc Trials Day.

Dettori was on the unbackable Snowfall that day, previously a triple Oaks winner in the summer, including at Epsom under the Italian, but was turned over by Roger Varian’s Teona. Frankie reckoned Hollie got the pace wrong, but horses are supposed to run on their merits and in the event La Joconde was only a half-length behind the superstar in third. If that smacked of sour grapes, on Saturday it was more a case of sour face.

Riding his favourite horse the now slightly faltering multiple champion stayer Stradivarius, Dettori came back boiling, now blaming young Irish rider Dylan Browne McMonagle for twice blocking his run. My view of the closing stages was that any inconvenience could hardly have been of the order of four lengths – the margin by which he was behind Trueshan. McMonagle, far from bowed by the old-timer’s complaints, quite rightly called it “just race-riding”.

The fastest finisher of the front three was undoubtedly Tashkhan, who started out in 2021 having joined Ellison from Emmet Mullins on a mark of 70. He was already up to 106 by Saturday and no doubt will have earned another hike. For Trueshan and his owners, who include Andrew Gemmell, his exploits entitle him to be the year’s top stayer.

I felt it worth starting out on Grumpy Frankie, who in a magical career of well over 30 years has had more than his fair share of good fortune – and leniency from the authorities - notably that day with the seven winners on the same racecourse. That was the year when I had just finished writing his “autobiography”, a Year in the Life of Frankie Dettori. Come off it Frankie, imagine how many times you’ve got in someone’s way when they thought they had a race in the bag!

But we move back to Shadwell. Two of their three winners on the day were home-breds. These were Baaeed, emphatic winner of the QE II Stakes and Eshaada, another Roger Varian filly to lower the colours of Snowfall, again below par in third in the Fillies’ and Mares’ race. After the brilliance of her trio of summer Group 1 wins at Epsom, The Curragh and York Snowfall may just be feeling the cumulative erosion caused by those efforts – not least her sixth in the Arc just two weeks previously. Varian must be thinking she’s his Patsy!

The third Shadwell winner was like the other two, a progressive three-year-old. William Haggas had not even revealed Baaeed to the racing public until June 7 of his three-year-old career but in the intervening 18 weeks he had won four more times including at Longchamp. Here the son of Sea The Stars was faced with the Gosdens’ Palace Pier, the highest-rated horse in Europe last year.

That status has been usurped by last weekend’s Arc hero Torquator Tasso. Baaeed was a most convincing winner and must have a massive future. Whether it will be that much more glorious than what we will see from Haggas’s other winner in the same colours cannot be certain. Aldaary, by Territories, had won a handicap on the same track two weeks earlier, the 6lb penalty for which brought his mark in Saturday’s closing Balmoral Handicap to 109. No problem as he proved to be the proverbial group horse running in a handicap by galloping away from 19 others under an exultant Crowley in a time only 0.07sec slower than the Group 1.

If there was an element of sadness around Hamdan’s colours winning half the races on that massive day, for me there was just as much poignancy about Aldaary’s success. The breeder is listed as M E Broughton, slightly disguising the identity of a man who equally hid behind the name of the Essex-based company he built, Broughton Thermal Insulation, in his many years as an enthusiastic owner-breeder.

Michael died last year – as did his wife Carol – and that after a career where the Racing Post Statistics reveal more than 100 winners in his sole name. He won races in all but two of the 33 seasons for which the Racing Post carries statistics, and in his final days actually won four to get him past the century.

He was a one-trainer owner, relying on the always-reticent Wille Musson and when the trainer retired five years ago, he stayed on as Broughton’s racing manager. Clever man that Willie Musson.
Michael was a jovial red-faced enthusiast and for a few years he used to ask me to go through the Cheltenham card on the days when he entertained a table of friends. These included his loyal PA, Maggie and Michael’s brother Roger as well as the Mussons, in the main restaurant at the Cheltenham Festival.

All his horses carried the prefix Broughtons (sometimes with an apostrophe before the “s”) and Broughtons Revival won three races of the four she competed in on turf as against a winless five appearances on all-weather, of course for Musson.

Retired to stud she had six foals before Aldaary and five of them are winners. No wonder Aldaary realised 55,000gns as a foal to the bid of Johnny McKeever at the 2018 December sales and then, re-submitted the following year in Book 2 of the October Yearling Sale, jumped up to 150,000gns to Shadwell. More than 150 Shadwell horses are due to go under the hammer at the Horses in Training Sale next week. I doubt that Aldaary, who holds the entry, will be sporting the insignia of Lot 1308 at Park Paddocks, rather enjoying some down time back at Somerville Lodge.
However sad it was that Sheikh Hamdan could not enjoy his day of days, I have much more regret that Michael was unable to enjoy seeing by far the best horse he has ever bred over all those years. Willie and Judy Musson will have been pleased as punch no doubt.

Earlier in the piece I suggested that Snowfall might not have fully recovered from her demanding run in the mud of Longchamp 13 days earlier, but the horse that finished one place ahead of her that afternoon stepped up to win the Champion Stakes thereby unseating Mishriff, the second Gosden ace in the hole.

That top-class globe-trotting winner of more than £10 million had sat out the Arc presumably to save his energies for Ascot, but shockingly, he didn’t last home, fading to fourth as Sealiway and Mickael Barzalona strode forward. Dubai Honour made a great show in second for the Haggas team and Classic winner Mac Swiney was third ahead of Mishriff thereby keeping Jim Bolger well in the action hard on the news that his other star of 2021 Poetic Flare is off to a stud career in Japan.

Sealiway had benefited from the traditional French way of training top-class three-year-olds. He had not run for almost four months before his Arc challenge having been runner-up a length and a half behind St Mark’s Basilica in the Prix Du Jockey Club.

Trained then by F Rossi, he switched to Cedric Rossi during the layoff and this convincing victory showed him as a high-class performer and one that is sure to be a major force in European and world racing over ten and twelve furlongs for the next year or so.

Elsewhere, Oisin Murphy held on to win a third title, but I understand there might still be some uncomfortable moments for him. He is a wonderful jockey and we have to hope he can overcome his demons. William Buick’s strong challenge will have given this unassuming young man the confidence that a championship is within his grasp especially as the Charlie Appleby stable remains so powerful.

Last week I suggested the Gosdens had more than enough firepower to claw back the half-million or so deficit they had on Godolphin’s main trainer, but in the event they retrieved barely ten per cent of it on Champions Day. Admittedly the season and therefore the title race in name continues until December 31 but big John and son Thady have no realistic chance of breaching the gap.
Creative Force won the sprint for Charlie and William and a touch more than £300k in the second race of the six. With his main rival surprisingly failing to get a winner on the day – especially the QE II and Champion Stakes, worth considerably more than £1.1 million that looked at their mercy - Appleby assuredly will win his first title after a period when John Gosden and Aidan O’Brien have been dominant.

The massive crowd and good weather and not least fair ground made for a wonderful day – on the tenth anniversary of the lavish Qipco sponsorship. A couple of friends managed to secure tickets for the owners’ lunchroom and Kevin and Dave had a wonderful time. The staff seemed overrun at times but the very pleasant greeter at the top of the stairs was a superlative advertisement for the hospitality trade.

The smile never left her face and then later in the afternoon I was quite surprised to see her carrying out a heavy load of rubbish to the bins. On suggesting that might be someone else’s job, she replied: “They are so busy and have been working very hard, it’s only fair!” What a woman!

At the end of the afternoon, when Dave, having enjoyed a fairly long and liquid lunch, mistook a step and fell headlong down half a flight of stairs, again the staff were quick to come to his aid, calling immediately for the medics. Dave, 78, was pronounced okay so we were cleared to go off to an evening at an Essex hostelry to complete a lovely day. And while I was fully aware of my chauffeuring requirements, the boys made a night of it and true to form were up and ready to go early on Sunday morning with Kevin, I know, supervising the action at his shellfish cabin in Billericay.

- TS

Monday Musings: Newmarket Rejuvenation

11 October 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

I had intended writing copiously 24 hours after my first wholly enjoyable, nay rejuvenating, visit to Newmarket racecourse for two years about a brief conversation of which I was the sole observer, writes Tony Stafford. The conversants were those two genial giants of our sport, Charlie Appleby and Aidan O’Brien, but I will leave that until later.

It was in the evening during a catch-up scan through the Saturday results that I noted the 7.30 p.m. race at Chelmsford was called the Tote.co.uk Now Never Beaten By SP Handicap (Division 1).

I’ve noticed that race title before, marvelling that the object of so much ridicule and indeed suspicion in its Betfred-owned days between 2011 and 2019 had been apparently transformed upon its acquisition and operation by the group formerly known as Alizeti Capital but now UK Tote Group.

Their intention, I remembered reading, was exactly that - to ensure the Tote returns were never to be bettered by SP and to help grow its new version to be of financial benefit to the sport.

In its rubric, Tote Group UK says it is “now owned by a group of racehorse owners and breeders who are passionate about the sport, backed by people who own and train over 1,000 horses worldwide.

“We’re united by a shared desire to secure British racing’s finances for generations to come through a revitalised Tote”. Glowing contributions in that notice in support of UK Tote Group have come from Sir Anthony McCoy, John Gosden, Richard Thompson of Cheveley Park Stud, and the Racehorse Owners Association.

I scrutinised all 36 races run in the UK on Saturday and in 24 of them, including the 7.30 at Chelmsford, SP was better than the returned Tote price about the winner. Course and betting shop punters would not have benefited, but I am reassured that online Tote odds backers will have been, according to the publicity (admittedly confusing) blurb to the tune of a maximum £500 per bet. [The race title referred to tote.co.uk, the online arm of the tote]

The three regular backers I know whom I thought might have been able to confirm this as correct all were unable to do so as they all three to coin a theme “had my account with the Tote closed years ago.” They all habitually try to get a few hundred quid on a horse. One big firm, asked for £500 each way on a horse the other day, offered to take £2.80 each way. Still theirs is a happy slogan and I wish anything that might correct the joke level of prize money in the lower reaches of the sport, a potential blessing. But as my three friends I’m sure would say: “Don’t hold your breath.”

I mentioned Charlie and Aidan’s very amicable chat earlier at Newmarket soon after the Darley Dewhurst Stakes victory of unbeaten Native Trail and the Irishman was glowing in his congratulations to his younger English counterpart.

Three wins on the day had already pushed Appleby past Andrew Balding at the top of the trainers’ championship standings for the first time and Aidan admired both Native Trail and the less exposed Coroebus, easy winner of the Group 2 Autumn Stakes.

Where Native Trail was a breeze-up buy for 210,000gns in the spring, able to make his debut in early July and now was making it a perfect four-for-four, there is no Godolphin blood in him, being by Oasis Dream out of an Observatory mare – Juddmonte all the way.

Coroebus meanwhile is Godolphin through and through: by Dubawi, their version of Coolmore’s great stallion Galileo, out of a mare by Galileo’s first superstar, the unbeaten Teofilo.

O’Brien remarked on both colts’ physicality, to which Appleby replied: “Coroebus is 540 kilos and Native Trail is 545, and that’s as heavy as Adayar who you know is a monster!” Formidable for two-year-olds you would agree!

The wins brought Appleby some elbow room at the top of the table and with a dearth of major and valuable races to come save next Saturday’s Qatar Champions Day at Ascot and the Vertem Futurity (just over £100k) at Doncaster the following weekend, opportunities are somewhat polarised.

Aidan told me he plans to run his top juvenile Luxembourg in the Vertem Futurity and expects that outstanding Camolot colt to go first in 2022 for the 2000 Guineas where he will almost certainly encounter Native Trail and Coroebus.

While Appleby has been inching his way up to and past Balding, who has had a season that must have surprised him with more than £4 million already in the satchel, he will be aware that John and Thady Gosden, who started slowly this year, are still in there pitching.

Balding has ten entries for Ascot, but only a couple, both 8-1 shots – Invite in the Fillies and Mares race, and Alcohol Free in the QE II – have better than outside chances. Appleby’s hopes from six entries centre, should he run, on Derby winner Adayar, about whom 3-1 is probably a little tight after his Arc exertions.

But the Gosden ten, with six in the closing Balmoral Handicap - Gosden senior dearly wants to win that race – include four serious darts at the biggest prizes of the day.

Mishriff, saved from the Arc in favour of the Champion Stakes, is 6-4 favourite for the £680k Champion. Palace Pier vies for favouritism with improving Baeed in the £623,000 to the winner QE II. Additionally, Free Wind is 7-2 for the £283,000 Fillies and Mares, and Stradivarius, should he renew hostilities with Trueshan, is second favourite behind that horse in the similarly-endowed Stayers’ race.

The Gosdens lurk around £500,000 behind Appleby and, unless such as Snowfall and maybe something else can edge out Mishriff, or The Revenant, back with a near miss at Longchamp, could possibly again unseat Palace Pier with Baeed’s help. Otherwise it seems a dominant position for a hat-trick for Clarehaven. It looks theirs to lose.

While that stealthy challenge in the trainers’ race has suddenly crystallised, the jockeys’ battle between incumbent Oisin Murphy and his nearest challenger William Buick has been a constant side-show most of this year.

It’s easy to portray this tussle as between Mr Naughty and Mr Squeaky Clean and certainly Oisin Murphy’s second failed breath test, which for the moment merely cost him one day’s riding at Newmarket on Friday, has done nothing for his reputation.

The jockey stressed that the alcohol reading while exceeding the permitted limit for being allowed to ride a racehorse was below that excluding him from driving a car. Great! Only slightly pissed then!

He dominated talk at Newmarket on Saturday, most people saying that for a repeat offence the case should get a proper investigation and the inside story at Newmarket on Saturday was that an inquiry will be held at the BHA today.

A one-day slap on the wrist, if that is all that happens for the offence, seems inappropriate to me. Suppose he hadn’t been tested, thus was free to ride on Friday and had caused danger to other jockeys and their horses. That puts the six-month ban (now ended) for promising apprentice Benoit de la Sayette when he was found in breach of the drug rules back in the spring in some context.

In the end, of course, Murphy was free to ride Buzz in the Cesarewitch and he gave the one-time Hughie Morrison horse a peach of a ride, one befitting of a champion, to make it a third win in the race for Nicky Henderson.

Buzz came to deny Burning Victory and William Buick in the dying strides, maintaining his margin over his rival to eight, when had the result been turned around it would have been only six. Charlie isn’t giving up on his jockey though and plans to run plenty of talented maidens between now and D Day on Saturday. Burning Victory of course was only Mullins’ second string but it would have been a nice result for readers of this column who may have noticed my frequent mentions of the mare in recent weeks.

So we had a seven-year-old winner who hadn’t raced on the Flat for two years beating a mare who had never previously run in a Flat race either in England or Ireland outclassing 30 other stayers. Burning Victory’s defeat and the no show of favourite M C Muldoon stopped a Willie Mullins four-timer in this contest.

Why are jumps trainers so good at winning on the Flat? We’ve known about these two for decades, but another younger member of their profession, an Irishman based in Gloucestershire, is showing similar tendencies.

Until 16-year-old daughter Fern attained that age in the summer, her father Fergal O’Brien was so disinterested in Flat racing that he had only winner from 50 runners in sporadic seasons from 2013 to 2019.

Fern, mentored by Fergal’s assistant and partner Sally Randell, a former star military race rider, won at the first time of asking a couple of days after her birthday and now stands on four wins from eight rides for her father as a lady amateur. His other 16 runners have yielded another four victories, including smart hurdler Gumball making all in a decent staying handicap at York on Saturday and Polish getting home first in a jump jockeys’ Flat race at Goodwood yesterday.

That makes it eight from 24 and a strike rate of 33%, a figure the Gosdens, Balding, William Haggas and the rest would kill for. And none of them has 55 jump winners since the end of April either!

Monday Musings: 72-1 Arc Winner? It was obvious, really… 👀

3 October 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

It was obvious really. It often is after the race and if we had looked deeply enough, we should have found the clue, writes Tony Stafford. Anyway, here we go. Last year Barney Roy won the race in question, one of four Group 1 wins among eight career victories. The previous year Ghaiyyath, the highest-rated horse in the world during the 2020 season, was successful.

Go back then to 2013 when Novellist, already the King George hero at Ascot two months earlier, picked up the prize, his fifth consecutive victory before heading off to stud in Japan. A son of the great German stamina influence Monsun, the sequence began for him after a fourth behind another German star in Danedream, the 2011 and 2012 winner of our race. She sandwiched in not only her 2011 easy Arc win but also her own King George at the expense of Nathaniel (and Novellist) at Ascot in July 2012.

The Grosser Preis von Baden, run at the spa town of Baden-Baden in South-West Germany has a historic roll-call of celebrated winners, the latest of them a month ago being Torquator Tasso. So little did the betting public, the media, writers on racing and ITV experts – thanks for showing it by the way – give credence to his chance in the race of the season in terms of class, that nobody bothered to mention him.

Well actually ITV did, but only in regard that he shared the same recently deceased German sire as Alenquer, William Haggas’ three-year-old who had beaten Derby winner Adayar, one of yesterday’s favourites for the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in the Sandown Classic Trial. That stallion was Adlerflug, winner in his racing days of the German Derby at Hamburg and sire additionally of In Swoop, runner-up to Sotsass in the 2020 Arc.

After eight winners in a single day on Saturday the Haggas stable had to be hopeful and that was rider Tom Marquand’s very cheerful pre-race assessment. But his bullish expectation that testing ground would be right up his colt’s autobahn did not materialise, Tom afterwards reporting the horse hated it.

When is heavy ground not heavy? The ITV coverage, enjoyable as it was, compared the time of the opening Group 1 fillies’ race with last year’s and declared it faster ground than in 2020. They repeated the truism after the big race, again a second quicker, when the reality was that it was still desperate going.

They neglected to remind their viewers that the 2020 Arc was the slowest this century. The way this Arc was run, with Adayar refusing to settle and making much of the running, set him up for the stronger stayers coming home. He was the assumed Godolphin number one (although Charlie Appleby suggested that on the ground Hurricane Lane might prove the stronger) and so it proved.

For a while it looked like Hurricane Lane and then Tarnawa would secure the prize but the dogged Torquator Tasso, on the outside of that pair having started his run alongside and soon moving ahead of Snowfall and Ryan Moore, kept plugging away.

It was with a mixture of disbelief and celebration that Richard Hoiles, ITV’s highly accomplished commentator, told us of possibly the biggest shock in Arc history, and the 72-1 Pari-Mutuel return is certainly right up there.

I love watching races right up to the line and at that point the German horse, ridden very calmly by his 34-year-old jockey Rene Piechulek, was actually drawing away from a high-class and tough Irish five-year-old mare and the St Leger winner, a rare feat of stamina. Then there was quite a gap to Adayar, a brave fourth in the circumstances, with Sealiway, runner-up to St Mark’s Basilica in the French Derby in June, next in fifth and Snowfall sixth.

As the exultant female assistant trainer told Matt Chapman, on his best form (and behaviour) in that and several other interviews, Marcel Weiss, who runs the stable of Gestut Auenquelle quite close to Cologne, has held his licence for only two years having been the assistant for the 70-horse string for two decades.

Gestut Auenquelle is a stallion station, standing the highest-priced sire in his country in Soldier Hollow (€30k this year) and also has Best Solution, the first of three consecutive Godolphin winners of the Grosser Preis von Baden in 2018, at the farm.

No doubt Torquator Tasso is destined for that location when he retires. His class has been evident from early as a three-year-old for after winning his maiden at Cologne he stepped up to be a close second to In Swoop in a one-two Adlerflug finish to last year’s German Derby. In 2021 he has progressed rapidly, avenging a narrow defeat by the Camelot filly Sunny Queen in an autumn Group 1 to the tune of five lengths when dominating a Hamburg Group 2 this summer.

After yesterday’s race the very astute Kevin Blake had the answer to the amazing SP, saying it was the defeat by Sir Mark Prescott’s filly Alpinista in the Grosser Preis von Berlin at Hoppegarten which preceded his Baden-Baden success that threw everyone off the scent.

It possibly did, but Sir Mark collected another German Group 1 preis with Alpinista at Cologne last weekend, while third-placed Walton Street was hardly letting the side (or the form) down when making a cakewalk of the Grade 1 Canadian International at Woodbine under Frankie Dettori two weeks ago.

Another easy to check labour I enjoy is trying to find reasons why a horse bred a certain way might do what he does. Before that minor investigation I had never heard of another German runner that enjoyed a lot of success on the track and subsequently became a stallion.

He is called Toylsome and was foaled in 1999. He is a son of the talented UK sprint/mile stallion Cadeaux Genereux and was sold as a yearling at Tatts for 320,000gns to the bid of German International Bloodstock. His daughter Tijuana did nothing on the track but is the mother of Torquator Tasso.

The purchasers could hardly complain as he won 16 of 36 races, so one for every 20k he cost. Crucially, the last of them came on his penultimate start 14 years ago to the day and on the same Parisian racetrack that his grandson chose for his day of greatness. The race was the 2007 Group 1 Prix de la Foret and among the opposition that day were the star French sprinter/miler Marchand D’Or (in third) as well as US Ranger, Dutch Art, Jeremy, Lingari, Arc winner Found’s dam Red Evie, and Red Clubs.

No wonder he started at 100/1 for his only victory at the top level in an unexpected performance that was something of a portent for yesterday’s amazing events.

There are many other things we could talk about from an exciting couple of days, but I will restrict myself to two. It was satisfying for his owners that Trueshan was able at last to have the shot at Stradivarius in the Prix Du Cadran on Saturday on his terms. He possibly could have been meeting the veteran and multiple champion as that one starts to feel his age, but Trueshan’s penchant for heavy ground was probably the bigger factor. I doubt Alan King would pit Trueshan against Bjorn Neilsen’s valiant performer on firm ground if the Gosden horse stays in training as an eight-year-old.

He is comfortably past £3 million in earnings and even in defeat got a nice top-up on Saturday – easier than topping up the horsebox fuel tank no doubt. As a son of Sea The Stars there is no reason why he would not make a decent stallion.

The other great result on the same afternoon was Saffron Beach’s emphatic all-the-way success in the Sun Chariot Stakes at Newmarket where she avenged her 1,000 Guineas defeat by the tough Mother Earth.

This was a top-class renewal and once William Buick decided to make the running there was never a time when the red and white colours of Lucy Sangster and James Wigan, augmented at the end of last year by Lucy’s son Ollie, looked likely to be denied.

Unbeaten at two, Saffron Beach was giving Lucy’s step-sister Jane Chapple-Hyam her first Group 1 win as a trainer almost a decade after Mull of Killough, owned by Invictus, a syndicate headed up by two of the younger Sangster step-nephews won three Group 3 races and a Listed up the same Rowley Mile.

Jane Chapple-Hyam stands on 25 wins for the season and not far short of half a million in prizemoney, a figure which thanks to Saffron Beach’s exploits is almost double her previous highest. She was already looking forward before Saturday’s race to the possible programme for the daughter of New Bay next year. Judged on Saturday, there is plenty more celebrating to come.

There’s also a feast of top-class racing in prospect during the rest of the month with the Future Stars (or is it Champions) meeting at Newmarket next week when the Dewhurst Stakes is the top attraction. Handicap fans will be just as interested in the Cesarewitch the market on which I have been monitoring for any movement in Burning Victory’s price.

I must report though that I heard some alarming news last week. It was that Ruby Walsh, still a big factor in the Mullins yard, reckons M C Muldoon, narrowly denied in the Ascot Stakes by 50-1 shot Reshoun, has improved out of all recognition. If that’s correct, then 6-1 isn’t a bad price. But then it’s not 72-1 is it? Let’s hope we see more of Torquator Tasso, he’s a star!

- TS

[Belated] Monday Musings: Of Arc and Opel

27 September 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Suddenly the Arc is upon us and Charlie Appleby couldn’t have set a more difficult conundrum, writes Tony Stafford. In the blue corner is the Epsom Derby hero Adayar, ridden by stable jockey and championship contender William Buick.

In the red corner the Irish Derby and St Leger winner Hurricane Lane. Both have added Group 1 races since their Derby triumphs, Adayar collecting the King George at Ascot from Mishriff, later conqueror of Sunday’s rival Alenquer and a possibly regressive Love in the Juddmonte International.

In all the appeal of a tussle between the best of Irish females, Love, her better-fancied stable-companion and successor in a triple of Oaks wins, Snowfall, and the early-in-the-week favourite, Tarnawa, the 2021 Arc is as much a feature of two stars we won’t be seeing.

Mishriff, whose race planning you could hardly gripe at, with more than £10 million safely in owner Sheikh A A Faisal’s pocketbook even before the Flat season started in the UK, waits for the Champion Stakes two weeks later, but you have to think he would have been a prime contender had he turned up.

More obviously, given that Tarnawa is as short as she is, the news that St Mark’s Basilica is drawing stumps on his stellar career so misses all of the Arc, Champion Stakes and even the Breeders’ Cup, makes for another unfortunate absentee.

Aidan O’Brien did his job to perfection, winning the Dewhurst last October to make him the champion 2yo in Europe in 2020; then two French Classics, the Poulains and the Jockey Club, to reinforce his appeal to a French breeding industry that is finding its feet on the back of the exploits of St Mark’s Basilica’s sire, Siyouni.

It needed one more win after a breath-taking dismantling of the older globe-trotting pair of Addeybb and a tiring Mishriff in the Eclipse and, when he was unable to go to the Juddmonte, there were those ready to suggest the Mishriff of that day might have beaten him.

So thence to the Irish Champion Stakes and in another small field it was vital he restored the glamour. He edged into a lead in the straight and dealt decisively with another dangerous duo, Tarnawa and multiple Group 1 winner and new Iron Horse, Poetic Flare.

The Irish race did not result in any rise in his official mark of 127, established after the Eclipse, and in the meantime that figure was afforded Adayar by dint of his comfortable defeat of key horse Mishriff (who was conceding 11lb weight-for-age, let us not forget) and a Love fresh from her fifth Group 1 win in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes at the Royal meeting.

Adayar was the nominal third string for the Derby, not that you would have known it as his odds tumbled from 40/1 to 16/1 in the closing moments leading up to the race. His near five-length demolition of Mojo Star, with best-fancied Appleby runner Hurricane Lane only third, had Buick wondering how he could have got it so wrong.

Since then the 30-year-old has ridden both colts to four more Group 1 triumphs. Adayar at Ascot did enough to convince Buick he should renew the partnership next weekend even though Hurricane Lane had won the Irish Derby, Grand Prix de Paris and St Leger, the last two in imperious wide-margin style since Epsom.

Mojo Star also had to be content with another second place for Richard Hannon and free-spending football agent Kia Joorabchian in the St Leger. Their colt is 66-1 and, with the horse’s penchant for running on well and the stamina shown at Doncaster, he might be the one to pick up the pieces and nick a place in the extra place markets.

Mishriff is undoubtedly the horse that ties in with most of the big horses in this fabulous contest and another who can be gauged with him is the better of the two Japanese entries as far as world form is concerned, Oisin Murphy’s mount, Chrono Genesis.

With career earnings well past £7 million she is almost in the Mishriff class for prize money and she ran a brilliant race when only a neck adrift of Mishriff in the Sheema Classic at Meydan in late February. That followed an easy win at home with a £2 million prize having got to within three quarters of a length of her country’s even more illustrious mare and great champion, Almond Eye.

Chrono Genesis’ only run since Meydan was in a Group 1 race at Hanshin in midsummer when an easy victory was her sixth in 13 career starts. Oisin has a great record riding Japanese horses and it is worth reminding punters that betting on horses from that country on the Pari-Mutuel on the day would be rather foolish if value is your credo.

One big factor in her favour is that her sire, Bago, won the race as a three-year-old for French-based English trainer Jonathan Pease. She is joined in a double Japanese challenge by recent course winner Deep Bond who saw off Broome on Trials Day by a couple of lengths. He is another possible place contender.

I’ve thought Snowfall would win the Arc, seeing as she has all the allowances, ever since her Epsom cakewalk and it would be to her advantage if the rains came. Her latest unexpected reverse has been treated as an irrelevance by the market but dangerously so. It is hard to see why Roger Varian’s filly, Teona, should be four times the price of her Longchamp victim and her trainer has always had a high regard of her talent.

It is no foregone conclusion that either will match Tarnawa after her excellent run over a shorter trip than ideal last time, splitting the winners of a hatful of 2021 Group 1's. Dermot Weld would love another step back into the big time, but I stay with Snowfall and Ryan Moore and take Adayar and Chrono Genesis to fill the places.

Until last weekend the name Westerberg alongside Coolmore runners has not made for a particularly happy association but within ten minutes on Saturday they clicked twice and the winning pair are respectively 8/1 for the 1,000 Guineas and favourite for the Derby.

Throughout the tenure of John Magnier at Coolmore/ Ballydoyle, initially as a 23-year-old with father-in-law Vincent O’Brien on the back of Robert Sangster’s Vernons pools fortune, through the Tabor/Smith heyday in the first two decades of this century and onward, the need is always for new blood and above all new funding to cope with opposition that owns countries, have fortunes within the bottomless pit of cash of the Saudi Royal family, or is a religious leader backed by wealthy adherents.

The Westerberg name disguises the identity of Opel Cars heir Georg Von Opel but until Saturday his appellation on several of the more expensive sales acquisitions of the past two years has been almost a jinx. One source close to the Coolmore action told me the other day: “I feel sorry for George, he’s such a lovely man, but he never seems to get any luck.”

Whether it was out of superstition or business commitments, Herr Von Opel was not at Newmarket on Saturday and missed an explosive last-to-first performance in his maroon and light blue livery (imagine West ham or Aston Villa) by Tenebrism, on her first start since March.

Her win that day six months ago at Naas had been similarly emphatic, prompting favourite quotes for the Queen Mary at Ascot, however she injured her pelvis struggling through the mud. Aidan worried he had not done enough with her to challenge for the Group 1 Cheveley Park Stakes first time back, but she answered most emphatically drawing away late in a romp.

A daughter of the already repatriated Caravaggio, to Ashford Stud, she carries all the Scat Daddy speed and with Pivotal on the dam’s side, she will be an interesting contender next year.

Just ten minutes later, George’s, or Westerberg’s, colours were to the fore again atop the similarly once-raced Luxembourg, and with even more significance with the 2022 Classics in mind. Started off at Killarney in a midsummer maiden O’Brien often targets with his potential Derby horses, the trainer sent the son of Camelot to the Curragh’s Beresford Stakes and won that Group 2 in a hack canter.

That made it 11 victories in succession in the race and a 21^st in all for O’Brien and, given that history, why even 8-13 was available is a mystery. Luxembourg is free of Galileo blood, being by a son of Montjeu out of a mare by Danehill Dancer – entirely Coolmore breeding and ideal as an outcross for all those Galileo mares that will continue to come on stream for a few years yet. How Georg, not to mention John, Michael and Derrick, would love him to put another notch on the Derby Roll of Honour for the team next year.

- TS

Monday Musings: Gordon’s Cunning Plan?

20 September 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Six months is a long time in politics, writes Tony Stafford: ask all the Tory ministers who either got sacked, demoted, moved sideways or occasionally up in the latest reshuffle. It’s a long time in the Covid19 story too, ask John Gosden’s mate, former Health Minister Matt Hancock, but it seems it is but a blink of an eye in Irish horseracing.

Gordon Elliott and Charles Byrnes came back from their independent six-month bans for breaches of Rules and in the former case basic decency. Each within days has shown that nothing has changed in their absence.
Immediately after THAT picture of him sitting on a dead horse on his gallops, Elliott was briefly the most hated man who had anything to do with caring for animals. Never mind that all his friends and co-workers insisted he was a true animal-lover, as well he may be and probably is.

But the six months’ absence, conveniently salved by the fact that another local trainer, the little-known Denise Foster, was allowed to be shoe-horned in and keep the show on the road, has been probably a nice summer break for the man.

Denise did her required task to the tune of 30 jumps wins from 275 runners at around an 11% strike-rate. In the latest two-week analysis whereby Racing Post statistics convey whether trainers are hot, cold or lukewarm, she had five runners, all on the Flat, each starting at least 14/1 and with two places before being shown the door – I trust with a nice bouquet of flowers for her trouble.

Elliott, whose last ban-shortened jumps tally was 155 wins from 1,003 thus 15%, started back in the middle of the week before last and already has six wins on the board from 21 jump representatives, at a rate of 29%.

What occurred to my suspicious mind is that the recruitment of Mrs Foster offered a real opportunity for Gordon. Once it became clear that he would be coming back, if not to all the owners – some like Cheveley Park Stud with Cheltenham on the horizon were swept away in all the emotion and opprobrium that descended on the trainer - he could plan for the future.

His biggest supporter, Gigginstown House Stud of the O’Leary brothers, stayed firm, albeit with the well-chronicled promised reductions in the size of their operation beginning to take effect – more than 40 of their horses were in the recent Doncaster sale.

One oddity has already suggested more than a minor reduction. None of the 21 initial Elliott horses wore the maroon livery of Gigginstown – maybe the easing in the holiday Covid regulations will cheer up the always-combative boss of Ryanair?

Having another name on the licence even if Gordie was allowed to keep his nose on the place, was an invitation to get a few horses down the handicap, not that I’m suggesting Denise was breaking any rules. But it’s simple enough to run horses over the wrong trip, on unsuitable ground or even when they are either unfit or out of sorts. The excuses are well-enough noted in the trainers’ lexicon. Expect a constant flood of winners from this undeniably talented trainer.

While Elliott did have some restrictions, the six-month ban on Charles Byrnes, long known as the shrewdest of Irish shrewd trainers, was a ban pretty much only in name.

Even the initial and name on the licence after his misdemeanour was unchanged with Cathal Byrnes holding the fort. Charles was allowed to go into the yard and even take the horses around the parade ring before their races.

Since regaining his credentials Byrnes has had the grand total of two runners, one unplaced jumper and one on the Flat.

UK trainers quite rightly have been moaning for ages about the favourable treatment of Irish horses in our valuable handicaps and I have been right up there in pleading their case. What happened at Cheltenham was a joke and belatedly Dominic Gardner-Hill, head of handicapping has promised a review.

Saturday’s Cesarewitch Trial at Newmarket – the winners of which never seem to get anywhere near in the main event the following month – still carried a highly-desirable £20k first prize. Byrnes selected the race for his 79-rated seven-year-old Turnpike Trip who on his last run for Cathal Byrnes had been a close second in a race over a similar trip but worth only €6k at Down Royal.

Back in the Charles Byrnes fold, virtually untouched for a good run and with the incentive of a valuable winner’s prize and some ordinary opposition, here was an opportunity for Clever Charlie to fill his boots.

As the Racing Post joyfully crowed, the gamble was landed by two lengths from Live Your Dream, trying in vain to concede an improbable 22lb to the invader over the marathon trip. The other seven were eight lengths and more behind.

The last time Charles bothered to bring Turnpike Trip across to the UK, he ran in a handicap hurdle at Ascot at the Christmas meeting in 2019, three months after winning a Grade 3 novice hurdle at Tipperary and three weeks after he ran the brilliant Envoi Allen to eight lengths off levels in a Grade 1.

Starting only 6/1 from a mark of 146 he finished fourth to Hughie Morrison’s smart dual-purpose horse Not So Sleepy, who at the time was rated 16lb Turnpike Trip’s inferior. The Irish horse was 14 lengths behind the winner, but that horse, who was fifth to Honeysuckle in this year’s Champion Hurdle, is now rated 153 hurdles and 99 on the Flat. All Byrnes had to do once the mark was fixed – and with no sense that maybe he was a blot of Burning Victory proportions at Deauville the other week – he just had to wait for the right valuable race. Job done!

And here was a horse running off 79. Help yourself - Charlie and his pals did.

The new system once it comes into force needs addressing at many levels, not least the ease with which low-grade or rather lowly-rated Irish horses can come and pick off as they like 0-55 races over here.

Handicapping and its potential for unfairness has long been an issue for Hughie Morrison and as he watched his nice three-year-old King Of Clubs toil home behind the placed horses at Newbury on Saturday he must have been screaming with rage.

King Of Clubs has won twice in handicaps, the second off a mark of 86 at Sandown when he finished well and got up on the line to win by a nose. Now there are trainers who would be shocked if such a win entailed more than a 2lb or 3lb extra impost but King Of Clubs got 5lb!
Then when the latest ratings came out on Tuesday, that most hated of concepts in the Revised Handicap ratings feature – collateral form – was brought to bear.

Here horses standing in the box on Tuesday morning can be given more weight because of something a close rival has done since his own last performance. In this case Sandown runner-up Victory Chime won next time at Chester, albeit only by three-quarters of a length, but the BHA handicapper added another 2lb to King Of Clubs’ mark.

Now raised 7lb for a nose, Hughie must have feared the worst for his 93-rated three-year-old. By that single action King Of Clubs can no longer run in 0-90 handicaps whereas without the extra 2lb he still could have.

Faced with horses of a different calibre and with far more experience he predictably found it all too much. Not only is the horse being forced into too strong company too early in his career, with the potential for halting his progress, his owners are now much more likely to succumb to offers to buy him from abroad. These are the sort of horses that should be encouraged to race in this country.

Elsewhere Charlie Appleby continued his world-wide sweep of the big races with two Saturday major pay-days in North America.

Recruiting an available Frankie Dettori for the Canadian International at Woodbine racecourse, Toronto, he collected £206,000 for Godolphin when hard-knocking Walton Street wiped away the opposition by more than five lengths.

Desert Encounter, trained by David Simcock to win the two previous editions in 2018 and 2019, had to be content with second on Saturday.

Then in New York, Yibir, winner last time of the Great Voltigeur at York but side-stepping the St Leger, was found a choice alternative in the Jockey Club Invitational for three-year-olds. Third favourite behind Bolshoi Ballet, already a winner at Belmont in the summer, Yibir came from last to first under guest rider Jamie Spencer, collecting £390,000 for the Appleby yard. That made it an (in the words of Lou Reed) Oh what a perfect day in North America coming home with almost £600,000! For the record Bolshoi Ballet, the favourite, was fourth.

Finally I have to mention my friend Jamie Reid’s (same sound, different spelling!) authorised biography of Victor Chandler which takes us to Longchamp 2007 and his (and three associates’) arrest for unlawful bookmaking at the Arc meeting. I was around in those days and have read this last chapter. Reid is a wonderful writer and was also very close to the subject for the period the book covers, I can’t wait to read the rest of it.

* Victor Chandler, Put Your Life On it. Reach Sport £20.

Monday Musings: Very Few Racing Certainties

13 September 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

As a certain young tennis player showed the world last week, nothing is guaranteed in sport, writes Tony Stafford. Certainly, when Aidan O’Brien assembled the cavalry for their dual skirmishes around the Curragh and on the manicured lawns of Longchamp last weekend, he and the Coolmore owners were expecting more than a single winner.

Okay, so St Mark’s Basilica, forced out of York but now refreshed for the task in the Irish Champion Stakes at Leopardstown on Saturday, did see off the dual threat of top older mare Tarnawa and fellow multiple Group 1-winning three-year-old Poetic Flare, but that is pretty much where it ended.

True, Mother Earth should have won the Matron Stakes on the same day bar being pressed against the rail by 25-1 winner No Speak Alexander, whose rider forced Ryan Moore to ease her close home when short of room. It was only the intervention of second-placed Pearls Galore that prevented the 1,000 Guineas and Prix Rothschild winner from collecting a third Group 1 in the stewards’ room.

Luck in general was hardly on their side over the weekend. Innisfree, one of their best-backed horses at Leopardstown, was poised to collect in the Group 3 when going wrong and having to be pulled up by the same luckless pilot.

But when sending seven individual winners of Group 1 races during the current season for such an important two days’ racing not just in Ireland (Champions Weekend), but also in France (Arc Trials Day) and UK (Saturday’s St Leger), one may be forgiven for expecting at least a few of them to win.

The biggest shock of course was the ending of the explosive victory roll throughout the year of Snowfall, from unconsidered winner of the Musidora in May, through the record-making 18-length romp in the Oaks, nine-length demolition in the Irish version, and latterly a more measured four in York.

Cynics said divide it again and make it two but rather than a multiplying factor, it was the linear reduction that applied. Go from nine to four, take off another five, and you get a first defeat. Teona, third at York and a 28-length disappointment in tenth at Epsom, opted out of the Curragh and a return to the Knavesmire, instead restoring her reputation in a Windsor Listed race. Roger Varian had her primed and the resulting one and a half length (that’s the linear version working to a nicety!) put the 1-5 shot in her place.

The tell-tale stat, as if we needed to illustrate further the law of diminishing Snowfall returns, was the location of La Joconde, a daughter of Frankel and part of the regular team of maids of honour attending the queen on her perambulations around Europe.

La Joconde, a 40-1 shot at Epsom, was 11^th of 14 there, beaten 34 lengths. At the Curragh, having first stopped off at Roscommon to break her maiden, she was again 40/1 when sixth, beaten 20 lengths, and the gulf contracted to just under seven lengths at York. Yesterday La Joconde, 44-1 under Hollie Doyle, was only half a length behind her principal in third, so some nice black type for her – well, they needed something on which to reflect favourably!

The Frankie Dettori magic on O’Brien horses – often getting on the Ryan Moore discards – didn’t extend to Doncaster on Saturday, either. With the stable number one in Ireland, Frankie had his first experience of riding one-time Derby favourite High Definition in the St Leger but true to form this disappointing animal proved worst of the quartet from Ballydoyle beating only one home.

The Mediterranean (28/1) in third and Hollie Doyle-ridden Interpretation (shortest of the quartet at 8-1) in fourth did as well as could be expected as Irish Derby winner Hurricane Lane continued his upward climb for William Buick and Charlie Appleby. Mojo Star, second in the Derby to Adayar and unlucky-in-running in Ireland, ran a big race again but was no match for the winner who is right up there at the top of the tree.

High Definition had been favourite for all three earlier starts, but now the plug had been properly pulled and he was relatively friendless at 14’s. In all honesty he should have been double those odds but highly-held reputations earned on the Ballydoyle gallops are not easily relinquished, especially among the bookmakers.

Reappearing at York in May after an interrupted preparation he was a rusty third behind Hurricane Lane in the Dante. Yet there he was next time at the Curragh, again favourite, this time for the Irish Derby, and you could hardly have imagined a less enthusiastic performance: always loitering at the back while Hurricane Lane was again doing their untroubled business while others, notably Mojo Star, were getting hung up in traffic.

The final straw ought to have been the Great Voltigeur back at York, the traditional St Leger trial, when again unbelievably favourite, he mooched into sixth of eight. He was a decent enough juvenile but the glitter has evaporated on the track in his Classic year. It happens to the best of trainers and even Aidan.

Talking of final straws, Hughie Morrison, spitting blood when Sonnyboyliston edged out his rallying Quickthorn for first prize in the Ebor, citing how well handicapped Johnny Murtagh’s horse had been, now has chapter and verse on his side as Murtagh’s stayer collected yesterday’s Irish St Leger. Rated 113, he got the better of 117-rated Twilight Payment to earn the greater part of €300k more to swell his month’s earnings to half a million, Raducanu proportions almost!

Quickthorn beat the 2020 St Leger runner-up Berkshire Rocco, conceding him weight in a conditions race at Salisbury last week, proving much too good despite losing 20 lengths at the start. No doubt he’ll be giving weight to Murtagh’s horse next time!

Appleby and Buick again had the wood on O’Brien and Moore at the Curragh yesterday in the National Stakes when Native Trail saw off Point Lonsdale in a clash of two unbeaten colts. Both had gone through the ring at Tattersalls: Point Lonsdale, by Australia, at the yearling sales when a 575,000gns purchase by MV Magnier. His four wins in a row – a maiden, Listed, Group 3 and Group 2, all with comfort – explained the 8/13 starting price.

But Native Trail, a 210,000gns acquisition from the Craven Breeze-ups this year, had won two, with a narrow success in the Group 2 Superlative Stakes at the July meeting at his home course, suggesting better to come. So it proved, Native Trail overturning the favourite after a short, sharp tussle. He must have moved right to the top of the two-year-old rankings after that.

Hard as the high-profile defeats had been, it must have been even more disappointing that Love and Broome, back in Group 2 company having both added in numerical terms to their top-level success – Love’s Ascot victory had been a little palled by two subsequent third places, admittedly in the King George and Juddmonte – could not convert the lower-level opportunities.

Broome had won the Group 1 Prix de Saint-Cloud but a return to France for his Arc Trial in the Prix Foy proved a disappointment as the Japanese Deep Bond made all in this full dress rehearsal for four-year-olds and up. Anyone fancying a bet on the big race next month would be well served placing a bet on course on the PMU as the hordes of supporters of the Japanese horses always distort even markets on world pool races.

Love’s defeat came from an unlikely source. When my friend Nicolas Clement bought a filly by Derby-winning Galileo stallion Ruler Of The World for Jonathan Barnett he paid the princely sum of €21,000 (his budget was €40k!). Clement has been adamant all along that she is the most promising of his fillies for next year and expects her to make a debut late next month. His reasoning was that Ruler Of The World is a vastly underrated sire.

As the result of yesterday’s Group 2 Blandford Stakes is digested it will show that La Petite Coco was winning for the fourth time in five starts for Paddy Twomey. She got up in the last stride to deny Love, with the third horse three lengths away. Already rated 110, La Petite Coco looks one to follow.

She has been the joint most productive filly by her sire in Ireland, from only a small representation, as he is based in France. Pineapple Express, trained and ridden by father and son Andrew Slattery (x2), was beaten a neck in the 23-runner finale handicap there yesterday. That made in four wins and three seconds in ten 2021 outings for her. I can’t wait to see Jonathan’s filly on the track.

In other news, it will hopefully be off to Yarmouth this week, either Wednesday or Thursday, for the three-year-old Dusky Lord, in whom Barnett is a partner along with Theona’s trainer, Roger Varian. I expect Roger to be in a decent mood when I speak to him before the race.

One very sad note was the death of Andy Stewart, owner of Big Buck’s and so many great jumpers, starting with Cenkos, over the past three decades. I knew him from even before he set up the company of that name with which he made his fortune.

We first met when he worked with investment bankers Singer & Friedlander, sponsors of a big chase every year at Uttoxeter. He liked to talk about his team of greyhounds at Hove stadium, with little thought of moving up into horses. That he did and with Paul Nicholls too was a joy for so many, especially the way in which he embraced horse racing and how graciously he treated everyone he met.

Monday Musings: Treatment of Trainers and Jockeys Chalk and Cheese

6 September 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

On the fateful Saturday evening of July 17 this year, an apprentice seemingly with the world at his feet made a misjudgement for which he is still paying, writes Tony Stafford. Had he been able to maintain the income per month with rides and percentage of winners of the first half of the year he would have added around £7,500 to his earnings so well was he progressing. Instead, Mark Crehan was given a 28-day salutary suspension in the manner of the old Army traditions which historically governed the Jockey Club’s total domination of racing.

On that Saturday, having only his fifth ride for Sir Michael Stoute – three of the previous four had won – he thought he was passing the winning post in the lead on Aerion Power, when he was in fact just at the half-furlong pole.

Replicating the same mistake that many riders have made down the decades, he eased his mount and was immediately horrified when two of his rivals continued urging theirs and went past him. He rallied Aerion Power to good enough effect to claw back second place, but Connor Beasley riding Colony Queen had a neck to spare at the line.

That was 51 days ago, and it was precisely one day before that when he last rode a winner. He has yet to add to the 38 he had clocked up from 225 rides in the first half of the year. Since his ban ended his ten rides have been sprinkled with near misses, one for Sir Michael who showed his support in the best way possible, and George Boughey his boss with five.

It is not just the loss of earnings but the complete halt to his momentum that is so frustrating. The late John McCririck was always most vociferous in cases like Mark’s: “Ban them for life,” might have been his coda such was his one-eyed concern with the men in the betting shops and their small daily wagers.

It seems, though, that there are mistakes and mistakes and, depending on who is making them, the penalty can be way out of proportion. The same month as Crehan’s blunder, Jessica Harrington’s course representative allowed the three-year-old filly Aurora Princess rather than the two-year-old Alezarine to run in the 2yo maiden at the Galway Festival. She finished first, unsurprisingly, but the error was discovered and she was automatically disqualified, the race going to the favourite from the Aidan O’Brien stable who had crossed the line second.

Later Mrs Harrington said it was an “indefensible blunder” and got a ticking off and a €2,000 fine. Life goes on for the top people, Aurora Princess winning as herself at Clonmel the other day. Alizerine made her “real” debut early in August and was unplaced.

A more amazing error – one described by Aidan O’Brien as “a million-to-one chance” was the mix-up in caps for two of the trainer’s runners in Deryck Smith’s purple colours in the Fillies’ Mile at Newmarket last autumn. Mother Earth, the subsequent 1,000 Guineas and Prix Rothschild heroine, ran as Snowfall, called over the line third in this Group 1 race, while Snowfall in eighth was identified throughout as Mother Earth.

Considering the pair has now won five Group 1 races between them and Epsom, Curragh and Yorkshire Oaks winner Snowfall heads betting on the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, a £4,000 fine was, with hindsight, hardly swingeing. I doubt the penalty troubled Aidan’s liquidity any more than Jessie’s two grand or even the bargain-basement £1k handed out to their similarly high-powered UK counterpart William Haggas this weekend.

A last fortnight tally of 15 winners from 50 runners with around £316,000 in first prizes alone is testament to his talent, power of stable and ability to find races all the way through his team. Winning Saturday’s September Stakes at Kempton with his father Brian‘s Hamish, brought back to fitness after a long absence for a tendon injury, was the emotional highlight of an eventful weekend, crowned by the fifth and finest success for the unbeaten Baeed in the Group 1 Prix du Moulin de Longchamp yesterday. Useful yardsticks Order Of Australia (Aidan) and Victor Ludorum (Fabre) followed this late challenger for Europe’s champion miler status over the line in Paris.

But over at Ascot on Saturday all was not well. There was a £38k handicap on the card and Haggas horses Chalk Stream and Candleford crossed the line in the first two places, Chalk Stream well ahead of his much longer-priced and apprentice-ridden stablemate. On weighing in, however, Candleford’s rider drew light and Haggas admitted that when saddling him he left the weight cloth on the head lad’s bucket and simply forgot about it.

So Candleford ran with a much lower weight than required and the trainer’s immediate worry was whether the BHA handicappers would take that into consideration especially as the £18k second prize was forfeit. Trainers receive a higher share of winning prizes than jockeys and William can expect more than £30k to go into his Weatherby’s account just for the last fortnight’s work.

There is absolutely no complaint intended about the trainer, apart from an unexpected lapse, just that the three examples I’ve listed are so blatantly lenient in comparison to the draconian treatment of Mark Crehan. I was pleased to see Frankie Dettori joining Sir Michael Stoute in pledging his support for the lad, but as with prizemoney and the scandal of the Cambridgeshire, referred to last week, something seriously needs to be done.

I note that while the Cambridgeshire, traditional first leg of the Autumm Double in the days when bookmakers were prepared to risk a few quid in case someone might get them both – in my time on the Daily Telegraph I managed it a couple of times – is worth £61k to the winner, the Cesarewitch over twice the distance, carries more than twice the money – £128K.

The top weight in the first leg has a handicap mark of 109 and there are 121 entries. Top weight in the Cesarewitch is 108 and 94 have been entered. It seems ridiculous given the tradition that there should be such a disparity. Among the latter race’s entries and now with a 4lb penalty after her €40k free kick in France the other day is the 2020 Triumph Hurdle winner, Burning Victory.

Yet to run on the Flat either in her now home base of Ireland or in England, she has two Flat wins in France to her credit for Willie Mullins this summer. I was gratified to see that the BHB handicapper thought she merited 96 rather than the French 88 when Cesarewitch entries were made and the 4lb more as against the French 11lb for Deauville brings them in line. How about her being the one from his 14 entries that is most fancied – he usually lines one up in particular for it? The fact she is only 12/1 suggests the guess might have some mileage.

As the ink was barely dry – yes I’m still living in the dark ages, but at least I don’t talk about quill pens! – on last week’s article, I started reading a book that has been on my shelves for years and one I have always assumed I’d read. I hadn’t!

Called Horsetrader, it was written in 1994 by noted author Patrick Robinson, with Nick Robinson, and outlined the 20 years of Coolmore stud dominance in racing and breeding and then the challenge made to them by Arab owners, particularly Sheikh Mohammed. Unexpected meetings in life can propel our future in a totally unexpected direction, and it was such an unlikely eventuality that years later brought Robert Sangster, heir to the Vernon’s Pools fortune, into a partnership with John Magnier and his father-in-law, Vincent O’Brien.

In his schooldays at Repton College, Sangster had an opinion that Vincent O’Brien must be the greatest trainer of racehorses in the world. “Had the Irishman not won three consecutive Grand Nationals and three Gold Cups and Champion Hurdles in the post-war era before turning to the Flat?”, he reasoned.

Later, as he was feeling his way in the family firm, Sangster used to meet up with several of the other well-connected young men in Liverpool where Vernon’s was based. There he met Nick Robinson, grandson of businessman Sir Foster Robinson, once a top cricketer and now a horse breeder outside his commercial interests.

Sangster’s chosen hobbies were golf on the Hoylake links where father Vernon would become Men’s Captain and mother Peggy, Lady Captain, and more seriously boxing. He won a dozen fights unbeaten before going into the army as a private soldier and another dozen in the service as a heavyweight. His godfather had taken him under his wing, often travelling down to London for big fight nights and for tuition with the great middleweight British champion, Freddie Mills.

But racing under Robinson’s prompting came into his life and it was with a horse trained locally by Eric Cousins, who was to be his first trainer before he graduated to Vincent, that he became enraptured by the sport.

On one of their Kardomah coffee house meetings, Nick Robinson told the gathering that Cousins’ horse Chalk Stream – I knew the name was familiar when seeing Saturday’s race – would win the Lincoln. It was 1960 and young Robert became captivated by the thought of a horse being “laid out” to land a big gamble, especially when his friend knew chapter and verse and also “everything it seemed” about racing.

Chalk Stream lost that race but won the Liverpool Autumn Cup in the days when Aintree still staged Flat racing, and from then there was no stopping him. Derby winners, stallions, champion owner and eventually breeder accolades all followed in great profusion over the next four decades.

I’d only got to page 6 when I saw fit to text Robert’s son Sam saying: “Now I know why you and your brothers are who you are!”

The book ends in 1994 when our hero is still intertwined with Coolmore, preparing to keep his massive new investment in Manton along with his 100 broodmares and breeding rights to some of the best and most highly valued stallions in the world. The latter chapter, just as successful but now with Michael Tabor and Smith joining Magnier and Aidan O’Brien, equally deserves telling.

I did a little research about Patrick Robinson, born in Kent but who now lives in the USA and is 81. Initially I assumed he must have been Nick’s son, but now am prepared to guess he was his elder brother as Nick is 77. As usual there’s nobody to ask once Wikepedia fails me at 3 a.m. on Monday morning.

Sadly I heard at the sales at Newmarket last week that Nick Robinson hadn’t been well. Robert Sangster of course died impossibly long ago in 2004 aged only 67. Two Derby wins – although he had owned Dr Devious before selling him too – 27 European Classic races and more than 100 Group 1 horses fell to his colours. Happily they are still seen on a number of the Sam Sangster syndicates based at Manton under Brian Meehan.

Quite a few were in action at the recently concluded Racing League where Brian, Alan King and Roger Charlton joined forces. Despite a paucity of publicity outside Sky Sports racing’s coverage, Meehan reckons it was a very good initiative that should be persevered with.

Six evenings of six races with £25k to each winner has been a target for some of the leading trainers and he believes there is scope for an expansion next year. “When it happens you should come along. You would enjoy it!” As I enjoy anything to do with racing or sales, I’m sure I would.

- TS

Monday Musings: A True Goodwood Celebration

30 August 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

There was a lovely moment at Goodwood racecourse on Saturday afternoon, writes Tony Stafford. The Celebration Mile, initially the Wills Mile and a feature of the late summer fixture since 1967, was always a post-York and pre-St Leger highlight.

In the early 1980’s no trainer did better than Guy Harwood with three wins in four years, via smart trio To-Agori-Mou (1981), Sandhurst Prince the following year and Rousillon in 1984.
At around that time, his Pulborough, West Sussex, stables, financed by the family motor sales business, was one of the top yards for big race wins in the UK. Stable jockey Greville Starkey, yet to be compromised by his poor ride on Dancing Brave in the 1986 Derby and then an overly extravagant celebration after the horse won his next race in the Eclipse, rode all three.

Owner Khalid Abdullah was never a man for extravagance of any kind – save in terms of having legions of high-class racehorses – and Pat Eddery took over from that point. Dancing Brave proved one of the greats and Eddery had a long time as the Saudi Prince’s principal jockey.

In the early 1980’s the race had a lot of prestige, not quite of the level from the earliest days when such as Habitat, the peerless Brigadier Gerard and Kris adorned the race’s Roll of Honour; but it was still a major event very much to win. It fell in 1999 to Cape Cross, later sire of Sea The Stars and Golden Horn, having been disqualified as a three-year-old two years earlier.

Anyway, I mentioned a lovely moment and that came with the strong finish and narrow victory of Lavender’s Blue, trained by Amanda Perrett, daughter of Guy Harwood. It is almost impossible to believe that Amanda, with the considerable help of husband Mark, previously a top-class jumps rider, has been holding the licence for a quarter of a century since her father’s retirement.
In that period she has initially “waxed” to a best score of 60 a decade or so ago to if not quite “waning”, she certainly has had to accept much smaller figures. In the regard that she is suffering from the familiar story of established trainers struggling to attract new owners.

The 2021 version of Horses in Training listed 24 horses in her care. The fact that she has won 19 races from the 23 that have run – two juveniles of her original trio are yet to appear – speaks volumes of the efficiency of her operation.

One owner who has stayed loyal over the years, especially since the retirement of the late John Dunlop, has been Benny Andersson, 25% of storied Swedish pop group Abba in terms of personnel and 50% of the writing team.

In the persona of Chess Racing - celebrating the musical he and Bjorn Ulveaus wrote with Tim Rice – he bred Lavender’s Blue, a daughter of Sea The Stars from a Danehill mare. The decision to keep her in training as a five-year-old, apart from getting her trainer back in the big time where she belongs, has brought handsome dividends with her future stud career in mind. One day at Newmarket two years ago in the owners’ room he sat quietly with the Perrett’s at the next table to me and Peter Ashmore, a pleasant, quiet and very humble man. The memory of that day alone makes me enjoy the mare’s success.

On Saturday she needed to peg back the multiple Group 1 world traveller Benbatl as Godolphin’s seven-year-old initiated another return after injury, and also overcome a previous winner of the Group 2 race in Duke Of Hazzard.

The Celebration success added to a Listed win at the start of her season and then she was a close third in the Dahlia Stakes, a nine-furlong Group 2 on 1,000 Guineas Day, behind top-class Lady Bowthorpe, whose subsequent heroics could have prepared us rather more than the 20-1 SP on Saturday suggested.

As the Amanda Perrett stable has rationalised itself, the famed Pulborough gallops do have another occupant and one who this year has had a much higher profile. French-born David Menuisier has always been regarded as a man who takes time with his horses and he too has a smart filly in his care.

Menuisier had worked initially in the UK with John Dunlop and, while he was there, he came under the scrutiny of Marcus Hosgood, the long-time right-hand man to Dunlop whose influence in finding suitable races for the Arundel inmates should not be under-estimated. I met Hosgood at Arundel when there just the once with Prince Ahmed Bin Salman to watch a few Thoroughbred Corporation-owned horses go through their paces.

Reputedly that was a luxury even the stable jockeys for Dunlop never experienced, that singular gentleman preferring to restrict galloping duties to the trusted home-based work riders. Since taking out a licence himself, horses like Thundering Blue have advertised Menuisier’s talent and this year Wonderful Tonight is only a 10-1 chance in betting on the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe despite her disappointing run behind Snowfall in the Yorkshire Oaks when the fast ground was not in her favour.

A few years ago I bumped into Marcus Hosgood at a gathering of former Raceform employees – many of whom have gone on to bigger and better things - myself qualifying as the one-time part-time Editor of the late, much-lamented Racehorse weekly publication. The event was organised by my almost exact contemporary Will Lefebve and we met in a pub close to the former Raceform base in Battersea, South-West London. Chatting about Menuisier, the shrewd Hosgood declared him the most talented horseman he had ever met. Praise indeed!

Amanda Perrett is no mean horsewoman either and where her yard contains, give or take a few mid-season arrivals, two dozen animals, Menuisier has three times as many in his care and stands on 31 wins, so the family firm is more than holding its own. I’m pleased to see that my friend Alan Spence maintains an interest with Amanda in a half-share with stable stalwart John Connolly in a progressive staying Gleneagles three-year-old called Eagle One, a winner and close second in his last two starts.

Jockeys have been restricted to riding at a single meeting from the resumption of racing after the Covid19 break last year and will again have to live with that rule for the whole of 2022, something I agree with. I see Jim Crowley has come out in favour of a continuing bar on racecourse saunas, which has been in place for the same period.

In the days of Guy Harwood’s pomp, most of the top jockeys would ride in the early races at Goodwood then after the Celebration Mile hightail it for the major races on the Windsor tea-time fixture which ended the year’s evening racing in those days.

Apart from the Group 3 Winter Hill Stakes, which is still going after around 40 years’ existence, there was and still is a Listed race and a valuable sprint handicap. I used to follow the jockeys’ route for what I now see is the 60-mile trip, largely because it was on my way home – sort of – and in those days I could never resist an opportunity to see top-class racing.

Twenty-one years ago, having seen Sir Michael Stoute win the Celebration Mile with Medicean, later sire of Dutch Art, I followed on to Windsor and Stoute again had the answer with the three-year-old Adilabad. Stoute may not have quite the firepower of old against the 200-plus teams that lead the sport these days, but the talent is clearly intact as he showed as his five-year-old Solid Stone picked up the 34k first prize of the Winter Hill Stakes on Saturday.

xxx

Last week I was getting rather hot under the collar when pointing out the apparent favourable treatment accorded to Irish stables in handicaps on the Flat and especially in the big UK races over jumps. I added for good measure that the French are not immune to allowing Irish horses into races with obvious chances and gave the illustration of a race due to be run at Deauville last Thursday.

Willie Mullins had orchestrated a very clever plan with his 2020 Triumph Hurdle winner Burning Victory who joined his stable after earning a 40-kilo rating (UK/Ire 88) following her three-year-old season in France.

Sparsely campaigned apart from over jumps, she had been sent for only one Flat run since her exportation to Ireland, and that two months ago when Mullins sent her across to Lyon Parilly for a minor conditions race and she had no trouble in winning it by five and a half lengths. To say I was surprised – I did have an interest in the race – that her rating remained firmly on 40 for a race with a €27,500 first prize plus 45% owner’s premium thus just about €40k to the winner is an understatement.

It was worth going for – indeed impossible to ignore - and Burning Victory duly won the race by almost two lengths. Too late for Thursday’s home opposition the handicapper closed the stable door after Mullins’ mare had bolted, giving her 5kg more (11lb). He should have done that before the race.

I was mentioning this situation three days before the race talking at Brighton to Owen Burrows, one of the trainers likely to be most affected by what could be a significant reduction in the Shadwell operation after the death of Sheikh Hamdan earlier in the year.

The twin subjects of our talk were handicappers – and, as he says, how long it takes (and costs) for a horse to come down the handicap in the UK before it is well enough treated to win a race – and the always testy subject of moderate prize money about which he feels people in racing do not complain enough.

Burrows reckons our system with the high administrative and ever-increasing feed costs encourages (or compels) smaller trainers especially to run horses deliberately below their true form to get one big chance to retrieve the high costs with a major bet.

As to prize money, reacting to my tale of the €40k for the equivalent of a 0-88 handicap he surprised me with the case of the Cambridgeshire, run next month and traditionally one of the prime handicaps of the season. This year it carries what I believe given its prestige is a derisory £61k first prize: in 2020 the understandable excuse for lower prizes was Covid and at just shy of £75,000 might have been acceptable in the circumstances.

In 2019 John Gosden’s Lord North, a Group 1 horse masquerading as a handicapper, romped home and collected to all intents and purposes £100,000. Owen wanted to know, where did the missing £40k go? I’d like to ask Jockey Club Racecourses the same thing. The prize is just about 50% more than Burning Victory won for an open goal in Deauville. Something is very wrong somewhere.

Monday Musings: Sonny Side Up Again for Irish Raiders

23 August 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Throughout the Cheltenham (especially) and Aintree spring jumping Festivals, much of the conversation within the media but more importantly among trainers and owners was the manner in which Irish trainers’ horses seemed not just to outrun their handicap marks but almost to transcend them, writes Tony Stafford.

For ages Willie Mullins has been able to take aim at some of the fattest staying Flat-race prizes over here, having a well prepared line-up of Championship-class jumpers primed to run away with races like the Cesarewitch.

No wonder then that much of the build-up to Saturday’s Sky Bet Ebor at York was dominated by the expectation that once again the home trainers were going to be caught with their pants down. Mullins was coming and unleashing a horse that had not seen a racecourse since October.

The world’s greatest jumps trainer is renowned for bringing back former stars from long absences for easy victories and Mt Leinster, a six-year-old by Beat Hollow, told a compelling tale. Starting out life as an average bumper horse and then hurdler, he didn’t exactly set the world on fire. However once Willie’s son Patrick got onto him in qualified riders’ Flat races (amateur and conditionals) and lastly the Kildare Amateur Riders’ Derby his progress was remorseless.

After an initial Flat-race win over a mile and a half he next found the concession of 11lb to the talented and versatile Wonder Laish beyond him. It was his following victory that projected him into a different league. At Listowel he gave 11lb and an easy five-length beating to French importation Cape Gentleman who had already shown winning form at home for Nicolas Clement.

Following that performance he won again at 3 to 1 on to end his season. Meanwhile, Cape Gentleman was running away with the Irish Cesarewitch before embarking on a successful winter over jumps. Last time, in the highly-competitive Galway Hurdle, Cape Gentleman was a creditable third to Mullins’ Saldier, another of those smart jumpers that seem to mop up valuable handicaps at will.

In the event Mt Leinster proved a severe Ebor disappointment, finishing in the rear division; but, never fear, the UK handicappers still managed to extend their reputation for charitable largesse in the Irish quest for the holy grail of the half-million pound Ebor pot with its £300k to the winner.

Few doubt that, as good a champion jockey as was Johnny Murtagh, he is shaping as though he will become an even better trainer. When he brought his four-year-old Sonnyboyliston to Chester for the Group 3 Ormonde Stakes – he was a good third behind Ballydoyle’s Japan and subsequent Goodwood Cup winner, Trueshan – maybe the Ebor was already in his sights.

He might have expected a rise in his horse’s mark of 109 and that seemed the most likely outcome after a comfortable victory back home in Listed company. That is not to understand those compliant handicappers who left him unchanged. Thus on Saturday with those impeccably solid Graded form credentials, he was, remarkably, 3lb lower than when easily winning an admittedly valuable Curragh handicap for Murtagh last autumn.

On Saturday, Sonnyboyliston duly took advantage of that leniency and, having passed Hughie Morrison’s fellow four-year-old Quickthorn, he just managed to resist the gallant runner-up’s late rally by a head. Morrison reckoned the winner may have been getting lonely in the lead and also that had the rain started when predicted on Saturday rather than when the horses were in the paddock for the race it would have helped his horse but would not have inconvenienced the winner.

There are occasions when trainers do not mind their horses being reassessed up to the full value of their victories and Quickthorn was a case in point. He reappeared this term on a mark of 84 – a full 28lb lower than Sonnyboyliston at the end of last year – so needed to do something special to get into the most valuable handicap of the year which was Morrison’s rather wishful ambition.

This process got a big boost when Quickthorn won by a wide margin at Haydock on his return, bolting clear in the heavy ground up the straight. Raised 13lb for that and then another 6lb more for success in the Duke Of Edinburgh Stakes at Royal Ascot it meant he just squeezed in on Saturday, but even so only 6lb lower in the weights than Sonnyboyliston. Great progress then from Quickthorn, but the Irish got the big money again.

When the dust settles Morrison will need a rethink as the guaranteed extra few pounds will put most UK handicaps beyond his reach. The trainer will be targeting long-distance Group races in France where the four-year-old will have more chance of getting his favoured soft ground. Morrison has exploited this division with such as his subsequent Melbourne Cup runner-up Marmelo, the durable and talented Nearly Caught and from an earlier vintage Alcazar, who won a Group 1 for Morrison aged ten.

It’s not just over here that the big Irish teams seem to get plenty of help. One of the balloted out horses for the Ebor was the 2020 Triumph Hurdle winner Burning Victory when she infamously took advantage of Goshen’s last-flight misfortune.

The now five-year-old was number 47 in the Ebor list so never had a chance of getting in but the pragmatic Willie spotted an opportunity at Deauville on Thursday and I will be shocked if at the final stage today (around 11 a.m. BST) she has not stood her ground.

This is a two-mile handicap and with 34 eligible before today she will be in the first half of the divided race for which the winner gets €27,500 plus 45% owners’ premiums, so just short of €40k, well worth the road/ferry fees.

When Burning Victory left France as a three-year-old before switching to Ireland she had a 40 kilogram rating, equivalent to 88 on this side of the Channel. Appropriately Thursday’s race is called the Handicap de la Manche. <The advantages of tote monopoly - €40k and that’s just to the winner for a 0-88, goodness!>.

While being employed exclusively over jumps in Ireland since her arrival she has been back on the level in France this summer. A conditions race over 2m1f at Lyon Parilly in June fitted nicely between runs in a Grade 1 at the Punchestown Festival and seventh place in the previously-mentioned Galway Hurdle.

She won that modest event by five and a half lengths, surely evidence enough that she is better than an 88, as you would expect of a Triumph Hurdle winner benefiting from two years of Mullins’ training. But the French handicappers have left her on her historical mark. You would have thought they might have seen Willie coming. I’m sure Clement’s Fitzcarraldo, whom I had planned to travel over to see in that same race, will have the Mullins mare to beat even though receiving 19lb from her.

I did say I planned to drive over but the old-time there and back in a day via Eurotunnel – my chosen mode of travel in the French Fifteen days – seems so tied up by Covid-flavoured red tape that it is looking increasingly unlikely that I can be there.

You do not need to take a test to enter France, or so I believe, as long as you have the correct number of vaccinations, which obviously I do.

But on returning to the UK you need one form showing you were tested between one and three days prior to that return from France with documentation of where you had been staying. Then two days after arrival it’s another test and not a free NHS job or even so I understand the £60 Boots special but a full-blown £125-a-go test from designated chemists and the like.

One trip I am definitely going to undertake is to toddle down to Brighton to see my friend Jonathan Barnett’s other active horse, the three-year-old Dusky Lord, try to overcome inexperience (one run last year) and an injury absence in a little maiden race.

I loved going to Ascot for the King George and today will be only my second appearance since Burning Victory’s Triumph Hurdle day. Maybe it will be an omen if I can’t make it to France. She was one of the luckiest Festival winners of all time and perhaps the luck might have run out. Alternatively Willie might think why bother to pick up another 40 grand? We live in hope.

Deauville continued apace yesterday and the Prix Morny was a triumph for the Richard Fahey stable with Perfect Power. He had been a desperately unlucky fifth at Goodwood on his latest appearance behind Asymmetric.

Alan King’s sprinter was again in the field and actually took the lead in the last furlong but had no answer to the finishing speed of Perfect Power (a son of Ardad) who held off another finisher, Trident, trained by Andre Fabre and running in the Tabor colours.

The Coolmore owners’ York had been mainly frustrating from the moment St Mark’s Basilica had to be scratched from the Juddmonte International owing to an injury sustained on the home gallops. Late sub Love proved no match in third behind six-length winner Mishriff who starred in a Gosden family revival stunningly shared by the ultra-game Stradivarius, holding Spanish Mission in the Lonsdale Stakes, undoubtedly the thriller of the week.

At least Snowfall was able to maintain her winning sequence in a third Oaks, copying Love last year with wide-margin wins at Epsom, the Curragh (Irish) and York (Yorkshire). Some churlish observers were reading down the distances, 16 to eight to four and discerning something sinister from them.

Aidan O’Brien seemed to be considering Champions weekend in Ireland as a preliminary before her top target in the Arc for which she is the 3-1 favourite. I’m sure “the boys” would be content with another halving to a victory by two lengths on the first Sunday in October. But then again as York showed us last week, a lot that can happen before that.

- TS

Monday Musings: Smith still having all the laughs

16 August 2021/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Thirty-eight years ago Littleton Stud owner Jeff Smith was at Royal Ascot to watch 10,000gns bargain yearling buy Chief Singer make his debut in the Coventry Stakes, the most important two-year-old race at the Royal meeting, writes Tony Stafford.

Trained by Ron Sheather, Chief Singer, a giant at 16.3hh, stood out in the field of more conventionally sized juveniles. This was so much the case that before the start Lester Piggott took time out to talk to Ray Cochrane, rider of the Smith horse.

Piggott was disparagingly dismissive about the colt to which Cochrane replied: “Have a good look at his face as that’s the last time you will. All you will see at the finish is his backside!”

Chief Singer, 20-1, duly bolted up by four lengths. The following year, Chief Singer was the only horse to give El Gran Senor a race in the 2,000 Guineas and he followed that performance with consecutive victories in the St James’s Palace by eight lengths, back to six furlongs for an easy victory in the July Cup at Newmarket, and he then completed the hat-trick in the Sussex Stakes at Goodwood.

That proved to be his final win as his temperament got the better of him and he was sold in a £4 million deal to go to stud. Smith had been the owner of Littleton Stud in Hampshire since 1976 and unfortunately as the Racing Post only began publication in 1988 any winners before that have been difficult to access.
What I can say without fear of contradiction though is that the ever-suffering Arsenal fan, Jockey Club member (since 2009) and Chairman of his local Salisbury racecourse for a year longer, has enjoyed winners every season (mostly home-breds) since 1988 with Group 1 triumphs liberally sprinkled along the way.

You couldn’t ever describe the always genial Smith as a small owner-breeder, but he does have much more interest in breeding winners for himself than producing horses for others to benefit from.

In those 34 seasons I make it 485 wins for Smith with trainers like David Elsworth, especially, Ian and now Andrew Balding, James Eustace, (recently retired in favour of his son Harry) and Ralph Beckett. No doubt Jeff, who made his money designing and providing internal fittings for aircraft, will have a figure way above 500 as his personal measure.
The reason for all the attention to Jeff Smith at this stage of the season is partly the result of yesterday’s running of the Group 1 Prix Jacques Le Marois at Deauville together with the prospect of next Wednesday’s Juddmonte International at York.

In gaining a second successive Jacques Le Marois, the Gosdens’ Palace Pier needed to see off a sustained challenge by the 2,000 Guineas and St James’s Palace hero, Poetic Flare. John Gosden suggested his colt had been only at around 80 per cent efficiency but form advocates would be more inclined to take the result at face value; Palace Pier (rated 125 officially) having a neck to spare over 122-rated Poetic Flare, trained and bred by Jim Bolger. Third, just under two lengths back, was the Aidan O’Brien-trained Order of Australia, a winner at the Breeders’ Cup last year.

The Jeff Smith interest here is plain. Poetic Flare, who has danced every dance this year, was gallant all the way to the line at Deauville, as he had been in his previous start in the Sussex Stakes at Goodwood last month. The ground was easier there and Una Manning, daughter of Bolger, suggested obliquely by saying yesterday’s ground was perfect, implying that Poetic Flare hadn’t been entirely comfortable in the Sussex Stakes.

But it would be hard to discern too much difference in Poetic Flare’s finishing effort there or anywhere else in his busy 2021 campaign. And whose colours finished ahead of Poetic Flare? None other than Jeff Smith’s.

In a year of many top-class three-year-old fillies – cite Aidan O’Brien’s quintet of Group/Grade 1 winning fillies from the Classic generation of 2021) - Alcohol Free, trained by Andrew Balding, is one of the best having won not just the Sussex Stakes but also, against her own sex, the Coronation Stakes at Ascot. In between she was a fast-finishing, unlucky-in-running, third to old rival Snow Lantern in the Falmouth Stakes at Newmarket and earlier a close fifth in the 1,000 Guineas to Mother Earth as joint-favourite in deference to her Group 1 Cheveley Park Stakes victory last year.

On Wednesday, she has a real giant-killer’s task in the Juddmonte International, not least because she is stepping up to ten furlongs, but also as she has to overcome St Mark’ Basilica. When the Aidan O’Brien colt added the Eclipse Stakes at Sandown last month to the two facile wins in the French 2,000 Guineas (Poule d’Essai des Poulains) and French Derby (Prix du Jockey-Club) he was awarded a European-high rating of 127 by the BHB’s handicappers.

That figure has since been matched by Godolphin’s Derby winner Adayar after his emphatic performance in the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes. In Wednesday’s feature, Mishriff, the globe-trotting and highest-earning horse trained in Europe, stands clearly second-highest rated on 124.

Mishriff, trained by John and Thady Gosden, earned a combined near £10 million for his Middle Eastern exploits in his owner Prince AA Faisal’s native Saudi Arabia (£7.5million), and Dubai (£2.3 million), at the end of last winter. He was reckoned a shade short of peak (that old Gosden chestnut!) when third and comfortably outpaced behind St Mark’s Basilica at Sandown but was probably more the finished article when runner-up in the King George.

So where does that leave Alcohol Free, rated 119? For one thing she comes into Wednesday’s race as an inmate of the stable that leads the trainers’ rankings in the UK. In recent seasons top place has invariably meant John Gosden or Aidan O’Brien. Two years ago Balding set his record earnings of more than £3.6 million from 124 wins. So far in 2021 his 106 wins have yielded stakes of £3.036 million, so he is firmly on target to beat both figures.

That 2019 Balding tally was some way less than half the earnings of the front two, with John Gosden at £7.91 million (192 victories) exceeding runner-up O’Brien’s £7.68 million from his 13 top-class winners by barely £230,000.
Now though, Gosden has made little impact with the Classic generation in his first year’s partnership with son Thaddeus and is languishing down at number six (81 wins and in his case a paltry £2.117 million). They trail Charlie Appleby and Godolphin (64 and £2.731 million); O’Brien (eight wins and £2.337 million); Mark Johnston (148 and £2.283 million) and Richard Hannon (101 and £2.143 million).

What that sextet has in common (although obviously O’Brien campaigns by far the greatest proportion of his team at home) is they all have strings exceeding 200. Size matters in racing these days, as indeed it probably always has done.

It will be difficult for Balding to hold on especially from Charlie Appleby who has not just the Derby winners, Adayar and Hurricane Lane (Irish, and also six-length winner of the Grand Prix De Paris), but also a host of horses primed to win Group and Listed races for the rest of the year when the two-year-olds will come increasingly on stream.

In the younger division, Balding can point to Berkshire Shadow and the unbeaten filly Sandrine as potential major earners for the rest of the season. For a trainer whose father Ian trained the great Mill Reef, one of the outstanding thoroughbreds of the Post War era, his now being firmly in the top echelon of his profession must be highly satisfying, the more so with his father and mother Emma still around at Kingsclere to enjoy it. Like Appleby, Andrew is modest about his achievements.

For Jeff Smith, the Juddmonte might not have been the obvious next step apart from the fact that the race holds a special place in his racing experience. Six years ago, the hitherto-unbeaten Golden Horn, winner latterly of the Derby and Eclipse Stakes for John Gosden and Anthony Oppenheimer, took a 130-rating into the Juddmonte.

Languishing on a mark a full 21lb lower, although she was getting the 3lb filly allowance in the York race, was the David Elsworth-trained Dubawi filly Arabian Queen, a daughter of Smith’s hard-working mare Barshiba. Nobody but Elsworth would have asked such a question of the Group 3 winner, but the veteran trainer had the first, last and all the laughs in between as Smith’s 50-1 outsider ran down the Frankie Dettori-ridden 9-4 on favourite in the last 50 yards. Golden Horn went on to win two more Group 1 races and was only narrowly beaten by Found in the Breeders’ Cup in his final race and second defeat.

For all his success over almost 40 years, Jeff Smith can be forgiven for telling his local newspaper in an interview last autumn that the Cheveley Park Stakes win for Alcohol Free had been his happiest moment in racing.

There have been two more great triumphs since for her and victory on Wednesday would no doubt put the cherry on the cake. But then you realise Jeff amazingly has owned three Racehorses of the Year in Chief Singer, his fabulous sprint filly Lochsong (Ian Balding), which he also bred, and the popular staying Flat-racer Persian Punch.

Over eight seasons in 63 races for David Elsworth, Punch won 20 races, 16 at Stakes (Group and Listed) level and never knew when he was beaten, much in the manner of his trainer. Persian Punch ranks alongside the great steeplechaser Desert Orchid as two undoubted horses of a lifetime for Elsworth.

I’d love Alcohol Free to win, but I hold with my belief that St Mark’s Basilica is a great champion. I also hope to see Snowfall put in another domineering performance after her Oaks and Irish Oaks cakewalks in the manner of Love last year in the Yorkshire Oaks on Thursday. Exciting days ahead - I wish I could be there, but it will have to be next year!

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