Monday Musings: Gordon’s Cunning Plan?

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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

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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 11th 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.

  • TS

Monday Musings: Treatment of Trainers and Jockeys Chalk and Cheese

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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

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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

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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

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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!

Monday Musings: Of Silly Season, Jerome, Maurice and Mariana

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For the first half of my working time in Fleet Street, life was still very much as it had always been in the early years after World War 2, writes Tony Stafford. Initially the BBC was the only Channel either side of the hostilities but then, in 1955, ITV brought in the first commercial opposition and nine years later BBC2 came on stream.

The dailies had combined sales well into eight figures at the start of the 1960’s and I remember there were THREE London evening newspapers. Every Saturday the paper man came round with the “Classified” edition where the football results magically appeared in the “fudge” – stop press -minutes after the matches finished. Every paper boy on the street corners in Central London called “Star, News and Standard”, always in that order until the Star disappeared in 1960, as we and our dads queued to find out what had happened to our team.

New (as we knew it anyway) technology was anathema to the print unions in those days and the internet and social media were half a lifetime away.

As I said, newspapers were the principal provider of news: households without television exceeded those homes with the big piece of furniture and its tiny screen of hazy black and white (grey really) pictures in the corner of the living room.

In those days, when we got to August everything shut down as politicians, journalists, schools and many big industrial factories went on holiday. Back in Fleet Street for those left behind, and then later when the two ‘new’ channels were well established, we had what was universally known as the “Silly Season”.

Suddenly editors were looking for quirky stories of the famed “man bites dog” variety. Reporters were dispatched around the country for the oddest and unlikeliest events which from September on wouldn’t have seen the light of day.

In many ways British horseracing has been mired in a similar tradition perhaps more firmly than its other major competing nations in Europe. The silly season has not really been possible yet this year with the pandemic still extending its grip and the Olympic Games 2020 going on for the past fortnight in Covid-strangled Tokyo. But there’s still time!

Between Goodwood (concluded on July 31 this year) and the end of August only the four days of York interrupt the ordinary sausage-machine offerings, weekends of valuable handicaps apart. One welcome innovation this year has been the William Hill Racing League where a dozen teams of four trainers, each calling on a squad of 30 potential runners and with three jockeys attached to each team, compete in six races on six consecutive Thursday evenings. Two have been contested so far.

With £50,000 available from each race, the idea seems to owe much to the successful 22 years of the Shergar Cup, the latest edition of which at Ascot on Saturday was won by the women’s team headed up by Hayley Turner and starring Nicola Currie and French sensation, Mickaelle Michel.

Any boost to prize money is welcome though an initial look at the type of trainer capable of compiling a team of 30 is obviously one for the already-haves rather than wishful-thinking have-nots.

But say a Newmarket trainer has an 80-rated horse that might be running for a £5k or so first prize in the normal run of things, it can be in line for a £25,000 first prize in the Racing League. Thirty-six handsome prizes among the thousands of embarrassingly unrewarding ones only fix one leak while water continues to escape from the rest.

Just three highlights at York – the Juddmonte, Yorkshire Oaks and Nunthorpe – carry Group 1 status, but that still exceeds Ireland’s single Group 1 in the month, the Phoenix Stakes, staged yesterday at The Curragh.

There were two more Group 1 races across Europe yesterday, the Grosser Preis von Berlin over a mile and a half at Hoppegarten and Deauville’s Prix Maurice De Gheest over six and a half furlongs. That was the first of four races at that level during Deauville’s holiday season, but throughout the month the programmes are of a higher quality than anything we have here as Chantilly goes to the seaside.

There is a received understanding that good sprinters in France scarcely exist, its proponents pointing to the UK domination of the Prix de l’Abbaye on Arc Day each year. Only four French-trained horses have won the five-furlong dash in this century, namely Imperial Beauty (2001), Marchant D’Or (2008), Whizz Kid (2012) and Wooded last year.

When the three home-trained sprinters/seven-furlong horses lined up for the Maurice De Gheest yesterday, they were respectively on offer at 9-1, 92-1 and 69-1 in face of potentially strong opposition not just from the UK and Ireland but also the Wesley Ward-trained Golden Jubilee promoted winner, Campanelle.

That filly ran an awful race, finishing last, while Starman, winner of the July Cup at Newmarket last month and the 9-5 joint favourite with the Ward filly, ran third, to two of the home team. Well behind was an assortment of Group 1 and 2 winners and the recent Wokingham hero, Rohaan.

But at the head of the race, a relatively unheralded horse that had won each of his previous six races this year stormed away from the field to win comfortably. Marianafoot, a six-year-old entire, owned by his breeder M Jean-Claude Seroul, was making it eight wins in a row since mid-December and was providing another reminder of the talent of his 35-year-old trainer, Jerome Reynier, who is based in Marseille.

Reynier has been training in his own right for eight years and in 2020 climbed into the top ten trainers’ list in France for the first time, owing much to the exploits of another six-year-old, Skalleti, also owned by M. Seroul.

He had a Deauville win over an under-ripe Sottsass, subsequently winner of the Arc, and this year has won four in succession including two Group 1 races at home and in Germany.

Reynier is a self-confessed racing nut who recalls that, aged 14, he used to make little contribution in his classroom as he was usually busy studying bloodstock sales catalogues. Little wonder that he was a winner of a Godolphin Flying Start award in 2008. A period as a bloodstock agent buying for his father, also a racing fanatic, preceded his taking the plunge eight years ago.

The €300,000-plus first prize (including owner’s premium} strengthens his place in fifth in this year’s trainers’ table and he is in rarefied company.

Leading the charge in his customary private battle with Jean-Claude Rouget is Andre Fabre with 78 wins worth €3.9m from 130 horses. Rouget has 97 wins from 131 horses and trails Fabre by close to €300k in prizes. Fabre provided yesterday’s runner-up, the filly Tropbeau, who, unbelievably given her connections and her fourth in last year’s French 1,000 Guineas, was the 92-1 chance mentioned earlier.

The Maurice De Gheest was the twelfth Group 1 race to be contested in France in 2021 and Aidan O’Brien has won five of them from 11 horses. That is enough to put him just behind third-placed Frank Rossi who has needed 135 horses and 68 winners to keep his nose in front of the Ballydoyle maestro, now fine-tuning his York team which will include St Mark’s Basilica and Snowfall. Jerome Reynier, still in his mid-30’s, is a very solid fifth and destined to go higher with the top two no doubt feeling the long-term draft from behind.

The Brits played a minor role in France but two big wins for Newmarket stables in Germany and Ireland proved that if the races aren’t to be found at home, “have horsebox, will travel” is still the mantra.

Sir Mark Prescott sent two of Kirsten Rausing’s home-bred fillies to Hoppegarten, a track bought in 2008 by an old acquaintance of mine Gerhard Schoeningh. He was based in England around the turn of the century and, after asking me whether I could introduce him to Sir Henry Cecil, had some nice winners with him.

Hoppegarten, in what was the old East Berlin, is the only privately-owned racecourse in Germany and has been brought back to its former prominence by Gerhard. The big race, the Grosser Preis, went to Prescott’s smart four-year-old Alpinista and Luke Morris who had Godolphin’s Walton Street back in third. Additionally, Prescott’s Alerta Roja finished second in a Listed race on the card.

One of the enduring mysteries of the international breeding business is just how Tony O’Callaghan’s Tally Ho Stud can continue to produce stallions that immediately out-perform what might reasonably be expected.

We all know about Kodiac, now at €65k a pop after producing a string of high-class performers over the past decade, but how about Mehmas? Available at €7,500 last year having entered the stud at €12,500 but, after his first crop ran away with the first-season sire title, he was upped to €25k for this year.

Tally Ho has two interesting first crop sires this year, and both were available at a covering fee of €5k. Cotai Glory is far and away the leader in his division with 18 individual winners. Heading his list is the brilliantly-fast Atomic Glory, already twice successful with ease in a Group 3 and then Group 2 in France for Kevin Ryan. Atomic Glory looks an obvious favourite for the Prix Morny (G1) later this month at Deauville.

Tally Ho’s other €5k bargain is Galileo Gold, Hugo Palmer’s 2000 Guineas and St James’s Palace Stakes hero. Palmer acquired his son, now called Ebro River, for Galileo Gold’s owners Al Shaqab for 75,000gns out of Tattersall’s Book 2 last October. Yesterday the owners collected almost double that when Ebro River landed the aforementioned Group 1 Phoenix Stakes as a 12-1 shot having looked short of top-class in recent runs at the major summer meetings.

Both stallions will assuredly be moving up into the Mehmas bracket for the next covering season and with sons Roger and Harry nowadays adding youthful energy as well as brilliant talent-spotting to the legendary skills of Tony and his wife Anne, John Magnier’s sister, Tally-Ho will be on top for many years to come. They repeatedly find new stallions that suit the sort of owners and breeders who like two-year-old winners! Who doesn’t?

- TS

Monday Musings: On the Passing of Rufus and Brod

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Coming up for 22 years ago, a web site called thefreelibrary.com came up with the idea of publishing what it suggested were the ten strangest names for people in racing or in a few cases historically had been involved in the UK and Irish horse racing industries, writes Tony Stafford.

Of the ten until the time I wrote last week’s article, six were still alive. Now there’s just four, with numbers one and four – both of whom I knew, the latter very well and someone I considered a friend, incongruously no more.

Numbers five, six and eight have all departed: in order Grand National-winning jockey Dave Dick (what’s strange about that, freelibrary?) in 2001; Fred Darling, champion trainer of seven Derby winners, in 1953; and Aubrey Brabazon, multiple Cheltenham Festival winner for Vincent O’Brien in the early post-War years (1996). Number seven, Dancing Brave’s original partner Greville Starkey, rider of 2,200 winners, died in 2010.

One I trust who has plenty of time to go, checking in at number three is the long-term but now no longer BBC Radio racing correspondent Cornelius Lysaght (pronounced Lycett), who is still in his 50’s. My daughter bought me his very nice coffee table book about the great racecourses of the world a couple of Christmases ago.

Otherwise the rest of them were born a year or four either side of my arrival in the aftermath of World War 2. Tristram Ricketts was a senior official who served two stints at the Levy Board split by a shorter spell under Peter Savill at the BHB, forerunner to the BHA. I met him often  in the days when I was still firmly ensconced in Fleet Street and later Canary Wharf.

He was born a few months after me in 1946 and came into racing having been spotted as someone of merit by Sir Desmond Plummer during that worthy’s time as Tory leader of the Greater London Council. I see Sir Desmond’s name every time I enter, as I did on Saturday afternoon, through the newer Southbound Blackwell Tunnel – he officially opened it 54 years ago today (Monday).

Sir Desmond turned from politics to racing administration and for a while theoretically held the purse strings at the Levy Board, while Tristram travelled smoothly in his slipstream, making far more of a career of it than his mentor. Maybe Plummer’s slightly pompous manner, contrasting with Tristram’s friendly, business-like attitude left an impression I’ve never been able to shake.

Son of Sir Robert Cornwallis Ricketts, 7th Baronet, Tristram became Sir Tristram upon inheriting the baronetcy in 2005 but sadly died only two years later. His mother Anne was the daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps, the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer of the first peacetime Cabinet. He had also been in the all-party War Cabinet, but now benefited after Churchill’s landslide defeat just a short time after he had virtually single-handedly stood up to Hitler in face of so many colleagues’ wanting him to sue for a “negotiated end” to the conflict with Nazi Germany.

All through my school days a couple of the more venerable masters at my Central London grammar were wont to call me Cripps, so I’ve always had this vision of that grey, slim, serious man with the round spectacles in my subconscious.

Years later when my son played various sports against Eton College, that school’s tennis (real and lawn) and rackets coach Norwood Cripps and I revived a connection we had on the cricket field in the early 1960’s. He was on the ground staff with MCC Young Professionals at Lord’s and the London Federation of Boys’ Clubs team used to play them every year on the main pitch. He played the first two years of my three.

In our later meetings he confessed that when he was at school, he was always called “Stafford” by his teachers. A one-time English junior snooker champion when aged 13, he was gifted at all sports and regularly won the national professional rackets championship – that’s the game with the hard little round ball that hits the wall at 90 mph. He was still active at that level only a few years ago! Norwood used to love to come to Ascot – living at Datchet was quite handy. He was Charlie Brooks’ tennis coach among no doubt many other people in racing.

So now we come to two members of that quirky club who are still going strong. At nine we have Len Lungo, who ended his training career in Scotland more than a decade ago but continues to own the stables now occupied with distinction by Iain Jardine. Lungo won two Cheltenham Festival races and a Northumberland Plate having spent his formative time, like Gordon Elliott, with Martin Pipe.

At number ten, born like Lungo in 1950, is the recently retired John Oxx, the most gracious man I’ve ever met on a racecourse. Notable for his flawless handling of the great Sea The Stars, he should probably be someone for whom I hold a long-standing grudge.

One Thursday morning I was watching a crucial gallop at Brian Meehan’s yard at Manton where two of his possible Classic horses for 2009 were to show their paces. Crowded House, winner of the Racing Post Trophy the previous October was winter favourite for the Derby and he was joined by his fellow three-year-old Delegator and two older horses in the work. These were decent handicapper Nasri and Ray Tooth’s Exclamation, a disappointing three-year-old but winner of a massive pot in a juvenile sales race at Newmarket in 2007.

Crowded House was tailed off in the gallop while Delegator showed tremendous speed to outclass Exclamation who in turn was clear of Nasri. I got straight on the phone and backed Delegator at 33-1 for the 2,000 Guineas but exactly in the manner of French Hollow and Camelot a few years later, having looked sure to win, he was picked off by Mick Kinane and Sea The Stars.

I knew I didn’t misinterpret the gallop but as Sea The Stars went on to win the Derby, Eclipse, Juddmonte, Irish Champion and Arc in an unbeaten season, all the time with John Oxx only gently suggesting it had anything to do with him, I was left cursing my luck.

So now we come to numbers one and four. Last Wednesday after a long illness Rufus Voorspuy died. He stopped training early this century having been particularly successful at the Sussex jumps tracks near where he trained, but he ended his days in Scotland.

He was a great friend of Peter Hudson, one-time estate manager at Manton in Barry Hills’ time there before running a private stable in Lambourn for Sheikh Mohamed Al Sabah from Kuwait, now occupied by Willie Muir. I mentioned the frustrated Barney Curley-like Yankee that Hudson arranged in 1989 when after three winners, the biggest cert of all got beat in a fillies’ maiden at a Leicester Saturday evening meeting.

“Bad luck, she’ll win at Ascot”, her jockey opined after her sixth place barely two weeks before the big day. She did, by six lengths; followed up back there the following month in the Princess Margaret and then won the Group 1 Phoenix Stakes in August.

I cannot claim to have been a pal of Rufus Voorspuy’s but number four and a massive kick in the teeth for me on Friday was to hear that Broderick Munro-Wilson, by a few months my senior, had died. I couldn’t believe it. Here was the man who always checked whether I’d be going to the military race days at Sandown where in his riding days he had enjoyed considerable success.

The main thrust of his calls would always be preceded by a string of invective and expletives aimed at my allegiance to the football team from the red half of North London – although he always called them “South London …..s!). His apparently illogical and unforgiving attitude stemming entirely from Arsenal’s Woolwich roots even though it was more than one hundred years ago that they moved across the river. Such it is with many Tottenham diehard supporters.

Brod was in the post-race champagne celebration at Kempton in 2007 after Punjabi’s win and it was there, having first been invited along by Derek Hatter, who I hear is still (pushing 90) fighting fit – he was seen having a coffee outside an establishment in Mill Hill Street the other day – that I met Raymond Tooth. Also there was Brod and knowing the lawyer was looking for a racing manager, put my name forward. Thanks Brod (and Derek)!

Always fit-looking in the extreme, I’d seen Munro-Wilson not long before last year’s initial lock-down and he appeared as he always did, at least ten years younger than his actual age.

Brod had a theory about riding Sandown. While everyone looked and laughed at the stiff-backed military posture, which he also employed on the polo field – all the reports of his demise referred to his association in that sphere with Prince Charles – he said: “When you jump the Pond three out, take a pull. Everyone goes like sh.. off a shovel, but if you hold on, you’ve more chance of getting up the hill.” It really did work. He was a gifted horseman, training his own polo ponies in between everything else in his hectic world.

That was true, among others, of his riding of The Drunken Duck over the years at Sandown and you want to see that style, you can find on the Racing Post site attached to his obituary a film of his marvellous win in the 1982 Cheltenham Foxhunters’.

A skilled if a somewhat corner-cutting money-maker in the City, he helped many small businesses on their way, notably getting Laura Ashley funded being his biggest achievement. Later in life he became a star of television shows often with a “society” or etiquette dinner party slant. The obits usually referred to his being in the SAS, but that was as a Territorial. His extreme fitness in the saddle owed much to that side of his life.

There were two memories of our connection I would like to mention. My then wife and I were invited to his 40th birthday in Hampstead where the A-list gathering was entertained by Showaddywaddy – look them up if you haven’t heard of them.

The Drunken Duck’s Cheltenham triumph came in 1982 and later that year he asked me if I could find him a horse to go into training with Michael Dickinson. We found a gelding for ten grand (or was it 12?) called Talon and on Boxing Day 1982 he became possibly the least memorable of Dickinson’s record 12 winners in a single day, although it was a big thrill for Brod and me. The following March came Michael’s Famous Five of the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

As I said, I cannot believe Brod is gone. Once memorably he was called a “cad” in a court case, but the grin never strayed very far from that impish face. Like Derek Thompson you could never knock him down. Rufus and Brod, in the same list 22 years ago and both gone within two days last week. It’s uncanny.

- TS

Monday Musings: The Apples of Charlie’s Eye

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I finally made it to Ascot on Saturday, my first visit to a racecourse since the last day of the 2020 Cheltenham Festival, writes Tony Stafford. As I drove the last few miles the excitement was almost making me breathless and I was delighted that by waiting until there was an element of normality, my trip was just as I remembered all those wonderful big-race summer afternoons.

The best part, apart from seeing a great winner of a very good King George, was the thing that I, as a now very senior citizen, always regarded as my private, exclusive club. When you’ve been racing in a sort of professional role you get to know hundreds, probably into the thousands, of people in the same narrow environment.

When loads of them stop to ask, “How are you? Long time, no see!” and variations of those sentiments having been stuck mostly at home for 16 months, it is so energising. I always used to say, “Most people my age probably see half a dozen people a day if they are lucky. I go racing three or four days a week and see maybe an average of a hundred or more that I know.”

And Ascot on Saturday was as normal as it ever was. Bars, restaurants and boxes open and fully extended, the always beautifully attired Ascot crowds basking in the better than predicted weather and fast ground befitting the middle of summer.

One person who didn’t make it was the “You’ve been pinged!” trainer of the brilliant Adayar, Charlie Appleby, who had neglected to do what people increasingly have been doing, removing the app from their phones.

Not too many Derby winners have followed their Epsom success with victory in the same year’s King George. It was more commonplace in the first 50 years of the race’s existence after its inauguration in 1951. But in this century, until Saturday only Galileo, Adayar’s grandsire via Frankel, had managed the double.

Appleby therefore made it four mile and a half Group 1 wins since the beginning of June with his two Frankel colts, the home-bred Adayar and his stablemate Hurricane Lane, the Irish Derby and Grand Prix de Paris hero, bred by Philippa Cooper’s Normandie Stud.

Both horses won maidens in the last part of October, Hurricane Lane on debut and Adayar second time out. Both therefore were far less trumpeted at the beginning of this season when again Hurricane Run started with more precocity, indeed until he finished third to Adayar, the apparent third string at Epsom, he was unbeaten.

Adayar’s juvenile victory came in the Golden Horn Maiden at Nottingham, the race name being awarded to the great Derby winner the year after his Classic triumph. Previously it was known as the Oath Maiden Stakes in honour of the 1999 Derby hero owned by the Thoroughbred Corporation, who won the same maiden to get his career on the go the previous autumn.

I thought I would have a look at Charlie Appleby’s 2021 three-year-old complement courtesy of Horses in Training. Charlie had 70 horses of that age listed at the start of the season, 21 fillies and 49 male horses. Of the 21 fillies, eleven are by Dubawi, also the sire of 27 Appleby colts and geldings. Surprisingly, as many as 12 were already gelded at the start of the campaign and at least a couple more have subsequently experienced the unkindest cut.

Appleby had three colts by Dubawi as major candidates for the 2,000 Guineas: Meydan Classic winner Naval Crown, who beat Master Of The Seas that day; Master Of The Seas himself, who went on to win the Craven Stakes; and One Ruler, runner-up to Mac Swiney in the 2020 Vertem Futurity, also went to the Guineas. Master Of The Seas did best, losing out in a desperate thrust to the line with Poetic Flare and, while that Jim Bolger horse has gone on to run in both the Irish (close third to Mac Swiney) and French (easy winner) Guineas, and then dominated the St James’s Palace Stakes, we are yet to see Master Of The Seas again.

Another Dubawi colt to do well has been Yibir, winner of the Bahrain Trophy at Newmarket’s July meeting, while the geldings Kemari (King Edward VII) and Creative Force (Jersey Stakes) both at Royal Ascot have been to the fore.

It is noticeable that several of the gelded group have been either difficult to train or simply very late developers.

Meanwhile, the five-strong team of Frankel sons have been nothing short of spectacular. It will be of great satisfaction for the organisation that Adayar is out of a Dubawi mare and not an especially talented one.

What of the other three? One, Magical Land, has been gelded. He won the latest of his seven races for Appleby and has an 80 rating. The others have not been sighted this year. Fabrizio, placed as a juvenile, is a non-winner but Dhahabi is an interesting horse I’d love to see reappearing.

At 3.1 million guineas this half-brother to Golden Horn carried plenty of expectations. He won on debut and, last time in the autumn, was third to One Ruler in a Group 3 at Newmarket. Just the five Frankels, then, and I bet Charlie wishes he had a few more. The list of juveniles shows 48 sons and daughters of Dubawi and 11 by Frankel.

For many years the ultra-loyal and ever agreeable Saeed Bin Suroor was the only and then the principal Godolphin trainer. His stable is now increasingly the junior partner with half of the 140-odd complement listed as four years of age or older, and many of these are probably more suited to the structure of racing in Dubai over the winter. Saeed has three Dubawi three-year-old colts and one filly this year, but none by Frankel. The juveniles listed reveal one by each stallion.

How ironic that in the year of Prince Khalid Abdullah’s death in January, the all-conquering owner of Juddmonte Farms never saw the crowning of Frankel, already the greatest racehorse certainly of the past half-century, as a Derby-producing sire.

He will surely progress again from this situation and, now with Galileo also recently deceased, is in position as the obvious inheritor of his sire’s pre-eminence.

The other younger contenders will take time to earn their prestige and it can only be good for racing that a horse that went unbeaten through 14 races has made such a statement at the top end of the sport.

To win his King George, Adayar had to see off the challenge from the tough Mishriff, stepping forward from his comeback third to St Mark’s Basilica in the Eclipse Stakes. His owner, Prince Abdulrahman Abdullah Faisal, was one of the people I’ve known for half a lifetime that greeted me on Saturday. Also, Adayar had to consign Love to her first defeat for 21 months. The concession of so much weight to a younger colt by an older mare – 8lb – is never easy, but her race didn’t go as expected either.

Her pacemaker Broome missed the break and then only gradually moved into the lead. In the straight Love looked poised and then Mishriff tightened her up on the outside as Ryan Moore was beginning to move her into a challenging position. Having to change course, as the Coolmore filly did halfway up the short Ascot straight, is never the recipe for success.

It is fair to say, though, that Adayar would have won whatever. It will be interesting to see how Appleby shuffles his pack. Someone suggested the St Leger. If you wanted to make Adayar a jumps stallion, that’s what you would do. He won’t go anywhere near Town Moor in September. With due deference to the fifth Classic, he will have much bigger fish to fry.

- TS

A Racing “Guess Who”

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When people have been around the racing game for a while, especially when they haven’t had the good fortune to crack it in the way of a Henderson or an Aidan O’Brien, a good way of teasing out their identity is to offer snippets from their lifetime, writes Tony Stafford.

We all know about Mr Frisk, the Kim Bailey-trained Grand National winner ridden by the amateur Marcus Armytage, son of trainer Roddy and brother to the first female Hennessy Gold Cup winning rider Gee, later Tony McCoy’s secretary.

Marcus was subsequently a colleague of mine at the Daily Telegraph – indeed he is still there. But our mystery man beat the youthful Old Etonian to it, winning five chases in a row, and unbeaten in six on the gelding in an invincible season as a novice, at one point telling an interviewing journalist that he and Mr Frisk would win the Grand National. Events would subsequently conspire for the combination of horse and jockey to be broken through no fault of our rider.

Next clue, born and bred in West Ham, East London, he went to the same school as did - a good few years earlier of course - Michael Tabor and the late and much-loved David Johnson, owner of all those wonderful jumpers with Martin Pipe. Our hero’s father Norman, youngest of a family of 13 after serving with distinction in the army, joined the Daily Telegraph as a printer.

In the days of hot metal linotype he and his many skilled colleagues would stand one side of the “stone”, the flat piece of the print room’s furniture along which the individual pages would be laid out and constructed. He would help the sub-editor – very often me on the racing pages – standing on the other side to fit it all in from my upside-down, back-to-front perspective. My job was assisted by having paper printers’ single long “takes” of the individual stories and racing cards which had to be cut to length – rather different nowadays with instant editing for all, not least without all the sensitivities of not crossing other unions’ demarcation lines.

Knowing what and how much to cut was the key but a good stone man on the other side made it easy and Norman knew his stuff all right. I loved those days and can still read newspapers upside down – maybe not the most helpful attribute these days, rather like knowing Latin declensions and conjugations!

A bit sketchy so far, well how about this? At 6ft 2 1/2inches he was the tallest jump jockey of his time. One season he broke his right collarbone nine times; it was only when ironically riding Bailey’s Just For The Crack at Newbury that both went in the same fall.

After retiring from race riding in the mid-1990’s he would not begin training in his own right for a few years, instead working as Norman Mason’s assistant – the assistant to the amusement machine magnate from the North-East was in effect the trainer.

Mason also had a Grand National winner, but Red Marauder’s success in 2001 when one of only four finishers happened after the mystery man’s departure having overseen his novice win. He was already setting up his own stable by then. What has defined him in the intervening two decades has been his extreme patience waiting, it seems, forever to land a touch for his owner, then carrying it off with certainty.

If you haven’t got it yet you never will so here we go - say hello to Alan Jones. From West Ham to the West Country via Northumberland has been a stretch. He still stands just as tall and with a season-best of ten a while ago and more likely four or five every term from his ten-strong string of individually and minutely prepared jumpers, he keeps the show going for his owners.

One of them enjoyed such a winning punt on his veteran horse Tiquer in the winter of 2017-18 that he decided to invest at a higher level. “He won 140 grand”, recalls Alan, “so decided to go to Goff’s in Ireland that October to look for a smart yearling. He had been using an agent but he thought his fees excessive, so he asked me to go along and find a nice filly for around 100-110k”, recalls Alan.

“We started with a dozen but boiled it down and eventually settled on a Camelot filly. To my surprise we got her for €100,000. The wind came out of my sails a bit when the owner sent her to Richard Hannon, but she was from a major Coolmore source, consigned by Timmy Hyde’s Camas Park stud, so you would have expected her to go to a big Flat yard. In any case, he is my biggest owner so you’d want to keep him happy.

“Of course, I kept my ear to the ground, listening for news on how she was doing at Hannon’s. It seemed she didn’t make the expected progress and it was as much an economy measure as anything else when I was asked to take her for the winter as a two-year-old”, said Jones. The next season as a three-year-old soundness was again an issue with her so it was back again to Mr Jones for some more rest and recuperation.

Ironically, recalls Jones, it was just when he detected the filly was starting to shape up that the owner nearly brought the project to an untimely end. “She was improving every day and then suddenly there was a potential buyer wanting to send her to stud unraced. I told the owner I thought we could still do something with her and luckily he finally agreed.”

Thus on Sunday, prepared on the same type of hill up which Martin Pipe, who in Jones’s estimation, completely changed the science of training racehorses, Lady Excalibur was finally ready to go.

The chosen target, a bumper at Stratford last Sunday, came along 1,021 days after Alan Jones signed the docket to re-invest that big chunk of his owner’s massive touch. After the event he reckoned “she’s not quick” but if you watch the video of where she is turning for home and where she is at the finish with Tom O’Brien sitting pretty you might have another opinion. The world is her oyster and whatever she does on the track she will always have a value as a potential broodmare.

As Tom told him afterwards, “You are just like my Uncle Aidan, you can perform miracles. This one certainly is”. Praise indeed, but when your stable is limited to a handful of animals, candidates for such miracles come along only rarely. In 60-year-old Alan Jones’ case 1,021 days from purchase to payoff is a bit of a sprint!

- TS

Monday Musings: The Middle Distance Ranks Are Massing

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Until Wednesday evening in Paris it was all plain sailing for Aidan O’Brien, writes Tony Stafford. He could pick his Group 1 spots for the rest of the year with his team of Classic colts and more plentiful top fillies and wait to see what presumably ineffectual opposition Europe’s other major stables would be able to throw at them.

But then along came Hurricane Lane, only third to lesser-fancied stable-companion Adayar in the Derby at Epsom but subsequently a workmanlike winner in the face of a good late challenge by English-trained Lone Eagle (Martin Meade) in the Irish Derby at The Curragh.

Neither run could have prepared us for the Frankel colt’s storming performance on Bastille Day (14 July) as he ripped away the home team’s barricades <couldn’t help myself> beating the Prix du Jockey Club also-rans with possibly more ease than St Mark’s Basilica had managed a month earlier.

Die-hard traditionalists have already been put in their place in France. In the old days the Jockey Club was 2400 metres (12 furlongs) in line with Epsom and The Curragh and was reduced to its present distance of 2100 metres in 2005.

That move coincided with the moving up to a mile and a half of the great Fête Nationale celebration race on a movable feast of an evening card at Longchamp. The Grand Prix de Paris, until the arrival of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 1920, had been the most prestigious and valuable race in France and was run over 3000 metres (15 furlongs), and even 3100 metres for a shorter intervening period.

In 1987, though, it was reduced significantly in distance to 2000 metres (1m2f) and it was at that trip that Saumarez won the 1990 race prior to his victory in the Arc that October. Previously trained to place in the Dee Stakes at Chester by Henry Cecil, Saumarez made Nicolas Clement, who had recently taken over the stable when his father Miguel died, the youngest-ever trainer to win France’s greatest race.

It works for France because, as Hurricane Lane showed so eloquently, a horse could run in and even win either or both the Epsom and Irish Derby, or indeed the Jockey Club, and there would still be time to prepare him for the Grand Prix.

That is just what Charlie Appleby did with such skill and the most notable element of it was how much he had in hand of the William Haggas colt Alenquer whose form with Adayer in the Sandown Classic Trial over ten furlongs in the spring appeared to give him a collateral edge on Hurricane Lane.

Alenquer not only beat Adayer on the Esher slopes but afterwards comfortably won the King Edward VII Stakes at Royal Ascot. But he was put in his place as Hurricane Lane stormed <that verb again!> six lengths clear of Wordsworth, first home of the O’Brien trio. It looked at first appraisal a major improvement on The Curragh but closer inspection reveals that Wordsworth had been beaten slightly further in his home Classic.

So where does that leave Adayer? Well, according to a conversation Charlie Appleby had with a friend who visited his luxurious stables in Newmarket before racing on Saturday, Adayer is fancied to run a very strong race as he faces up to last year’s O’Brien Classic superstar, Love, in Saturday’s King George.

The filly has the edge in the market after her comeback win over an inadequate ten furlongs in the Prince Of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot but Appleby, mindful that the weight-for-age scale favours three-year-olds, is by all accounts confident he will do so. Love concedes 8lb to the Derby hero while William Muir and Chris Grassick’s Coronation Cup hero Pyledriver gives him 11lb. Ascot is also the probable target for Lone Eagle.

Like O’Brien, Appleby is a modest man who often deflects praise to the people around him. Indeed as my friend left, Charlie said, “If you couldn’t train horses from here, where could you?”

Guesses that maybe St Mark’s Basilica might step up in distance on Saturday have been scuppered by his trainer’s single-mindedly pointing him towards the Juddmonte International. Those three days in York next month will also feature the next step towards the stars of Snowfall, following in the footprints of Love from a year ago by taking in the Yorkshire Oaks.

By the way, Jim, get my room ready! I’ll see how my first day back racing on Saturday at Ascot goes and then I might take the liberty of giving you a call. Where have I been? Too busy with all this Covid lark, mate, but I have been thinking of you!

However short a price Love was on what was to prove her last run of 2020 after the easy wins in the 1,000 Guineas and Oaks, the latter by nine lengths, 4-9 will be looking a gift if that is available about Snowfall. Could be 1-5!

Many felt the exaggerated superiority, indeed a UK Classic record-winning margin of 16 lengths, could in part be ascribed to the very testing ground at Epsom. Just as many were predicting that on faster ground in Saturday’s Irish Oaks she might go for economy.

Leading two furlongs out under Ryan Moore, delighted to be riding her for only the second time – he was on board for the shock Musidora win at York on May 12 three weeks before Epsom and that Frankie Dettori benefit – she drew away by eight-and-a-half lengths in majestic style.

As we know, the Coolmore boys like all the boxes ticked and the opportunities covered, but I can categorically tell you that they did not expect her to win at York. Even when she did, the beaten horses’ connections were dreaming up reasons why you could not trust the result.

After all she was rated only a modest 90 on the back of her juvenile exploits, the most memorable apart from winning a small maiden race was the mix up when she wore the wrong colour hat when well behind in the Fillies’ Mile at Newmarket last autumn.

After the Epsom and Curragh regal processions there is only one place you would consider for a soft-ground loving but equally comfortable on quicker turf three-year-old filly of her status - the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. It took me a while – having discarded my European Pattern Races 2021 book with hundreds of others in advance of a hoped-for downsizing move – to work out why she had not been one of the dozen O’Brien horses entered for the Arc.

Six older male horses – Mogul, Broome, Armory, Serpentine, Japan and Inisfree (where’s he been for 20 months?) – are supplemented by Love. The five three-year-olds are the colts St Mark’s Basilica, along with domestic Classic flops Bolshoi Ballet, High Definition and hard-working Van Gogh whose dance in four Classics (the UK and Irish Guineas, when third behind Mac Swiney, and French and Irish Derby) brought that one positive result.

That left room for one filly and, considering Santa Barbara took until last week to gain Grade 1 winning honours in the New York Oaks while four of her supposedly inferior female counterparts beat her to it, the evidence is there. They did indeed think she was far and away the best.

At least that was the case until 3.15 p.m. on the afternoon of May 12. The Arc closed at France Galop’s HQ around four-and-three-quarter hours earlier.  Now they have to wait until September 27 to get her in and pay a heavy penalty to do so.

In all, 101 horses made it. I am sure that date is writ large on the Racing Office wall and, if she enjoys another exhibition round back at the Yorkshire track she first consented to tell her trainer and owners how good she is, the supplementary entry will be made. Chances to win the race do not come along very often.

For all his and his owners’ successes in big races around Europe and in the US, the Arc has proved elusive. Two victories, with four-year-olds Dylan Thomas in 2007 and the brilliant filly Found five years ago, leave him still with a blank to fill. No Ballydoyle three-year-old has won the race since the days of Vincent O’Brien, who took the first of his two Arcs with Alleged in 1977. His second win, doubling up for Lester Piggott the year after followed Ballymoss in 1958, showed once again just how tough a race it is to win.

As mentioned, two O’Brien fillies are entered, Love and Santa Barbara. The latter might continue to make up for her earlier limitations in the Nassau Stakes next week but, as we know, a trio of Classic-winning alternatives, Joan Of Arc, Mother Earth and Empress Josephine, are equally qualified to step in and possibly pick up the Goodwood fillies’ Group 1.

Meanwhile Kevin Ryan has been exploiting the early juvenile Group contests in France with Atomic Force. Beaten first time out and gelded before a win in a small race at Hamilton, Ryan took him to Longchamp last month and he won Group 3 Prix du Bois nicely.

Returning yesterday for the Group 2 Prix Robert Papin, he started 2-1 on and bolted up. He will probably return for the Prix Morny at Deauville next month. Having watched that win the Sky Sports Racing team suggested the Nunthorpe might be an option given how much weight juveniles get from their elders. This year though that could be a hot race if newcomers on the Group 1 sprinting scene like Ed Walker’s Starman and Tim Easterby’s flying filly Winter Power turn up.

- TS

Monday Musings: Remembering a True Legend of the Turf

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Reassuringly he was always there; then, half-watching Racing TV the other day, suddenly he wasn’t. People of my generation always used to ask, “Where were you when the news came through that JFK was assassinated?” For the record I was in a little street in Bow, East London, with just about my first proper girlfriend and her family, writes Tony Stafford.

Bloodstock people of all ages now will relate their whereabouts at the time of the passing of the greatest stallion of all time. Galileo, aged 23 and sire of 91 Group and Grade 1 winners at the time of his death late last week is no more. No longer is that the figure either, Bolshoi Ballet making it 92 in New York on Saturday completing an Aidan O’Brien / Ryan Moore Grade 1 double with Santa Barbara, now respectively Derby and Oaks winners after all.

Galileo’s legend though will continue to develop, with a couple more crops of those whole-hearted, ultra-genuine performers yet to grace the track, mostly from Coolmore Stud and Ballydoyle who monopolised his progeny from the time Teofilo and others showed him to be a sire for all seasons and more importantly all ages. Messrs (and Mrs) Magnier, Tabor, Smith and of course the whole Aidan O’Brien family owe him a massive debt of gratitude.

Having had him as my equine hero for a decade and a half and as the password on almost all my electronic devices such as they are, it was gratifying that on a visit for the Champions Weekend in September 2018 along with Harry Taylor and Alan Newman I got to meet him.

Minutes later we were allowed into the Coolmore museum and saw the life-size and oh so realistic embodiment of his sire Sadler’s Wells whose apparently never-to-be broken tally of records has indeed been shattered by this phenomenon.

Typically Alan gave him a cuddle and for months afterwards would show anyone within reach the pictures, asking, “Who do you think this is?” I, of course, would have been tempted to say, “Surely it’s you!” but most people are less unkind.

I remember sitting in the late George Ward’s Ascot box, along from the Royal Box – a fair way along if I’m honest – telling the heroic combative boss of Grunwick, the company that produced the Instaprint and Tripleprint photo services long before cameras did the same job instantly, about him.

George had been through an awful front-page making ordeal with the unions decades earlier but came through it and got interested in racing, becoming a major sponsor and a leading light in the Racehorse Owners Association.

I told him, “George, you have to send a mare to Galileo, he’s only €30k!” He said, “That’s too rich for me, I’ve just a few ordinary mares.” Fair enough and of course by the time the next lot of nominations were considered his fee had already increased notably.

Sadly George died soon afterwards and now the equine object of my admiration, long since designated as having a “private” fee is gone, too.

One quote I saw (and a figure too that was often bandied about) was that you needed to stump up €500k to unlock the golden gates to his magical semen. But such was the flexibility of John Magnier’s marketing skills that the way to Galileo’s heart (as far as breeders’ mares were concerned) could often be through foal shares. The mare had to be pretty good in most cases but the numbers also needed to be kept up, so “private” had to be the way to go.

I could imagine breeders sitting down around a table at Royal Ascot, Longchamp or Newmarket sales asking each other: “How much did you pay?” I bet they always erred on the high side!

A slow computer early this morning limited my intended analysis of the Coolmore stallion roster 2021 but as far as I could tell, from 24 of the 26 other sires listed to be standing as Flat stallions this year, their combined fees amounted to just about half a million Euro – equivalent to one top-priced (no deals) Galileo.

Two exceptions are the highly-promising pair Wootton Bassett, a relative newcomer, but now raised to €100,000 and No Nay Never, up to 125K after his progeny’s exploits in his first few years’ activity. Two nice Wootton Bassett winners over the past weekend will keep him in breeders’ headlights.

Their upward momentum is reminiscent of a similar hike for No Nay Never’s sire, Scat Daddy, another shrewd buy from Coolmore, running in Michael Tabor’s colours in the US towards the end of his career. He had just been promoted to a fee of $100,000 at their Ashford Stud, Kentucky, base after a brilliant start when he had an accident at the farm. His untimely death came with a stunning book of mares waiting in vain for his services.

There can be little doubt he would have been a realistic US-based counterpart to Galileo if the evidence alone of the unbeaten Triple Crown winner Justified is considered. Two other sons of Scat Daddy, plus two of No Nay Never, grace the present Coolmore Ireland roster. Caravaggio, by Scat Daddy, has made a great start with his first two-year-olds this year and Coolmore has taken the hint - he will be based at Ashford in 2022.

Also at Ashford is the other Triple Crown hero of the modern age, American Pharoah, while the horse that came nearest to a UK Triple Crown, which would have been the first since Nijinsky in 1970, Camelot stands at only €45k in Co Tipperary. He is the sire of Santa Barbara, who thus on Saturday belatedly joined the four other Group 1 winning three-year-old fillies at Ballydoyle. Needless to say Alan has pictures with both Triple Crown winners, but I didn’t make that trip.

Two of the five, Empress Josephine and Joan Of Arc, both Classic winners this year, are daughters of Galileo. As far as my haphazard researches allow, I believe seven sons of Galileo are standing at Coolmore and Churchill, the 2,000 Guineas winner of 2017, is already off to a flying start with eight individual winners in his first crop.

Apart from the Flat-race squad, Coolmore NH has a further 18 stallions between Castle Hyde, Grange Stud and The Beeches where six more sons of Galileo ply their trade, so to speak. Classic winners Capri, Soldier Of Fortune and Kew Gardens are among them along with Order of St George, a dual Gold Cup hero from Ascot.

Two non-Galileos working away there are his fellow Sadler’s Wells horse, Yeats, the four-time Gold Cup winner and the multiple Group 1 winner, Maxios (by Monsun), busiest of the lot last year with 298 mares successfully accommodated. At €7k a pop, his new increased price, that’s good business.

If there is to be a sire to step into those size 14 shoes – not really but you get the illusion! – it has to be St Mark’s Basilica (Siyouni-Cabaret/Galileo). Now I know why, straight after that epic Eclipse win at Sandown that brought a best in the world rating of 127 to eclipse (ha!) Palace Pier, one insider said, “They are hoping he might be the one to replace Galileo.” He better not lose from now on then, but I fail to see why he should.

Back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when Robert Sangster, Vincent O’Brien and his son-in-law John Magnier were going hard in the bloodstock business in the US having acquired Coolmore from Tim Vigors, the great Northern Dancer was commanding fees of $1 million.

Such was his allure that when Henryk De Kwiatkowski was looking for mares to send to his Horse Of The Year, Conquistador Cielo, he paid 3.8 million dollars for a mare in foal to Northern Dancer. She lost the foal – and he didn’t pay the extra for foal insurance. Conquistador Cielo, subject of a $36 million syndication proved to be pretty rubbishy as a stallion but Henryk had another horse, by Northern Dancer, who did turn out pretty good at the same time. That was Danzig and he at one stage was getting quite close to the magic million too. Pity I didn’t find a mare to send to him (for free!) when I was offered the chance.

As the Old Testament would say, Northern Dancer begat Sadler’s Wells; Sadler’s Wells begat Galileo; Galileo begat Frankel, Teofilo, Minding, Love and many more champions besides. There are legacies and legacies, but none like Galileo’s. Rest in peace, we’ll never forget you and I can’t wait to see you standing next to your dad in the Coolmore museum. I’m sure Alan will let me know when the star attraction is ready for viewing.

 

 

Monday Musings: St Mark My Words!

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The sports pages yesterday were dominated by a certain football match in Rome and, much earlier on Saturday, the 18-year-old world number 338-rated female tennis player wowing the home crowd at Wimbledon, writes Tony Stafford. At least on a par, ten miles down the A3 in Esher, St Mark’s Basilica was deservedly making his own headlines.

There is winning a Group 1 race, indeed one completed in slower time for the Sandown Park ten furlongs than the two handicaps over that trip on the card, and then there’s winning it like a potential champion.

You can list a big winner’s credentials but when it gets into the top level it is rare to find a horse running past fully tested Group 1 performers in a few strides and drawing away. That is what St Mark’s Basilica did in swamping Mishriff and Addeybb for speed once Ryan Moore unleashed him.

Afterwards there was the inevitable qualifying of the performance, commentators suggesting Addeybb, who battled back to wrest second off Mishriff, and the third horse may have both come to the race a little under-cooked.

Well here’s the rub. Both horses had already won Group 1 races this year, Addeybb continuing his Australian odyssey with another defeat of the brilliant mare Verry Elleegant in the Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Randwick in April while Mishriff earned his owner Prince Abdulrahman Abdullah Faisal just about £10 million when annexing his own country’s Saudi Cup and the Dubai Sheema Classic on Dubai World Cup night.

Those wins illustrated his versatility, the former over nine furlongs on dirt and the latter a mile and a half on turf, so Sandown’s mile and a quarter will have fitted comfortably within his parameters.

When Mishriff drew alongside Addeybb in the straight on ground possibly a little less soft than ideal for the leader, he looked set to win, but St Mark’s Basilica was poised in behind in this four-horse field and, when given the signal by Ryan, he sailed serenely clear.

Sandown’s tough uphill conclusion often provides sudden changes in momentum. By the line St Mark’s Basilica was, either from loneliness or simply feeling the effects of the sudden change in velocity that took him clear, definitely if marginally coming back to the rallying Addeybb.

But William Haggas’ seven-year-old is a battle-hardened winner of 12 of 23 career starts. Mishriff, handled skilfully by the Gosdens, has won six of 11, but until Saturday his only defeat in the previous six had been in Addeybb’s Champion Stakes where he appeared not to appreciate the very testing ground.

Saturday’s success makes St Mark’s Basilica the winner of four Group 1 races in succession starting with the Dewhurst. That normally is the race that signals the champion juvenile of his year and then he went on to hoard both French Classics open to males, the Poulains and Jockey Club, where his electric burst heralded the type of performance we saw on Saturday.

In a year where four-fifths of the Aidan O’Brien Classic winners have been four different fillies and none of them Santa Barbara, the fifth has been going a long way to eradicate the overall disappointing showings – so far, and remember it is a long season – of the other colts.

A son of Siyouni – also the sire of Sottsass, the 2020 Arc winner, now standing his first-year stallion duties for €30k a pop at Coolmore Stud – his two French Classic wins made him an obvious object of admiration for French breeders as previously mentioned here.

Unfortunately, their pockets will need to have become much deeper than anticipated with each successive Group 1 victory and if the speed that has characterised all his wins remains or, as is more likely, intensifies with experience, he will easily outstrip his sire’s appeal – and stud fee.

Any thought that he will end up anywhere other than Co Tipperary is fanciful and with all those mares needing partners he will have an enviable stream of potential mates. One slight difficulty is that his dam, Cabaret, is by Galileo.

Cabaret was an unusual product of Galileo on the racetrack, atypically precocious enough to win twice including a Group 3 by mid-July of her two-year-old season but never nearer than seventh in four more races. Sold for £600k at the end of her four-year-old season – double the yearling price at which she joined Coolmore – she has been the dam not only of St Mark’s Basilica but also Aidan O’Brien’s 2,000 Guineas winner Magna Grecia, by Invincible Spirit.

Post-race quotes of 6-4 for the Juddmonte International look just about spot on in a year when you get the impression that Aidan is being more confident in narrowing down his candidates for the biggest races to the single most deserving.

Of course, there’s still Love as a possible for the Juddmonte as she won reverting to ten furlongs at Royal Ascot, but why wouldn’t O’Brien prefer to keep her in her comfort zone for a second Yorkshire Oaks at a mile and a half? Then it is the small matter in three weeks of the King George, for which in a vastly over-round market, Love and the Derby winner Adayar are vying for favouritism at around 2-1 or 9-4, with St Mark’s Basilica moving in close at 4-1 if Aidan wants to stretch him out to 12 furlongs as soon as that.

And what of Snowfall? A 16-length Classic winner is not one to ignore wherever she runs. It’s great having a lot of good horses: the trick is knowing where to run them.

One trainer who never seems to be at a loss in choosing the right target for his equine inmates is William Haggas. With 67 wins from 266 runs, but more pertinently having won with 49 of the 106 individual horses he has run this year, the Newmarket trainer operates at a better than 25% strike rate despite many of his horses having to run in high-class handicaps.

If they sometimes are not raised as rapidly as those of his fellow trainers who might have a much less healthy strike rate, the economy with which they often win is at least a contributary factor.

But they are invariably well bet, so for Haggas to be losing under a fiver to level stakes for those 266 runners is miraculous. I saw Bernard Kantor, a patron of Haggas, again last week and we were musing as to whether his Catterick winner Sans Pretension – remember she was DROPPED 2lb for that! – would ever be reappearing.

The next day, Bernard excitedly told me, “She is in at Yarmouth on Wednesday,” about his Galileo filly. I’m sure he will have seen a later and much more high-profile entry in a fillies’ race at Ascot on Friday. I could be tempted as there’s another horse on the same card I really ought to go to see. I had planned to wait until post July 19, so possibly the King George, but maybe I will try to go this week. I bet Sans Pretension will not be too far away in whichever race the shrewd Mr Haggas decides upon.

There are some jewels that one’s eye will often pass over when looking for something in the Racing Post records. While Haggas has had nine winners from 41 runs in the past fortnight there is another area where he has plenty to prove.

Like Ryan Moore, who won a hurdle race first time on the track for his dad before ever riding on the Flat and who has not revisited that discipline since, Haggas had a go at jumping. I know he had at least one winner over jumps, Fen Terrier on October 20, 1995, at Fakenham, but possibly only one.

The 6-4 second favourite, a daughter of Emerati owned by Jolly Farmer Racing, won narrowly with the 5-4 favourite Dominion’s Dream, trained by Martin Pipe, ten lengths behind in third.

William has had a further seven runners over jumps in the intervening 9,389 days without another win. I wonder if he considers he has something to prove. Probably not!

Another of my favourite meetings will come and go without my attendance this week. Whenever I think of Newmarket July I go back to the day when Hitman broke the track record in the competitive ten-furlong three-year-old handicap for owners the Paper Boys, and Brough Scott insisted I do an interview for the telly.

My then wife was blissfully unaware of my association with the Henry Cecil colt, that was until a colleague on a day off who was interested in racing congratulated her on the win in the office the next morning. Other similar offences were digested and clearly taken into account before the eventual inevitable domestic rupture!

- TS

Monday Musings: Classic Connections

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The weekend in Ireland produced another extremely disappointing performance from an Aiden O’Brien Derby favourite, writes Tony Stafford. If anything, High Definition’s sluggish display in the Dubai Duty Free Irish Derby was in merit terms inferior even to Bolshoi Ballet’s comprehensive defeat at Epsom.

The discovery of a cut to a hind leg immediately after that race gave connections a straw to cling to with Bolshoi Ballet, while on Saturday a stumble through clipping heels after two furlongs apparently unbalanced High Definition with jockey Ryan Moore apparently never able to get him back on an even keel thereafter.

The common denominator in a period when Irish horses have otherwise been wiping the floor with their English-trained counterparts over jumps and on the Flat has been the two Derby wins for Godolphin on horses trained by Charlie Appleby.  Adam Kirby was the unexpected hero in the Cazoo Derby at Epsom but William Buick, only third that day on first string Hurricane Lane, was again in the saddle as that horse put things right at The Curragh.

From the time when his father Walter used to bring him over from Norway, where he was born, while Scots-born Buick senior was the eight times champion jockey in Scandinavia, William always had the mark of a future top jockey.

He used to come along to Newbury racecourse, a tiny lad, and visit the press room where his proud dad brought him and, later on, his two younger brothers, Martin and Andrew. Even years later when he started riding aged 16 as a 7lb claiming apprentice from Andrew Balding’s stable he weighed just about 5st wet through.

Walter took on the job of trying to get him started and initially it proved difficult. Then one day he rode his first winner for Paul D’Arcy, a friend of Walter’s from their riding days before Walter moved to Scandinavia.

That made little difference to the flow of rides and one day Walter asked me whether I could talk to any trainers. William had been enrolled in the Newmarket Jockey School and apparently had made something of an enemy of one of the coaches who found him rather too ready to express his opinions, a tendency that years later cost him a doubling of a suspension when he accused French stewards of being corrupt, a comment he later wisely withdrew.

At the time I was very friendly with Vince Smith and we’d recently arranged for a couple of Raymond Tooth horses to go to him, with excellent results. Vince is no longer a trainer and after surgery for gender transformation, is now known as Victoria Smith.

Vince gave the boy his chance and in the last two months of 2006 he rode the three-year-old handicapper Vacation six times to two wins, two seconds and two thirds, the impetus of which helped get him going. By the end of the year he had clocked up ten wins. Vince continued training for only two more seasons and William rode seven winners from 40 mounts for him with another 13 finishing second or third.

But what I believe was a big step in the making of William was when, as a result of a recommendation by Michael Tabor, William spent the early part of 2007 in the US in the Florida winter base of top US trainer Todd Pletcher. That, rather than run through his claim in egg-and-spoon races on the all-weather, Buick senior agreed, was a better idea and more beneficial for his future.

On that trip, with his dad as chaperone, he was taken under his wing by the great Angel Cordero in his daily track work and returned to the UK a better rider and a much more rounded young man.

While voted the Apprentice of the Year in the Derby awards in both 2017 and 2018 by UK journalists, Buick was actually beaten as champion apprentice the first year by Greg Fairley who had been supported with all the ammunition available from the country’s now winning-most trainer Mark Johnston. Sadly within four years of having maintained a similar level, Fairley found the struggle to deal with maintaining an unnatural weight beyond him.

In 2008 Buick did gain his coveted Champion Apprentice title, although he had to share it with another Andrew Balding rider, geegeez-sponsored David Probert. Within a couple of years he was head-hunted by John Gosden and for four years, during which time he won a first Irish Derby on Jack Hobbs, the pair had spectacular success together.

But the final step on his graduation into the top sphere was being recruited in 2014 by Godolphin with all the winter benefit of winning such races as the Dubai World Cup and its extravagant rewards. That has projected Buick into the same elite jockey grouping as Frankie Dettori and Ryan Moore.

Moore has been the Coolmore number one throughout the same period, succeeding Joseph O’Brien, while Dettori, previously the long-term Godolphin number one, switched back to Gosden on Buick’s departure and duly extended his astonishing longevity with the UK’s top stable, most notably with his association with Enable.

William won the 2018 Derby for Godolphin on Masar and, while he could finish only third behind Adam Kirby, who rode lesser-fancied stablemate Adayar, on Hurricane Lane in the Blue Riband earlier this month, he remained loyal to his mount and was rewarded three weeks later with what was a second victory in the Irish Derby.

It required a top-class ride on Saturday as, going into the final furlong, Dettori, riding the Martin Meade-trained Lone Eagle, had poached a clear lead. With none of the home team looking up to making a challenge the two UK colts had the finish to themselves.

Between the Godolphin pair at Epsom was the Richard Hannon-trained and Amo Racing-owned Mojo Star, still a maiden but he was now strongly fancied to correct that status in this Classic. Unfortunately for connections, when Buick first launched his run down the outside of the field he instigated a touch of general bunching to his inside.

Mojo Star was the worst affected in the scrimmage so, while having no time to recover fully, he did well to finish fifth, just ahead of Irish 2,000 hero, Mac Swiney. Wordsworth, in third, was the best of the Ballydoyle runners but a full five lengths adrift of the first two.

So, with a Classic win, there was a little respite for the town of Newmarket, still shocked by the sudden resignation earlier that day of Matt Hancock from his post as Health Secretary and therefore the most constant face of the Government’s during the Covid-19 crisis of the past 15 months. Hancock is the Member of Parliament for the West Suffolk constituency which includes Newmarket.

The former minister was the subject of a leaked picture, probably taken from a phone camera, showing him snogging a woman that turned out to be his future live-in partner, an action contrary to Covid-19 regulations and a few other considerations too, I would imagine. The break-up of his marriage had been announced just before the departure.

I touch on this simply because he was, or rather is, a fan of horse racing and while the financial situation for owners remains as dire as it has been for many years because of the inadequate prize money levels, the sport certainly needs friends in high places. I don’t suppose he’ll be too much use from the back benches.

I digress. Whereas Adayar was a home-bred, Hurricane Lane, a son of Frankel, was bred by Philippa and Nicholas Cooper’s Normandie Stud in Sussex. I first met the Coopers in the spring of 1998 after Hitman, a decent horse I bought as a yearling and had in training with Henry Cecil along with Peter Mines and a few of his pals under the name of the Paper Boys, was beaten a neck by their horse I’m Proposin at Leicester.

We were all shocked, but Henry, despite Hitman’s having starting the 4-9 favourite after some exceptional homework, was not surprised. “A better horse still needs to be fit to win and Hitman needed the race. When it came to the crucial stage, I’m Proposin <an 8-1 shot that day and winner of his next two races for John Dunlop> was fit, so he won.” A lesson learned from the words of the master! Mainly jumping owners at the time, the Coopers graduated to the Flat before becoming highly-successful commercial breeders.

They reluctantly decided to sell their West Sussex farm in 2017 but continue breeding basing their mares at Coolmore and Newsells Park, the latter of which has changed hands in the past few weeks.  Gale Force, a daughter of Shirocco and, rarely for Philippa, not a home-bred, was sold in a partial dispersal of Normandie’s stock in December 2019 for 300,000gns. That was two months after her son, to be known as Hurricane Lane, went through the same Park Paddocks sale ring for 200,000gns.

Part of the reason for the Coopers’ sale was the tendency for all their retired racehorses to come back to the farm and then live to a great age. Now they are kept at Angmering Park, near Arundel, the home of the late Lady Anne Herries and former training base of William Knight, who moved to Newmarket early last year.

The Classic Year 2021 has thrown a few unexpected barbs at Coolmore with Santa Barbara’s defeats in the 1,000 Guineas and Oaks even though they still won both races. Mother Earth’s victory in the Newmarket race and more emphatically Snowfall’s record-breaking romp at Epsom obviously lessened the blow each time.

Yesterday Santa Barbara, with Aidan O’Brien splitting the difference in the ten-furlong Group 1 Pretty Polly Stakes, feature race on the final day of the Derby meeting, went a long way towards restoring her reputation. Initially looking at best booked for third or fourth, she produced a flying finish between horses in the last half furlong under a left-hand drive by Moore and only narrowly failed to catch the more experienced four-year-old, Thundering Nights.

That filly, sent to Belmont Park for her previous run and an excellent second there in a mares’ Grade 2 for Joseph O’Brien, looked likely to win comfortably but Santa Barbara reduced the margin to a neck.

With four three-year-old fillies at Ballydoyle already Classic winners this year, the in-fighting for a place in the Nassau Stakes line-up will be intense but at least Santa Barbara must now be a contender. As Peeping Fawn showed back in 2007, there’s plenty of time to rebuild a reputation. She won four Group 1 races only starting at Goodwood that year.

- TS

Monday Musings: Of Long Days and the Classic Generation

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June 21st is upon us. The longest day was to be the freest day until the timid medical advisors to the UK government put the wind up them with fears that the D variant – the virus formerly known as Indian – would cause another surge in infections, writes Tony Stafford.

Well it has, averaging around 10,000 a day for the last week or so, but they are testing many, many more nowadays. Anyone prepared to go anywhere near a racecourse will have enjoyed the experience of things up their nose or aimed at their tonsils.

Since mine were removed in 1952, the year of the Queen’s ascent to the throne – rewarded with a nice ice cream <me, not the Queen> as I recall – I would only be eligible for the nose job, but apparently it’s very much an officialdom-rich environment.

While the infections have risen, the numbers dying most emphatically have not, an average of ten a day for the last week when the “roadmap” was hastily and negatively redrawn. With massive numbers of older people fully vaccinated you wouldn’t expect many deaths, but the silly old advisors want it both ways.

As I’ve said numerous times, I won’t go until everyone is free to go everywhere. I contented myself with a Saturday night day-early Father’s Day celebration with my three 40-plus children and a selection of their issue. Lovely it was too.

So on to the summer and of course from tonight the days will shorten inexorably by three minutes for each of the next 182 and then the semi-cycle will start again the other way round. We’ve already had Royal Ascot and ten of the 12 spring/summer European Classic races – only Ireland’s Derby and Oaks remain in that part of the calendar, and then the St Legers in their various forms and degrees of credibility.

The Irish have won eight of the ten, Jim Bolger picking up the 2,000 Guineas with Poetic Flare and his domestic version with Mac Swiney. Poetic Flare’s demolition job in the St James’s Palace Stakes certainly puts him well ahead among the mile colts this year.

The two Classics decided so far and not to have been won by the Irish have been the Poule D’Essai des Pouliches (French 1,000) won by Coeursamba, trained by Jean-Claude Rouget, and  the Derby (Adayar, Charlie Appleby).

The remaining six have all been hoovered up by Aidan O’Brien and the Ballydoyle team and each of them boasts combinations of the increasingly complex Coolmore pedigrees.

Five individual horses have been involved in those all-important Classic victories, and four of them are fillies. I contend that St Mark’s Basilica, despite his workmanlike victory in the French 2,000 (Poulains) and a more comfortable Prix Du Jockey Club success, both under Ioritz Mendizabal, is vastly under-valued in official terms. He beat a big field in Chantilly and his female stable-companion Joan Of Arc (by Galileo, <really?!, Ed?>) was similarly too good for another large field of home fillies in yesterday’s French Oaks, the Prix de Diane. This time Coeursamba finished only 11th.

On Sunday Aidan relied on a single runner in a field of 17 and the 16 home defenders were no match for another Mendizabal mount who won by just over a length from the fast-finishing Fabre-trained and Godolphin-owned Philomene, a daughter of Dubawi.

That made it single-runner O’Brien challenges in three of the four French Classic races to be run so far – unplaced Van Gogh joined St Mark’s Basilica in the Jockey Club.  Therefore three wins and a close second (Mother Earth, ridden by Christophe Soumillon) in the French 1,000. That new-found minimalist approach also extended to Epsom and the Derby where Bolshoi Ballet, the favourite, was left as their only runner having been initially one of six expected to turn out.

Three of the four fillies in question improved markedly on juvenile form, the exception being 1,000 Guineas winner and then Pouliches runner-up Mother Earth, who had already earned her 111 rating for her second place in the Juvenile Fillies’ Turf race at Keeneland last November and remains on that figure despite her Classic exploits. She ran another game race in third in much the most testing ground she has faced in Friday’s Coronation Stakes at Ascot behind Andrew Balding’s Alcohol Free.

Joan Of Arc took a rating of 105 into the Irish 1,000 and was Ryan Moore’s choice for the race but Seamie Heffernan got up on the line that day aboard Empress Josephine (101) in a private duel between two Galileo fillies. She clearly improved on that yesterday while Emperor Josephine was assessed at 109 after her win.

But the biggest eye-opener was Snowfall, the 16-length Oaks winner at Epsom who went into her prep in the Musidora at York on an official mark of 90. That was upped to 108 after her Knavesmire romp but even so she was still believed by insiders to be second-best among a more normal Oaks quintet behind lightly-raced Santa Barbara, now beaten favourite in both this year’s fillies’ classics in the UK.

It seems to me a master-stroke of fudging by the BHA to restrict Snowfall’s latest mark to 120, not merely because that is 2lb lower than Enable after her Oaks defeat of Rhododendron – what that champion did after Epsom has nothing to do with the assessment - and also 1lb less than Adayar.

The give-away for me is to suggest that Mystery Angel, rated 100 after her fourth (four lengths back) in the Musidora had only equalled her York mark. That ignored she made the running at Epsom in a much bigger field and still had the resources left to stay on and retain second 16 lengths behind the Frankie Dettori-ridden winner, finishing well ahead of a trio of considerably more highly-rated fillies.

If the medical advisors who keep us wearing masks and touching fists rather than shaking hands are timid, they have nothing on the BHA men who fear giving too high a rating to a Classic winner, even one who has set a record winning distance for any UK Classic in living memory and beyond.

Snowfall has made the first big statement that she might be a challenger to Love, her predecessor as an outstanding Oaks winner and star of the stable’s slightly disappointing Royal Ascot, as the season progresses. Love, dropping back two furlongs after a ten-month absence since the 2020 Yorkshire Oaks, made all to win the Group 1 Prince Of Wales’s Stakes.

A third female deserving of mention in that elite grouping must be the David Menuisier-trained four-year-old filly, Wonderful Tonight. She got first run on Broome to win Saturday’s Hardwicke Stakes in style despite its being her first appearance of the year. Her French-born Sussex-based trainer has the Arc, where she has a good chance of getting the soft ground she favours, as her main target.

Broome may not have won but earlier that afternoon his close relative by Australia, the two-year-old Point Lonsdale, won the Chesham Stakes, a race often reserved for the best of the earlier O’Brien juveniles. Ryan had a battle keeping him straight, first going right and as they got close home, more markedly left, but they had enough in hand to beat the Queen’s promising colt Reach For The Moon – Sea The Stars/ Gosdens / Dettori – by half a length.

We had wondered why she chose Saturday to make an appearance. That highly-encouraging performance and the good run later of her King’s Lynn in the Wokingham made it a bit more like Royal Ascot, even when viewed from Hackney Wick. Hopefully, Your Majesty, you and me (and many others besides) can be there for the whole five days in 2022.

The astonishing thing about all four female Coolmore Classic winners is that at no time did anyone at Ballydoyle, and certainly not the trainer nor the owners, believe any of them was within hailing distance of Santa Barbara. My guess from Epsom was that the favourite probably did not stay the mile and a half under the conditions and in the quirky way the race was run, up the stands side with all the direction changing that inevitably happens.

I’m looking forward to seeing her, in what still will be only her fourth race and with a highly-creditable close fourth to Mother Earth at Newmarket on her record, in a suitable race over ten furlongs. The Nassau would be nice, but maybe she won’t be the only one from her stable appearing in that Goodwood Group 1.

 

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