Monday Musings | geegeez.co.uk

Monday Musings: Welcoming Back Windsor

16 December 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Back in the 1970’s, one of the favourite trips for Home Counties racegoers was the New Year’s Day programme of jump racing at Windsor. The New Year’s Day Hurdle, a conditions race aimed at attracting potential Champion Hurdle winners, did so on its second running in 1975 with Comedy Of Errors, already winner of the 1973 edition at Cheltenham, soon to add a second a couple of months later.

The giant gelding, 17hh, won 23 of 48 career races, adding to his Cheltenham exploits for the great Fred Rimell, by taking both the Scottish and Welsh Champion Hurdles – in those days important weight-for-age races – as well as three consecutive Fighting Fifth Hurdles and a couple of Irish Sweeps Hurdles.

In his era, he supplanted Arkle as the horse that had won most National Hunt prizemoney in the UK and Ireland. He ended his days as Mercy Rimell’s (Fred’s widow) hack until his death aged 23 in 1990.

I was at Windsor for many of the New Year’s Day Hurdles and another notable winner was Royal Derbi in 1991. He was trained by the late Neville Callaghan and was an example of the difference in the racing structure in those days.

Originally trained by the highly talented David Wilson, the Scottish-born former Harrow schoolboy, who shares his alma mater like many other famous trainers, not least the two best-friend Williams, Haggas and Jarvis, and their Newmarket neighbour Sir Mark Prescott.

Wilson, who still advises the Gary/Josh Moore stable, waited until Royal Derbi’s first run in a handicap after three jogs round, to win a 17-runner three-year-old Windsor handicap by a couple of lengths with Brian Rouse in the saddle.

He was bought out of that seller by Callaghan and raced thereon for two seasons in the name of a Mr Lockhart. His first hurdles run – a successful one – came six weeks later, on August 12, when he won a match at Plumpton at 2/9, but only by a length.

Unlike now, when one NH season ends and the next begins 24 hours later at the end of April, the earliest start for jumping would be July 30 or 31, usually at Newton Abbot. So Neville was immediately on his bike with Royal Derbi who proved a very durable animal indeed.

Who would have imagined that by the middle of November, he had raced another eight times, all in novice hurdles, winning four of them? The last two of those victories were in a 25-runner field at Wetherby before beating 14 opponents at Chepstow. He wound up his year with a rare poor performance in Chepstow’s Finale Junior Hurdle, a big Triumph Hurdle guide then as now.

Early in 1989 he had another five hurdle races, winning three including a wide-margin defeat of subsequent Champion Hurdle runner-up Nomadic Way (Barry Hills). Only fourth in the Triumph Hurdle, he erased the memory of that with an easy victory in Punchestown’s Champion 4yo hurdle. Eight wins in 16 runs, all as a juvenile.

Nowadays a top candidate for the Triumph Hurdle will run twice or in rare circumstances four times, so sparse are the opportunities and so stringent the penalties for wins. Novices would have blanket penalties for multiple wins. Now seven previous victories could usually entail penalties of 42lb: they don’t like you winning races!

After that demanding campaign, Callaghan found a new owner, replacing Mr Lockhart, and Royal Derbi next appeared in the colours of the pre-Coolmore version of Michael Tabor. He was a great money-spinner for the owner and trainer, when his final career total for flat and jumps combined was 17 wins from 66 starts. His New Year’s Day Hurdle win was by six lengths from the smart Aldino in 1991.

While writing this piece I waited until I could watch the opening three races (two hurdles and one chase) on Windsor’s pioneering first jumps card back after a gap of 20 years. In truth, it was another six years longer, as it was only during the rebuilding of Ascot racecourse between 2004 and 2006 that Windsor was taken out of mothballs – the original closure coming in 1998.

I was wondering how the hurdles track would be different from the flat circuit where races longer than one mile imitate Fontwell’s chase course with a figure-of-eight. It looked at first sight yesterday that they are often travelling in a different direction to what they do on the level but that may be an optical illusion. I need to take a better look at the map. The bends looked sharp enough and like on the flat, they do turn left and right-handed at different stages.

[Editor’s note: here are the revised track configurations for hurdle and chase]

The ground at Windsor should be suitable for winter racing and yesterday’s surface of good to soft looked very appealing. The weather is undoubtedly warmer than was the case in the late 1990’s when frost caused the abandonment of three consecutive runnings of the New Year meeting.

Yesterday started with a couple of Henderson hotpots getting beaten early on, and favourite backers were not experiencing an initial punting panacea as another odds-on shot bit the dust later. Once it settles down, Windsor will be a good addition to the jumps fixture list, and I can’t wait to go. It might not be the same as midsummer Monday nights, but any racing is better than none to my mind.

Now all we need is for Jockey Club racecourses to free up Nottingham. The City Trial Hurdle in February fitted well in the Champion Hurdle build-up for suitable horses but Nottingham closed to jumping after 1994 and operates with two distinct tracks, one for spring and autumn – where the jumpers used to race - the other as their blurb goes, “for high summer”.

This year, Nottingham had the misfortune of losing four of its 23 planned fixtures, three of them on the inside course. Other tracks also suffered from the awful weather which came at the most inconvenient times for trainers. Despite this, I hope that if the Windsor project proves a success, then other flat-only tracks like Nottingham might reconsider.

It may be too much to ask Cheltenham, another Jockey Club course, to waive its New Year’s Day fixture, but after a New Year’s Eve skinful, Londoners would not need to get up quite so early to travel to the banks of the Thames rather than suffer the crowded M40 with hungover drivers as the trains are sure not to be running a proper service. <I do realise other people live in different directions and distances from both tracks>.

****

I had a small theoretical bet when I met the Editor of this piece in the week and think I came out just on the wrong side. Matt Bisogno’s Geegeez syndicates have done amazingly well and last Sunday he travelled over to the Boulta point-to-point near Cork to watch Gee Force Flyer make his racecourse debut in the second division of the four-year-old maiden race.

Matt was offered the son of Jet Away by Olly Murphy whose plan was to send him across to Ireland to be broken and trained for exposure in what can be the goldmine offered to winners of Irish points. He didn’t have too much trouble syndicating him.

Ridden by John Barry, Gee Force Flyer mover up nicely in the last mile, disputed the lead over the last fence and drew away near the line for a two-length victory. We should be seeing him under the Murphy banner in the New Year. The bet arose as several of the principals from the Sunday card were in the Tattersalls Cheltenham auction after racing on Friday, but not Gee Force Flyer who is adamantly not for sale.

The runner-up was. I reckoned he would go for “at least 75k”, Matt was much more reticent, suggesting “around 25k”. On a day when the runner-up of the first division of the four-year-old maiden went for 160k, our boy was led out unsold at 48k. I make it a small win for Matt!

- TS

Monday Musings: Chinese Takeaway

9 December 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

So Oisin Murphy didn’t stay home this autumn/early winter for a full English, but instead filled his boots with the ultimate Chinese takeaway, writes Tony Stafford. Oisin didn’t follow my suggestion he might challenge for the 26-times champion Sir Gordon Richards’ best of 269 in a single year, and stands marooned on 215 in the year of his fourth championship. Put another way, Oisin, you have only 23 titles more to go!

I’m sure he and his agent will be content with the £150k or so he picked up in Hong Kong yesterday, courtesy of a win on Giavellotto and fourth on The Foxes in his two rides on the richly-endowed Longines-sponsored card at Sha Tin racecourse. I expect it took Sir Gordon a fair few of his 4,870 winners to match Oisin’s haul over the 2min 27.53 secs of the Vase.

The Marco Botti-trained Giavellotto picked up £1.3 million and change for winning the Vase over a mile and a half. He had the William Haggas world traveller Dubai Honour two and a half lengths behind in second under Tom Marquand with Luxembourg, second to the Hong Kong supreme champ Romantic Warrior in the ten-furlong Cup last year, only fifth for Aidan O’Brien and Ryan Moore.

Giavellotto can lay claim to being one of the most publicly underrated and indeed under-noticed of performers, if not by the handicappers who have him on 119. This year, he won the Yorkshire Cup over 1m6f at York in May and the Princess Of Wales’s Stakes over yesterday’s trip at Newmarket in July. He warmed up for his trip to the Far East with a third over 1m6f, three lengths behind the peerless Kyprios in the Irish St Leger in September.

As an entire he could presumably have been trained for the King George at Ascot in July and/or the Arc early in October – that’s already nine weeks ago! – and maybe next year his realistic trainer might give those races a whirl.

Italian-born Botti quietly goes about his business in Newmarket from where his 93 horses to run picked up 49 wins, 87 places and earnings of £921,714. Yesterday’s victory easily more than doubled that sum on its own.

The big day for Hong Kong racing also provides a showcase for its own champions and the afore-mentioned Romantic Warrior made it 17 wins worth almost £18 million in 22 career starts following a third successive victory in the Cup race with its £2.25 million to the winner prize.

Andrew Balding was rewarded for his enterprise in sending The Foxes to Hong Kong, the four-year-old finishing just under five lengths back in a lavish (£240k) fourth place under Murphy. The Foxes had beaten Dubai Honour when they met in Newcastle’s Churchill Stakes, appropriately so as he’s a colt by Churchill.

Romantic Warrior was almost unbackable but, to the Sha Tin and World Pool adherents, also just about unbeatable at 10/1 on and won as he and his rider liked, the identical price as Sprint winner Ya King Rising, that one less far down the road but getting there. He stands with nine wins from 11 starts. Ya King Rising won a shade cosily under Zac Purton, one of the regular top Australians that have made Hong Kong their own along with that race’s runner-up Hugh Bowman.

But it’s the New Zealand-born James McDonald who really has the game sorted. One of the leading riders in Australia for many years, he manages to organise his trips to Hong Kong to coincide with Romantic Warrior’s runs and has been on him for his past eight races, the last seven wins in a row starting with the Cox Plate at Moonee Valley in October last year.

They also won a Group 1 race together in Tokyo on June 2 this year, one of only four 2024 runs before yesterday. The son of Acclamation was sold as a yearling at Newmarket by his breeders Corduff Stud, fetching 300,000 Guineas to the bid of the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Peter Lau Pak Fai, his owner, will be eternally grateful that it was his number that came up when the annual ballot for owners and horses was enacted.

James McDonald also picked up the winning rider’s share of a second £2 million to the winner race on the 8/5 favourite Voyage Bubble in the Mile. Bizarrely, he was in the television booth when last month’s Melbourne Cup was being run, having no ride in the race, after which he set straight off for his regular Hong Kong stint. Even when he won the Melbourne Cup three years ago on the mare Verry Elleegant, his pickup from the £2,584 million first prize would not have matched yesterday’s combined bounty.

Saturday’s racing at home was massively affected by the latest hurricane to trouble our shores, ending hopes of Aintree staging the Becher Chase over the Grand National obstacles, in which Kim Bailey was denied a run for his smart emerging talent Chianti Classico. Kim woke up on Saturday morning with two fancied runners each at Aintree and Chepstow and instead none got a run. Usually in the winter, when potential winning opportunities are withheld in this way, they only rarely get a suitable race to make up for it.

Jumps trainers must be getting so frustrated. The wet summer when the big horses weren’t generally in action proved difficult for the fast-ground regulars. Then as the early autumn became very dry, many trainers waiting for a first run for their good horses were understandably worried about sending them into action on quick ground.

Then came another very wet spell, with meetings lost and good-ground high-class horses also being put at a disadvantage.

Sandown survived on Saturday but surely it’s a reflection on these problems that the Grade 1 Henry VIII Novice Chase at Sandown attracted a final field of four. These were the Dan Skelton-trained favourite L’Eau du Sud; two from Gordon Elliott, Touch Me Not and Down Memory Lane; and just one more from the UK, the Kieran Burke-trained Soul Icon, the 16/1 outsider.

L’Eau du Sud didn’t have as much to spare as when winning on comeback and chase debut by 11 lengths at Cheltenham, but this race has always been a decent guide to the Arkle Novice Chase at Cheltenham. He will be going there certainly as one of the best of the home team.

The money on offer for that race was 56k, 20k, 10k with more than five grand for the horse that brought up the rear. You wonder sometimes how owners that moan about prize money as I feel they are entitled to most of the time, explain a case like this when so few found their way to such a historic novice race. All the novice chasers in the UK cannot be rubbish, or can they?

An hour later it was the Grade 1 Tingle Creek Chase and Jonbon won this for the second year in succession for the McManus/Henderson/de Boinville team.

The Tingle Creek was worth almost twice as much as the Henry VIII, Jonbon picking up a few quid short of £100,000 for his eight-length defeat of Irish raider Quilixios. Two of the three remaining UK runners fell, including Edwardstone, so again each of those that did get round got a handy prize, around 40k, 20k with 10 grand for fourth.

It’s hard to believe with the recent flat season still so fresh in the memory that when my article appears in two weeks’ time, the days will be getting longer again. Some people are counting down to Christmas, but there may be many that will be sensing Cheltenham 2025 coming over the horizon. Three months? It’ll go in a flash!

- TS

Monday Musings: Superpowers

2 December 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

What a lovely Saturday afternoon, writes Tony Stafford. Sky Sports Racing – now on my Now TV sports package, if you please – had all three UK cards. Thus, there was a constant flow of high-class jumping from Newcastle, Doncaster and, above all, Newbury suggesting that all may not be quite so gloomy where our sport is concerned.

Alex Hammond, Mick Fitzgerald and Jamie Lynch provide a refreshing balance of experience, insight and regional accent and they were in their element, especially Mick, as his old boss Nicky Henderson was on one of his very good days. The former stable number one showed he keeps a keen, close acquaintanceship.

Basically, he knows where the Seven Barrows horses go to work at home or, at important times, away and even, no doubt, what they had for breakfast.

The Henderson highlight, of course, was super-sub Sir Gino, nimbly stepping in after his work with Constitution Hill at Newbury suggested he might have made up a chunk of the 23lb that officially separated them in the BHA handicap.

Lameness was the reason for the former (2023) Champion Hurdle winner’s absence from Saturday’s Fighting Fifth Hurdle at Newcastle. It could turn out in time that Henderson might not have needed to search so intently for a reason <lame excuse?> to explain the gallop’s outcome.

Saturday’s field seemed to contain only one horse capable of challenging the previously unbeaten Henderson four-year-old. That was Mullins’ superbly bred Mystical Power, result of a union between perennial (but deceased) champion flat-race stallion Galileo and close-to unbeatable hurdling mare Annie Power, one of the stars of Willie Mullins’ long career.

Mystical Power was never going in a race where a couple of outsiders made the pace. Nico de Boinville moved Sir Gino out to challenge entering the straight and when he asked him to extend, the gelding did so thrillingly, winning by an ever-widening eight lengths from five-time winner (from eight runs) Lump Sum. It was Nicky’s eighth victory in the race.

Sir Gino started out with an unexpected debut win in France and, once “lifted” from under Harold Kirk’s and Mullins’ noses, went unbeaten last season, missing the Triumph Hurdle, but sorting out the Triumph runner-up, Mullins’ Kargese, by almost four lengths at Aintree. Constitution Hill’s performances still stretch far into the distance where even the best of the rest is concerned, but Sir Gino could just be getting a good deal closer, and his stablemate clearly hasn’t been as easy to train of late.

Until I checked on Sunday morning, I had no idea of Willie Mullins’ age or when he started his training career. It was a shock to see he’s 68 years old and took out his first licence 36 years ago!

That still makes him a novice compared with the six-years-older Henderson, who began training ten years earlier. The pair have been at the top in their respective countries for decades and the most pugnacious of opponents at every Cheltenham Festival meeting since Mullins got into his stride.

Paul Nicholls began as a trainer three years after Mullins, but with the credibility from his time as a jockey when he won two consecutive runnings of the then Hennessy Gold Cup on Broadheath and Playschool in 1986/87 for David Barons. How he ever managed 10st 5lb to ride Broadheath I can’t fathom, but then, when Ned Sangster can ride in amateur riders’ races on the flat at under 10 stone, I suppose anything is possible! Don’t turn sideways Ned, I won’t be able to see you!

Nicholls didn’t take long showing he had gone through a thorough apprenticeship. Towards the end of the Martin Pipe superiority after the turn of the century, when Pipe won 15 titles, Nicholls got ever closer, finally ending that one-sided era with a first triumph on a memorable final day at Sandown in April 2006.

Over the next 17 years, he and Henderson dominated, albeit heavily in Nicholls’s favour, 14 to four, with legends like Kauto Star and Denman to fuel the lavish prizemoney that decides the title. Henderson had collected twice in the 1980’s, so he has six.

Then, last April, it became evident that Willie Mullins, not content with 17 consecutive championships at home, was intent on dislodging either Nicholls or Paul’s former assistant Dan Skelton, and he duly achieved it with something to spare.

The statistics around this top three – Henderson, Nicholls and Mullins – are collectively most impressive with only Skelton in the UK likely to beat the trio to the top spot. Skelton’s wonderful training complex near Alcester, was built and designed on father Nick’s business acumen and Olympic Gold medal riding skills over many years.

Both Dan and younger brother Harry, already a champion jump jockey and potentially going close to another title this season, had their initial racing experience in Nicholls yard, as did emerging trainer Harry Derham.

In Ireland, Gordon Elliott has withstood what many thought would be a career-ending faux-pas a few years ago to come back even bigger and stronger.

Elliott’s stats are remarkable. After Saturday’s racing, in the season from May, Gordon had run 232 individual horses in 633 races, winning 86 and accruing €1,822k. Mullins, with 78 fewer horses (154) and from under half the runs, has 65 wins for €1,326k.

Skelton meanwhile in the UK has gone off at a fast pace, returning to getting as many wins as possible at the “phoney” first half of the season (May to October) before the real stuff begins. His stats are not far short of Elliott’s. He has run 196 horses for 484 runs, 96 wins and £1,247k. Nicholls has 47 wins and £845k from 114 horses and 194 runs. Slow-starting Henderson has 29 wins and £496k from 84 horses and 128 runs.

Henderson was at Newbury on Saturday, saddling two winners, both making their seasonal comeback. Nicholls, too, was content to let his Coral (ex-Hennessy) Gold Cup contender Kandoo Kid go to Newbury without a previous run this autumn and his judgment and that of rider Harry Cobden proved correct as he won comfortably from the favourite, Nigel Twiston-Davies’ Broadway Boy. Here the inherent dangers of punditry came to the fore, one of the trio (Mr Lynch I believe) suggesting the Coral Gold Cup rarely goes to a horse first time out. It did this time.

This was a fourth training win in the race to go with those almost four decades ago riding successes. We all remember Denman’s duo – the only thing we might have forgotten was that they were respectively 17 and 15 years ago!

It’s not only Nicholls whose former assistants rise to a high level after taking their leave. Henderson saw Tom Symonds, a former joint assistant with Ben Pauling, enjoying a prestige win with Navajo Indy in the Gerry Feilden Hurdle. The runner-up there, the former Oliver Sherwood-trained mare Queens Gamble, now with Harry Derham along with her former handler, was a good second first time out for a year, and she is the one I would take from the entire Newbury card.

Talking of Pauling, while his Henrys Friend was only fifth in the big race, he would have been much closer I’m sure had he not punctuated his otherwise great jumping round with a shattering mistake halfway down the back straight second time around. He was also making his return to action and should not be missed next time.

The previous afternoon at Newbury, Pauling showed his hand with another young chaser who could be winning the Coral Gold Cup next year. Carrying Harry Redknapp’s colours, The Jukebox Man made an exhilarating first run over fences in the John Francome Novices Chase, sponsored by Corals. Ben brought him along carefully through his bumper and hurdles seasons and he is now ready to reveal his true potential as a chaser.

I mentioned above the numerical strength of Elliott and Mullins in Ireland. Gordon had 17 runners on the Saturday Fairyhouse card but it wasn’t until the day’s final race, the bumper, that he had a winner. Most punters would have been expecting Ma Jacks Hill, a €310k acquisition for Giggingstown House Stud to land 4/5 favouritism, but he was only third to Elliott’s other runner, William Butler, a 25/1 shot. I hope Sir Mark Prescott’s assistant noticed it running and had a fiver on it!

Talking of expensive buys, the Sir Alex Ferguson colours had their first airing on the Nicholls-trained €740k acquisition Coldwell Potter at Carlisle yesterday. He and Harry Cobden treated the crowd to an exhibition from the front and won easily. That Nicholls fellow keeps persuading the boys to fork out the money. He won’t get back on top otherwise.

- TS

Monday Musings: Ritual

18 November 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Over the past year or so at Tattersalls sales, it has become a ritual, writes Tony Stafford. Bill Gredley, cap perched defiantly atop his head, eases his way between the tables in the Tattersalls Newmarket buffet room, stops and smiles. John Hancock, my long-term associate, as usual is in the perfect spot to meet and greet those we know (and in many cases John seems to remember he knew).

Bill stops and the ritual begins. "How old, are you Bill?", John asks politely. Bill’s answer – I can never remember this part – “92!” - or is it91? John says, “So am I!” <whichever>. “Which month?”. The saga continues and until the next time, neither of these august gentlemen of the turf will remember who indeed is the older. For the life of me I cannot! Maybe December sales later this month will give us the definitive answer and I’ll make a note. <As if! Ed>

John Hancock for many years has been the doyen of bloodstock insurers and still gets the request for cover from old clients after they buy their horses. Cowboys and far more honourable types have come and gone, but he’s still here and loves every minute, although £3 for a Coke and £2.50 for Maltesers would be excessive at the Ritz never mind the sales; but we endure it for the camaraderie.

Entrepreneur Gredley was already age 60 when his great filly User Friendly went on an extraordinary year in 1992 under the care of Clive Brittain. Unraced at two, User Friendly was a 25/1 shot in that Sandown late April fillies’ maiden over ten furlongs when opening the account on debut.

Next came the Lingfield Oaks Trial, followed by three Classics and one other Group 1 victory, in the Oaks, Irish Oaks, Yorkshire Oaks and St Leger. The filly and George Duffield, her regular partner, only gave best - and then by a neck as favourite - to French-trained Subotica in the Arc. Respective Irish and Epsom Derby winners from that year, St Jovite and Dr Devious, were fourth and sixth to emphasise her merit.

In the meantime, much of the Gredley (now officially listed as the Gredley family) race planning with his trainers comes down to son Tim, a more than effective point-to-point rider and international show jumper.

Increasingly, decent Gredley flat racers, usually home-breds and many with East End names to celebrate Bill’s (I’m proud of it, too) heritage, have switched to the winter game, no doubt with Tim’s approval, and are based with a future top-five trainer in James Owen.

Last year at Cheltenham, the family’s Burdett Road, switched from Michael Bell to the former Arabian and point-to-point trainer, exploded onto the hurdling scene. He recorded impressive wins at Huntingdon and in last weekend’s (a year ago) Triumph Hurdle Trial which he won by more than six lengths.

The embryonic favourite for the Festival, he lost that position when well beaten in a return to Cheltenham in January, by future Aintree G1 winner Sir Gino. A setback ruled him out of running in the big race, but he returned to flat racing for James Owen this year and, two runs back, won a Listed race at Newmarket. Challenging Kyprios in the Champion Stayers’ race at Ascot last month proved beyond him, but he returned to jumping yesterday in the Greatwood Hurdle at Cheltenham and made all to collect the £60k prize.

They say lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, but racehorse breeding often lends the lie to that adage. Now the year-younger full-brother to Burdett Road, East India Dock, is following a similar path.

The initial difference was that he was in training with James Fanshawe. He easily won handicaps at 1m4f at Salisbury and 2m at Goodwood before turning to hurdling, again with Owen. The first race proved a comfortable success at Wincanton and then it was on to follow in big brother’s footsteps at Cheltenham on Saturday.

On ground officially described as good with good to soft places, he breezed up to the leader two from home; from that point it was a massacre, trebling his brother’s winning margin in a remarkable time. His 3 min 53.82 sec was more than 20 seconds faster than Burdett Road achieved, admittedly on soft ground, and considerably faster than the two previous renewals of this race.

The record time for the Old Course’s 2m1/2f is 3 min 44.35, set in March 2022 by the wonderful Constitution Hill in the Supreme Novice Hurdle. So, almost ten seconds faster, but when you consider the brilliant Jonbon was second that day, beaten 22 lengths, we are talking in superlatives. By that measure East India Dock looks right and the time is right too!

Will Willie Mullins be worried? Presumably the team he and Harold Kirk have been compiling from France and, given that mysterious ability enhancement over the months of summer and autumn, will again be to be feared. Last year, Mullins had the first two but not necessarily the ones most expected. He supplied seven of the twelve runners and all finished in the first ten. Sir Gino abstained on that day but came back to win at Aintree. He’s one to look forward to from Nicky Henderson.

When Burdett Road won last year, he was immediately put in at a short price for the Triumph Hurdle. The initial quote for East India Dock was 12/1 – really? In my punting days I would have been on the phone in a heartbeat. You could still get 10/1 in a couple of spots Sunday evening.

Yesterday’s performance in the Greatwood by Burdett Road was spectacular enough, seeing off the hot favourite Dysart Enos by the last hurdle and then comfortably holding the flying finish of the Skelton runner Be Aware. If you needed more evidence of how good the East India Dock run was, his big brother took more than five seconds longer over the same course and distance when most of that top-class field of experienced handicappers could never get near to challenge.

His win came with Cheltenham under a pall as the immediately preceding long-distance chase suffered two fatalities, neither involving a fence. Bangers And Cash, trained by Ben Pauling, collapsed halfway through the near 3m4f contest, and then the all-the-way impressive-jumping winner, Warren Greatrex-trained Abuffalosoldier also collapsed when circling on pulling up after the race.

Reverting to Saturday, based on what my eyes told me, I also cannot wait for the next appearance of Dan Skelton’s L’Eau Du Sud. As with East India Dock, he strolled up the final hill of his valuable two-miler with Harry Skelton, such a brilliant rider, never more so than now, enjoying the view from a top-class conveyance.

He hadn’t been the luckiest in his runs in valuable handicap hurdles last winter for the 'Sir Alex Ferguson and mates' - not including Jim Ratcliff - team and could be a future Champion Chaser.

Sir Alex also owns a bit of the Paul Nicholls-trained Il Ridoto, winner of the £84k to the winner Paddy Power Gold Cup, although if Jamie Snowden’s Ga Law could have eliminated his customary mid-race horror jump, it might have been close. So while his £1 million-plus job as a Manchester United ambassador has gone down the drain – obviously Mr Ratcliff was aware of the extra National Insurance cost if he had kept him on - the racehorses are playing their part.

On Friday, amazingly, Sir Alex and best racing pal Ged Mason were celebrating a second successive victory in the Bahrain International Trophy with the Richard Fahey-trained Spirit Dancer. Fred Done of Betfred also has a piece of this one. Oisin Orr came widest of all in the straight and, just as it appeared that the classy Gosden-trained Lead Artist would follow up last time’s Group 3 win at Newmarket, he was cut down and outpaced by Spirit Dancer, who had been well behind him in that Newmarket race. Even split three ways, £472k helps significantly towards paying the training fees. For Fahey to keep the horse in such tremendous shape at age seven and targeting the right race deserves immense praise.

I had intended having a right rant about the decision of the third bunch of adjudicators to allow the original result of the Cesarewitch to stand. The ten strikes rule has been brought in, rightly, to appease public opinion. It is not a question of how many blows land on the horse in the place stewards deem “useful”, it's much more what the public sees. Ten is ten and ever more shall be so.

If the apprentice rider was too incompetent, tired or merely unbalanced, he still tried to give his mount a tenth strike - the one that should have broken the proverbial camel’s back and brought disqualification. As he admitted on television straight afterwards.

The BHA rules are ridiculous. Stewards on the day decide one way or another. Why do they need a different team several days later to say whether it was ten hits or not? They found it was and disqualified the horse. Nobody bar connections disagreed.

The next month another team gathered, no doubt at considerable expense and the BHA team were out-lawyered by the connections of the Irish horse Alphonse Le Grand, trained (sic) by Cathy O’Leary, Tony Martin’s sister. It seems the last of the ten strikes landed prematurely and on the “wrong” part of the horse to be regarded as a proper strike, so sorry connections of Manxman, now £48 grand worse off and the same goes for other prize earners all the way down.

I think after this fiasco, the BHA should make up the deficit from what owners and trainers understandable believed was their rightful due following the disqualification. Simon Crisford, joint-trainer with son Ed of Manxman, understandably called it a fiasco and a sorry day for UK racing. It just made me sick to the stomach. Intent to commit a crime is a crime in law. Intent to hit a horse that misses its target ought to count just the same.

- TS

Monday Musings: A Little Bit of Politics

11 November 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

I rarely delve into the murky world of politics and apologise for doing so now, writes Tony Stafford. But a conversation with a couple of senior and well-respected trainers over the weekend did at least offer an insight into how Rachel Reeves’ first Budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer will impinge upon the racing industry in general and trainers in particular.

The increase in employers’ contributions to National Insurance is a body blow, not least for employees. Trainer one said his increase in annual costs simply from that rise will be £40,000. The choice was to increase training fees, already dangerously expensive, or make one staff member redundant, saving £30K. A tough pick but one with an inevitable outcome.

Taken across all of racing, you might have thought this could have a beneficial effect as many trainers have been complaining since Brexit that the supply of qualified foreign staff has been significantly reduced. Yards in the big centres have been woefully short of fully qualified stable staff, but the new legion of redundant workers will hardly be the best in their respective places of work.

Staff reductions and smaller, if any, pay rises, will be the obvious result while in London tube drivers it seems will be able to work a four-day week on the same pay, courtesy of the Mayor of London.

The second trainer reckoned “a storm” is about to hit racing, after the Budget. Many country-based trainers also combine to a degree farming on their land. The change in inheritance tax rules will surely cause retaliation in some ways.

In France, by now tractors will have been lined up two by two on all the main thoroughfares, intent on bringing traffic if not to a halt, to a crawl. Coincidentally, last weekend, all racing in France was cancelled with many professionals joining a protest in Paris against the proposed increase in the tax on sports betting. €115 million was the intended haul from the new legislation. Jockeys, trainers, PMU workers and the rest were on show. Could it happen here? Doubtful.

Last weekend also featured the latest running of the November Handicap. At around the time I was getting most immersed in racing, I remember listening on the radio to a commentary on the 1962 November Handicap, in those days still run at Castle Irwell in Manchester.

It was a very big ante-post race and in the year of my favourite old-time flat horse Hethersett, the 1962 St Leger winner for Dick Hern, Towser Gosden (father of John) won the race with Damredub. It was a shock the other day when I noticed that this year’s race, although attracting a full field, carried a first prize of just over £36,000.

Inadequate records limited my research, but I was sure the race had been worth more in the past. A simple look back to 1993, one of my favourite renewals, as the Jason Weaver-ridden Quick Ransom’s victory at 6/1 was enough to win me the Sporting Life naps table that year, was enough to answer my question. Jason also won it the following year on Saxon Maid for Luca Cumani. Who’d have believed he won the race more than 30 years ago, watching him on TV working at the track on Saturday? Call him Peter Pan!

Quick Ransom picked up £24,000 for the Mark Johnston stable. The pound sterling in 1993 was worth £2.55 of today’s pounds, so the race’s real value had it kept pace with inflation should have been nearer 60 grand. Twelve years ago, when Brian Ellison won the race with Batswing it was £40k to the winner and the pound then represents £1.47 nowadays. Again, something close to £60k.

Brian Ellison has been around for a while too, so it was great that while his horse Onesmoothoperator could finish no better than 12th in last Tuesday’s Melbourne Cup, his owners still collected 85 grand. Had he been one place further back, it would have been nothing for unlucky 13th.

For Newcastle-born Ellison the Northumberland Plate win for Onesmoothoperator this June provided a kick-start to the six-year-old gelding’s explosion of earnings. Before collecting that £81,000, amusingly (or maybe not so?) less for a big-race UK win than his 12th the other day, he had run 33 times over four seasons.

David Simcock trained him at three, sent him to win his maiden first time out at Newcastle and gave him another two more placed runs there before switching less successfully to turf racing.

After six runs, he was sent to the sales and owners of Ellison’s bought him for 65,000gns. He won on December 22nd 2021 at Southwell but it wasn’t until almost two years (November 11th last year) and 18 runs later that he won another race - back at Newcastle.

It took another seven losing runs before his Plate victory, so in all just one win in 26 outings before the race that gave Ellison’s lengthy career what we thought was the fitting embellishment.

Sometimes, owners and their trainers can be over-cautious – Ellison has never been that, but to contemplate a winter trip to Australia where he easily won the £160k to the winner Geelong Cup proved his attacking policy so imaginative and rewarding. Just as St Leger winner Jan Breughel was ruled out by the exacting Racing Victoria veterinary team, so Onesmoothoperator also got an initial no, but survived a second vetting.

From Northumberland Plate to Melbourne Cup, five races earned the six-year-old gelding £326,000. His previous 33 races earned a total of £156k for three wins and 16 places.

It’s salutary to think what a significant part in his story the 57-rated Jimmy Moffatt-trained horse Yukon played. During his long losing run, Ellison sent him to Sedgefield for a maiden hurdle for which Onesmoothoperator started 2-1 on under Brian Hughes. Yukon, ridden by Charlotte Jones, was a 50/1 shot. Onesmoothoperator looked exactly that as he jumped the last hurdle level with Yukon, yet for all Hughes’ efforts, was beaten more than two lengths, seeming less than keen. He is rated 45lb Yukon’s superior.

Maybe if he had won that day, he would have been kept to hurdling and would never have seen the racecourses of Victoria.

What his history does tell us though is that many of the horses sold at the end of their three- or even two-year-old careers last month at Newmarket may have been disposed of prematurely. I know trainers who have been urged to sell horses by owners when often they believe their potential has not been anywhere near achieved.

So these horses – increasingly sold for export and the riches awaiting them elsewhere – are mostly never heard of again unless they crop up in one of those massively-endowed features over the winter.

There is still a market for jumps horses (where potential owners can get in a bid) and I’m sure that after the record amounts of rainfall in October, the big teams were getting ready for nice ground through the next couple of months.

But then two weeks ago, the taps went dry, and we had the prospect of a Premier Raceday card at Exeter on Friday when only 41 horses turned out – 12 absentees mostly citing unsuitable ground for their absence, and one race becoming a walkover. The Haldon Gold Cup with its £59k first prize, £23k more than the November Handicap, mustered five runners.

Two of Wincanton’s races on Saturday also outstripped the November Handicap prize. The Badger Beer did have ten runners and was worth £47k. The four-runner Elite Hurdle provided one of five wins for Paul Nicholls on the day and carried a £41k winner’s prize. Favourite Rubaud’s superior jumping saw off Brentford Hope, who should be winning again soon.

There was also more money on offer for the Grand Sefton Handicap Chase at Aintree, won by David Pipe’s lightly weighted King Turgeon. Fifth, staying on well up the run-in was Sure Touch, and he should be resuming normal service back on conventional tracks for the geegeez syndicate boys in red, dark blue and white.

- TS

Monday Musings: It’s Coolmore’s Classic, but not as we thought…

4 November 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

How fitting. City of Troy does have an Achilles (Ancient Greek hero of the Trojan wars) heel, writes Tony Stafford. Not an arrow shot from a bow out of the packed stands at Del Mar on Saturday night, just a different surface and a slow exit that consigned him to being the latest non-winner for Ballydoyle of the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

It had been in the expectation of watching City Of Troy win the 2000 Guineas – he didn’t, of course – that Michael Tabor stayed in Europe on the first Saturday in May when he previously insisted he would always go to Kentucky in preference to Newmarket if the boys had an authentic contender for the Run for the Roses.

He changed that life choice this year such was the confidence emanating from the Aidan O’Brien camp, just as he had a few weeks earlier. Then, he made a first-ever trip to Dubai for the Sheema Classic where the 2023 Derby winner Auguste Rodin had one of those off-days that sprinkle his card.

The Coolmore team had two big chances in the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs – one in their name, Sierra Leone, carrying the dark blue of John Magnier, and also Fierceness, the favourite, who although owned by Mike Repole’s stable, the Coolmore team had acquired some of the racing and more importantly breeding interests, just as they had their two Triple Crown-winning stallions American Pharoah and Justify towards the end of their racing careers.

The pair were fancied to complete the 1-2 in Kentucky and Sierra Leone surely should have won in front of Derrick Smith, one of the partners, had he kept at all straight rather than doing his imitation of a naughty schoolboy.

Three noses crossed the line in concert, and it was indeed by a nose that outsider Mystik Dan held on while Japan’s Forever Young was the same distance away in a regularly impeded third place. Most people thought the second and third places should have been reversed. Fierceness, the 2023 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile winner, was a non-competitive 15th with no apparent excuse.

In between May and November, Sierra Leone had been beaten three times, albeit close up in the places in Grade 1 races at Saratoga: not his track, said trainer Chad Brown. Fierceness won two of those races, the Jim Dandy in July and the Travers in August, for Todd Pletcher to lay claim to being the best of the Classic crop.

On Saturday, half a dozen or so horses went off in a group at a suicidal pace in what was the fastest first half-mile ever for a Breeders’ Cup Classic. Fierceness sat just behind the front rank, while Sierra Leone was for a while almost dancing step by step with City Of Troy.

The Irish challenger in the first Magnier silks merely plodded along, but Sierra Leone in the vibrant pink second livery made rapid ground. Fierceness, with the utmost gallantry, led three furlongs from home as his fellow front-runners ran out of puff, and turned into the stretch in front; but his old adversary was full of running and won readily. Fierceness deserves the utmost respect for keeping on for second.

The Breeders’ Cup Classic has been something of a Holy Grail for O’Brien and his owners, and he and the team will have to brush themselves down and revert to winning the big races in Europe. Not that he’s a mug at this meeting, two winners on Friday propelling him to 20 and the equal of almost but not quite retired D Wayne Lukas whose Kentucky Derby win for Michael Tabor in 1995 with Thunder Gulch was the catalyst that helped forge the alliance with John Magnier.

Those two nice wins on Friday, with Lake Victoria in the Juvenile Fillies Turf over a mile and the Juvenile Turf for colts and geldings at the same trip with Henri Matisse, both owed plenty to Ryan Moore’s coolness under pressure. Lake Victoria could easily have been a victim of the inevitable first bend crowding around this tight turf course as she got knocked back a worrying few lengths.

Patient as ever, Moore bided his time and burst through to lead in the closing stages. The filly showed that the mile of the 1000 Guineas next year will not worry her. In between the seven-furlong Moyglare and Friday, she outclassed the opposition when dropping to six furlongs for the Cheveley Park Stakes at Newmarket. Probably the only thing to stop her will be another of the O’Brien fillies, like for instance Fairy Godmother, who hasn’t been seen since Royal Ascot.

That marvellous Friday was the filling between two less agreeable moments for Aidan. While preparing his Del Mar team, 19 hours further forward on the international time scale, over in Australia the veterinary panel adjudicating on which horses should pass fit to run in tomorrow’s Melbourne Cup, ruled that the unbeaten Jan Breughel could not.

Jan Breughel last raced in the St Leger, beating fellow O’Brien Galileo colt Illinois, when still looking to have a fair bit to learn about racing. As Hughie Morrison can testify when a similar pre-race fate befell his 2018 runner-up Marmelo in preparation for the 2019 renewal, it was a crushing setback.

As was the case last week, Hughie’s vets totally disagreed with the verdict, but there is no recourse. Aidan was visibly fuming and while the Coolmore coffers can withstand the odd reverse of this kind, it’s no less galling than for a team like Morrison’s with the cost of sending horse and staff and keeping them there for several weeks being so excessive.

The man wheeled out to explain the situation was none other than Jamie Stier, the head of the temporary Australianising of the BHA at the end of the last decade. Few mourned his departure from our shores, but beware, he’s still very much out there helping to run Racing Victoria. One horse happily that did pass the scanners and “gait-evaluators” is Brian Ellison’s Onesmoothoperator, winner of the Northumberland Plate and now the Geelong Cup last week which entails 2lb extra in the Melbourne Cup. I’d love him to win the £2.35 million and I’m sure Brian will still talk to everyone if he does!

The worst moment for me of the weekend was to hear than Brian Meehan’s Jayarebe had collapsed and died after sustaining a heart attack while finishing what must have been an ultra-brave seventh place in the Turf race that immediately preceded the Classic.

Brian had plotted a masterful programme for the three-year-old, winning three of his five races and looked to have an exceptional chance. He ran an usually sluggish race, starting slowly and never getting close to the front, which became wholly understandable in the awful circumstances.

In a year when his stock has gone a long way towards where it was at the time of his two previous Breeders’ Cup Turf wins with Red Rocks and Dangerous Midge, this will be a tough blow for Brian to overcome. Let’s hope the new intake Sam Sangster acquired for the various syndicates he manages will bring another star for Meehan to work his magic on.

Talking of magic, it’s hard to believe that it’s coming up to 30 years since Kim Bailey pulled off the Gold Cup (Master Oats) and Champion Hurdle (Alderbrook) double in 1995. Kim continues to show a sure touch especially with his training of staying chasers and at Ascot on Saturday, he brought out second-season chaser Chianti Classico to win his comeback race, the Sodexho Live! Gold Cup with a pillar-to-post victory off top weight,

It's strange not to see the bustling style of David Bass on the Bailey horses but Tom Bellamy seems to have the regular gig now. He's much more a "let the horse do the work"-type pilot and it's looking good and working well so far.

Once Chianti Classico settled in the lead it was almost like a flashback to a few years back in the same race when Vindication came back from a break to win this nice prize. At age seven, Chianti Classico is the perfect profile of a Coral Gold Cup (Hennessy etc) winner at Newbury next month.

- TS

Monday Musings: Sistina’s Aussie Fortunes

28 October 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Who would have believed it? Three hundred and twenty-five days after buying the then five-year-old mare Via Sistina for 2,700,000 guineas at Tattersalls December sales, new owners Yu Long Investments were already in the black, writes Tony Stafford.

On Saturday at Moonee Valley racecourse, Via Sistina tackled the Ladbrokes Cox Plate over ten furlongs. She won, beating the Japanese-trained favourite, the six-year-old entire Prognosis by eight lengths in track record time, taking her earnings in Australia to £2.9 million.

It’s common knowledge that Australian trainers know how to prepare for the Melbourne Cup, Tuesday week’s (November 5) biggest prize and “the race that stops a nation”, but before we get too excited about Via Sistina’s chance in the big one, there is a small hurdle for her to overcome.

Moonee Valley and Flemington may only be 3.1 kilometres apart, so less than the Cup’s distance of two miles (3,200 metres), but the double in the same year of these two highly prestigious races has been only rarely achieved. Phar Lap, the greatest Australian horse of the Inter-War period, did it in 1930, while the dual Melbourne Cup heroine Makybe Diva did the Cups double 19 years ago. Time flies.

She was a six-year-old, and that second Melbourne Cup win proved to be her racing swansong before retiring to stud.

The Cox Plate is acknowledged to be Australia’s premier non-handicap Group 1 race and it carried just over £1.6 million to the winner on Saturday. It was Via Sistina’s fourth Group 1 victory in six starts since travelling down to Australia, to which can be added one second place in another £1.6 million to the winner extravaganza.

Chris Waller, best known for his training of Winx, never asked that great mare to go further than the 1m2f of the Cox Plate. She won the second of her consecutive quartet in the race by eight lengths, mirroring Via Sistina on Saturday, and won 37 of her 43 career starts.

Should Waller decide to go for the Cup. Via Sistina will clearly challenge for favouritism and while like Winx she has never won at beyond 1m2f, she is a staying rather than the speed type of Winx at the trip. If she runs it would add massive excitement and a completely different aspect to an already compelling race.

Two people at least that will be looking on wanly should she run, will be previous owner Becky Hillen, daughter of the late David Wintle, and her initial trainer Joseph Tuite, who handled the five grand yearling as an unraced two-year-old and progressive three/four-year-old.

George Boughey had her in his yard at the latter part of her four-year-old season and then at five, where she began the startling progression, that culminated (so far) in that Cox Plate tour-de-force. Some selling owners cannot bear watching their former horses win for the new connections. Until Saturday, Becky and husband, bloodstock agent Steve, were probably happy enough. After Saturday and maybe next week, it might be a different story.

But for Joe Tuite it can only have been two years of turmoil and what might-have-been after he relinquished his licence in late August 2022. Clearly, studying Via Sistina’s career from the comfort of my office, Tuite had a major part in developing a late-maturing filly into the colossus she now is.

Unraced at two, Via Sistina won second time out as a three-year-old, by five-and-a-half lengths in a Goodwood maiden fillies’ race. She added a Newmarket handicap off 89 by four lengths in October of that year. Such was her obvious potential at that stage, that when Tuite targeted a fillies’ Listed race at Doncaster the following month, she went off as the 11/4 favourite, but finished in the ruck, only 13th of 18.

Clearly at the start of her four-year-old season, her training hadn’t gone smoothly, and it wasn’t until August 27 that Via Sistina made her debut. She appeared in the Winter Hill Stakes at Windsor, a Group 3 race open to colts and geldings as well as fillies. She was a 33/1 shot and in finishing fourth she probably exceeded expectations.

By now though, the die was cast and Joe had already made up his mind to give up the unequal fight of trying to keep himself financially afloat. A report in the Racing Post the day after the filly’s promising return to action tells how it was almost with a measure of relief that he was finishing. The story went thus:-

Joe Tuite felt a mix of sadness and nerves as he saddled the final runner of his 11-year training career on Saturday, yet he stands by a decision to retire due to financial difficulties. Via Sistina outran her 33/1 odds to finish fourth in the Sytner Sunningdale & Maidenhead BMW Winter Hill Stakes at Windsor.

Tuite revealed he'd had a "few offers" for a future job in racing but no decision had been made.

Tuite said on Saturday morning: "It's a bit of a weird feeling – I can't really describe it. It's a bit of sadness I suppose.

"There are a lot of times where you go racing and there's not much of a worry but today I'm on tenterhooks about it all."

The trainer said a difficult season, with just two winners, and financial issues heightened by escalating costs were behind his reasons to retire.

He added: "It's definitely the right thing to do. I was down on numbers, and it was putting square pegs into round holes. I'd be worried looking down the road what the future would be like for the lower-tier of racing, that's for sure.

"It's tough but business is tough for everyone, not just racing, it's in all walks of life.

"I know my decision surprised a few people, but a few people that were closer to me weren't, as they could see the way things were going."

Within not much more than a month, Via Sistina was already showing Joe that maybe if he had held on for a short while, things might have sorted themselves out for him. Transferred to George Boughey, Via Sistina was quickly off the mark for him, running 2nd in the Group 3 Pride Stakes at Newmarket at the beginning of that October and then going across to Toulouse and picking up a provincial Group 3 in November.

She ran five times for Boughey last year as a five-year-old, starting off with a six-length win in the Group 3 Dahlia Stakes at Newmarket in May, before going across to the Curragh for the Group 1 Pretty Polly on July 1 where she beat Hughie Morrison’s slightly unlucky in running Stay Alert by two lengths.

She didn’t win again in this hemisphere, but third as the even-money favourite in the Group 1 Falmouth at Newmarket 13 days later when dropping back to a mile probably wasn’t her ideal task. Then it was 2nd, beaten a nose in the Prix Jean Romanet (ten furlongs) at Deauville before that sale-exploding run behind King Of Steel in the Champion Stakes at Ascot a year ago.

The luck was certainly just as much with Becky Hillen in terms of the timing with the December sales and all that Aussie money, barely a month ahead. Just as the luck had been notoriously absent when Joe Tuite had to make the awful decision to cut his losses and hand in his licence even as the filly he nurtured so carefully was about to come into full bloom as a late-developing racehorse.

For each of her 121 seconds of action around Moonee Valley on Saturday, Via Sistina earned her new (ish) owners £13,000.

In 11 years as a trainer in the UK, Joe Tuite had a best tally of 30, but usually picked up between 15 and 20 or so wins each year. From 1,881 runs over those 11 seasons, on the flat he won 173 races and total earnings of £1,552,585. Put another way, it represented a return of £825 per runner.

It must be salutary to think that his former inmate, the one that he brought to a position where she was equipped to make the giant strides she later managed as she had not been rushed or abused, won more in those 121 track-record-breaking seconds than he did in all those 11 years.

We keep saying it. Something’s rotten about English racing that we can afford to lose people with the skills of a Joe Tuite because he can’t manage to make it pay. Our only point in world racing seems to be to provide the proven material that can then go back to countries with many times more prize money to spread around and clean up – like Via Sistina!

One footnote. Cheltenham’s winter season proper started on Friday and Saturday and, as usual, it proved a bonanza for the Irish. They had six winners over the two days, including the first four races on Saturday. Henry De Bromhead had the 1-2 in the £100,000 featured chase, his pair mopping up £75k as they careered well clear of the rest up the Cheltenham run-in. Here we go again!

- TS

Monday Musings: UK Prizemoney has a mountain to climb

21 October 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Eighty-six horses, many of whose connections feared that heavy ground at Ascot would render their task hopeless, gathered on Saturday aiming to take a slice of the – for the UK anyway – lavish prizemoney on offer, writes Tony Stafford. It was British Champions Day, for four Group 1 races, a Group 2 and a one-mile handicap making up what from the stands seemed a motley six-race card and, in the end, the ground wasn’t too bad looking at the race times.

The UK administrators have clearly been beaten to the punch though by the Irish, and by their two-day feast at Leopardstown and the Curragh in September. Obviously, the French could never be budged from their also two-day sacrosanct Arc extravaganza over the first weekend of October.

So here we were again, switched from the outside flat track to the inner hurdles circuit. As I approached in the late morning, the sun finally having broken through, I passed the one-mile round start. The grass looked lush and verdant green, almost waiting for a herd of cows to come along and start munching.

Apart from Kyprios in the opener, there was no other established superstar on show although Roger Varian’s Charyn deserves to be elevated to the elite level after snaffling the day’s second biggest prize, the one-mile Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, with authority.

Saturday’s top pot, money-wise, the Champion Stakes, had been expected to be a match between the smart French-trained Calandagan and William Haggas’s improving Irish Champion Stakes winner, Economics. But in a rough race, Economics had a dreadful passage (and also reportedly bled), and it looked as though his fellow three-year-old Calandagan was home and dry, having squeezed through a gap at the rail.

But Jim Crowley on the lightly raced six-year-old Anmaat, at 40/1, also managed to thread a passage through in the dying strides to deny the younger horse and give trainer Owen Burrows a massive boost. Most of the crowd were scratching their heads, apart from my mate Steve Howard who fluked a tenner each-way and paid (with help of two of his friends) for a superb Chinese meal for nine of us on the proceeds.

To my mind, the Champion Stakes has never been the same, not benefiting at all from the switch in 2011 from Newmarket and its far less weather-susceptible surface, even conceding Frankel on his career finale the following year.

Saturday’s racing was eventful, Kyprios making it seven from seven on the season with one of his most commanding performances when collecting the G2 Long Distance Cup by an untroubled couple of lengths. What do the boys do now, we thought? Keep on collecting the same half dozen races as in 2022 and this year – 2023 was an injury-marred aberration – or retire him to stud? Not a bit of it, Aidan O’Brien said after the race, he’ll be having the winter off, coming back in the spring for the customary Navan then Leopardstown path to, hopefully, a third Gold Cup – and the rest.

The Stayers are given short shrift by the powers that be, the winner’s cheque £255,000 good enough for a non-elite race but below the other treasures on offer. £283k was the main prize for the sprinters and fillies and mares, while more than double that goes to the milers and ten-furlong stars. Takeaways for the two top prizes were respectively £737k for Anmaat and £655 grand for Charyn. Second home in the Champion Stakes was worth £279k for Calandagan while another French horse, Facteur Cheval, received £248k for his second to Charyn, both uncomfortably close to Kyprios’s take-home pay.

Calandagan had already earned eleven grand more than Saturday on his previous trip to the UK, following home City of Troy in the £703k to the winner Juddmonte International at York. When Ambiente Friendly ran on into second behind City Of Troy in the Derby two and a half months previously, he collected £334k for the Gredley family and James Fanshawe against the winner’s prize of £882,000, best in the entire UK programme.

Thus, the top reward for a runner-up spot in UK racing in 2024 has been Ambiente Friendly’s £334,000. So what? you may ask. So what, indeed. On the other side of the world, at Randwick racecourse in Sydney, Australia earlier the same day, a horse called I Wish I Win collected £337,331 for finishing last of 11! That’s 43 thousand more than Ambiente Friendly’s best second prize of the entire UK race programme and, as near as damn it, £100k more than Calandagan picked up in the Champion Stakes later that day.

The six-year-old was competing in the Everest Stakes over six furlongs. If he had finished seventh, the money would have been just the same for this six-year-old who had previously won six of his 18 races. His total earnings to date have been a touch short of £7 million.

The year-older mare Bella Nipotina won the race, and her earnings leapfrogged Saturday’s tail-ender by dint of the £3.74 million to the winner – up to £8.78 million. She has won seven of 52 career starts and is trained by Ciaron Maher. Kyprios, with 15 wins from 19 starts and only a year younger than Bella Nicolina, has earnings of £2,635,000.

Until recently, Maher shared the training billing with Englishman David Eustace, son of James and brother to Harry, who has quickly built up a strong stable in their hometown of Newmarket. David has now moved to Hong Kong, another place where the prizemoney levels must burn into the hearts of those David has left behind in his native land.

Not content with knocking off the big one, Maher also collected more than a million for third and, for good measure, added another £1.5 million for the victory of Duke De Sessa in the Caulfield Cup. Caulfield, near Geelong in Victoria, is a mere 886 kilometres south, and a nine-hour drive, from Randwick. The race is usually a stepping stone to the Melbourne Cup, run at Flemington on Tuesday, November 5.

A nice touch on the last race of the Randwick card was the £1.58 million-to-the-winner King Charles III Stakes as the King and Queen embark on their tour of Australia. Maher was second here, threequarters of a length behind winner Ceolwulf, with the favourite Pride Of Jenni.

Reverting to the Everest, and its 20 million Australian dollar (just over £10 million) total prize fund, it threw up some other amazing facts. The 11 competitors after the race had each won more than £1 million in their careers to date, several of them from only a handful of runs, especially a trio of three-year-olds. Among these was a Justify colt owned by Coolmore called Storm Boy, who finished eighth behind the winner yet beaten only two lengths.

The total career earnings for the eleven, stands at a notch over £40 million from a total of 180 runs, which I make more than £22,000 per run. When Duke De Sessa was trained in Ireland by Dermot Weld, he won around €100k for two Group 3 wins and one Listed victory.

The clue? The title name Everest is preceded by the letters TAB, the off-course near monopoly system which fuels the astonishing power of the prize money in that country. No wonder owners here beseech their horses to win nice races as three-year-olds and await the calls of the top trainers, of which Maher is no exception.

We’ve been saying it for half a century. Maybe the Prime Minister’s wife, who likes racing, might get her hubby and his party to rush through a bill to effect an off-course pool monopoly here. Actually, no rush, you have five years to do it! We’d still have one or two bookmakers on the course for colour, although when it happens, don’t try to get a hefty bet on when you go racing, having paid all the excessive costs – for everything!

Last week at Newmarket, Book 2 of Tattersalls sales in Newmarket was also operating at more than 100,000 guineas per horse over the first two days – of course nothing like the drama of Book 1. Maybe if the buyers had been sending their precious acquisitions of the previous week straight to Australia you could start to understand how it could happen. It won’t be the case; the Aussies are mostly too canny for that and wait to see what they can do on the track before biting.

At the other end of the scale, Book 4, starting late on Friday when most people had gone home, originally catalogued 81 yearlings. Of those, 20, probably wisely, didn’t show and of the remainder that did, 28 didn’t make their reserve prices.

In the event, 33 were sold through the ring, although others, probably out of desperation by their vendors will have found new owners later. The total official aggregate of the 33 that did change hands was £111k, for an average of just over three grand and a median of two thousand, both figures around one per cent of the Book 1 figures.

Ten found new buyers at the minimum bid of 1,000 guineas including a strong-looking Rumble Inthejungle colt bought by Henry Candy. Henry, one of the most-admired veterans of his profession, has been saying that he has no wish to retire, and that he has worked hard all his life and intends to continue to do so. I’d love that colt to win a race or two for him.

As for the hapless vendors who have nurtured their young stock with the same care as the posh studs who made all the big money, you must be totally sympathetic. To be in Book 4 is like a leper’s curse. Surely Tattersalls can either include them in a slightly enlarged Book 3 where they could have a chance as buyers are still around, or be more stringent on which horses they accept for the sale.

- TS

Monday Musings: A Mishap for Martin

14 October 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

It wasn’t Mullins, Willie or nephew Emmet; nor Gordon Elliott; neither O’Brien, Aidan or Joseph; nor even tricky old Charles Byrnes that was slipping away silently to collect the proceeds from a 33/1 winner of the Club Godolphin Cesarewitch at Newmarket on Saturday, writes Tony Stafford. No, it was that man Martin again.

Tony of that ilk is a mastermind at, in racecourse parlance, having it off. He did under his own name in the Chester Plate (Cup consolation) in May; lost his licence but still had the brass neck to stand grinning alongside his sister Cathy O’Leary – the trainer in name – after the same horse, Alphonse Le Grande, also picked up the Northumberland Plate consolation at Newcastle in June. Martin must have had more than a little influence in Saturday’s even more spectacular coup de grace on Dewhurst Stakes Day.

I would imagine those closest to the horse won a few bob – it’s difficult not to when the SP is 33/1 and presumably in a race that was at least ten short of the optimum figure - and no better for it - they must have got longer than that in the build-up.

It was almost with glee then that on the TV coverage after the photo-finish verdict was announced, Lydia Hislop and Nick Luck counted the whip strikes administered by apprentice rider Jamie Powell and came up with ten, the magic number which would normally be construed as the borderline for disqualification.

Nothing will be finalised until tomorrow when the whip offences committee reviews a case that seemed to satisfy the local stewards and young Powell himself, namely that he did indeed hit Alphonse Le Grande ten times.

The £99k first prize will be a significant loss to the owners, the appropriately named Bet Small Win Big syndicate, but their respective sibling trainers have done them proud collecting three very tough handicaps in the UK this year. Pretty rough justice for the rider, too!

The hapless jockey is no novice. Before this year he had amassed 59 wins in three seasons at home. In that context, only seven more from 171 rides in 2024 when an acceleration might have been expected along with experience, is quite an anomaly.

But nothing like the anomaly where riding for Saturday’s trainer, or indeed her brother when he still held the licence, is concerned. Cathy O’Leary has had an almost equal number of domestic runners on the flat and over jumps in the past period. Until September 5 when En Or won a two-mile handicap at Clonmel, she had not trained a single domestic winner and, until now, it’s En Or from 37 runs. Over jumps, it’s nought from 30, so one from 67 in all.

As to the possibility of a rider/trainer(s) connection, forget it. Young Powell, as I mentioned earlier, has had 171 rides in Ireland this year, yet none from either Mrs O’Leary or her brother. I wonder if the disqualification is confirmed tomorrow whether he’ll be asked to get up on another of their plots.

Plots they surely are. One report suggested Alphonse Le Grande had been down the field in his previous race in Ireland as though it was a rubbish run. His eighth of 30 in the Irish Cesarewitch, worth almost 500k to the winner, represented a very good performance. I just watched the replay, and he was almost the only runner staying on in a race won by Aidan O’Brien’s The Euphrates

In the last furlong and a half, he passed at least half a dozen high-class handicap stayers, many like him laid out to try to win the massive prize. Had there been another 100 yards to run, he would have been fifth.

Anyway, one win in 67 at home: yet two in five for Cathy in the UK. Her Zanndabad came over for the Queen Alexandra at Royal Ascot, started 9/2 favourite and finished sixth under William Buick. Belgroprince accompanied Alphonse Le Grande to Newcastle and finished seventh behind him.

Her final UK runner in that time is probably one to write down in your notebooks or trackers. The 47-rated Jackie Brown came to Hamilton in August and was unplaced in a low-grade handicap.

Since returning home, the filly has had three runs and started 25/1 each time. First it was 14th of 17; next 5th of 12; then last week at Navan she was beaten only half a length in an 18-runner handicap. Remember the name and watch out UK, Cathy might well be coming!

If the result is amended tomorrow, it will mean that never mind the 12-horse Irish assault, the UK will have ended two years of their domination in the race with a 1-2. The Crisfords’ Manxman won the race on the far side by half a length from Ian Williams’ Aqwaam, who looked all over the winner a furlong out. Strong-finishing Alphonse Le Grande nosed ahead on the near side of a race shaped into two halves by Ryan Moore’s guiding Queenstown across as they entered the ten-furlong straight.

Ryan and Aidan had earlier had the disappointment of the withdrawal of overnight odds-on shot The Lion In Winter from the Darley Dewhurst Stakes.

In his absence, once raced, and that only a week earlier, Expanded made a brave battle of it with Godolphin’s Ancient Truth up the stands rail while Shadow Of Light, the other Charlie Appleby runner, switched over from the far side group to get up late in a battle of heads.

All three colts will probably be aimed at a Guineas, though whether it will be in Newmarket, Longchamp or at the Curragh is anyone’s guess at this stage. It didn’t appear there was another City Of Troy in there this year, but you never know and it was a great effort for Shadow Of Light to come back so soon after his emphatic Middle Park Stakes win over Whistlejacket two weeks earlier.

Saturday’s racing for the big teams was almost a half-term break after the excesses of three days of Tattersalls October Yearling sale Book 1.

The board behind the auctioneers shows several currencies in addition to the UK guineas bidding, with Euro, US dollar and Yen to the fore. I am grateful to the Blood Horse for revealing that Newsells Park Stud, owned by Graham Smith-Bernal, grossed almost three times as much as any other vendor, his lots accruing more than $23 million. That’s 17.6 million guineas!

The median figure (the middle when all 400 are laid out from top to bottom was an astonishing 250,000 guineas and the average 340,000 guineas, both records, as was the total turnover of 128 million guineas. That figure beat the 2022 record when 120 more yearlings were catalogued.

Sixteen lots exceeded one million guineas, and two buyers dominated throughout. Amo Racing, in a concerted effort to break into the territory that Kia Joorabchian described as “the province of the home-breeders like Coolmore, Godolphin, Juddmonte and Shadwell”, paid a total of 20 million for 17 yearlings.

Godolphin might be prolific breeders these days, but Sheikh Mohammed and team were also very active, even exceeding Amo Racing’s tallies with 18 yearlings at just over 22 million guineas.

Smith-Bernal, happy for the international break so he could concentrate on his lovely yearlings rather than Tottenham Hotspur FC, sold the most expensive of the lot at 4.4 million for a filly by stallion of the week Frankel, naturally to Amo.

Lots of love, as the ancient Romans and Latin scholars might have said, going around at Tattersalls. And plenty of Amo too!

- TS

Monday Musings: Gloom?

7 October 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

There’s so much gloomy navel-searching about all the things that are perceived to be wrong with racing in the UK, but it took only a couple of days in Paris to dispel them, or some of them anyway, writes Tony Stafford.

True, the statistics are invariably distorted by first place in the £2.4 million to the winner Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe – something which wouldn’t have been allowed to happen in pre-supplementing days – by Ralph Beckett’s remarkable filly Bluestocking, but in overall terms the home team took a real hiding.

Four wins for the UK, via Brian Meehan, the Gosdens and Ed Walker, as well as Beckett, matched Aidan O’Brien’s personal quartet over the two days. The French, on home soil with everything - even down to the going in their favour - limped behind with three.

Aidan also collected the £100k-plus Arqana sales conditions race on the first day and front-running Los Angeles picked up just shy of half a million for his third in the Arc. Once more, though, it was fillies to the fore, Bluestocking confirming Prix Vermeille form with Aventure, edging a half-length further away than in the trial three weeks earlier.

I’ve always found the fillies’ Group 1 on Trials Day much more significant than either the Prix Niel for 3yos or the Foy for the older colts. Those two races had five runners each last month, whereas the Vermeille had a field of 12.

The Arc 1-2 had some smart performers behind them that day: Emily Upjohn, Stay Alert and last year’s champion juvenile filly Opera Singer were the next three home. The races for the boys were remarkably similar, each run at more than four seconds above standard, a full three seconds slower than Bluestocking in the Vermeille.

Ralph Beckett has been relentless closing on the top training positions over the past few seasons and his comment, “I couldn’t see any reason not to supplement her,” epitomises his pragmatic approach to training.

Of course, as with all the big stables, and he had 183 listed in this year’s Horses In Training, there is a margin for error. When the year began, Bluestocking had won only once, on juvenile debut in September 2022. Since the summer, it has been a roller-coaster of ever greater success.

I had a look at the overall prizemoney earned by each of three major European horseracing and breeding superpowers over the weekend. Although Aidan got off to a flyer winning three Group races, including Kyprios’s second Prix du Cadran over 2m4f on day one, the momentum wasn’t quite maintained.

Yesterday, the lesser fancied of his two Jean-Luc Lagardere runners, Camille Pissarro, echoed the late-running performance on the first day of 25/1 shot Grateful. The similarity? Both were ridden by Christophe Soumillon with Ryan Moore on the first string. Ryan had the consolation of three €100k plus wins on day one, the third in the valuable conditions event put on by the Arqana sales company. And his third place on Los Angeles in the Arc earned him his jockey’s share from around half a million.

The overall Irish haul not including the Arc was around £675,000. The French on home soil amassed just over £800,000 for their non-Arc runners, while UK horses collected more than £1.22 million for 22 places. When you add in the Arc money, the GB total thanks to Bluestocking is more than £3.67 million; the French total comes to approximately £2.15 million and Ireland – almost entirely via the Coolmore runners was close to £1.3 million. So the UK stables picked up better than half the available money!

Even though the French had many more runners in the additional races than either UK or Ireland, they retained barely 30% of the money available. If we’re in trouble, how about them?

Those from the big teams cannot rest. After a day today looking at stock in the Tattersalls sales barns, Book 1 of the October Yearling Sale starts tomorrow, three days when 448 yearlings – blue-bloods all, but which cannot all turn out to be talented – go under the hammer.

The sale nowadays closely echoes the example of the Goffs Orby sale in Ireland, staged last week. That also commences with a Book 1 for the top stuff and Book 2 for the rest. A later sale offers less expensive pedigrees.

It’s amazing how the decisions of a sales company can make such a difference to the prospects of a borderline Book 1/Book 2 yearling. It’s simply the difference between whether an owner is to get a decent price for his/her sales candidates. Book 1 over there had 466 lots going under the hammer over two days. Of those, 399 (80%) found new owners at an average price of €128k.

The two days of the similarly populated Book 2 proved far less attractive to buyers with only 332 of 449 changing hands, that’s 70%. If that was significant, the average price of €20k was disturbing for many stud owners, especially pin hookers who will have struggled to match foal prices never mind a year’s costs.

One well-known trainer who was happy to pick up a horse from Book 1 at a fair price, did not look at any of the stock in Book 2. “It’s okay to buy them just because they are cheap,” he said, “but you have to find someone to pay for them and to have them trained.”

I canvassed a few trainers some weeks ago as it was proposed by friends to buy a horse in training. They were all middle-range but talented trainers and they were all somewhere around £60 a day (plus VAT of course). So, we’re already up to at least £500 a week, with extras like shoeing, vet charges and transport to the races. In Newmarket and many other training centres, there is also a gallops fee levied.

On Friday, the day after the conclusion of Book 1 and three days before Book 2 where most owners will not have to worry much about the likes of Godolphin, Coolmore, Amo Racing and rest to find a yearling, there are more than 750 lots to wade through. Smaller catalogues for Books 3 and 4 next week conclude as the runners for the Cesarewitch, Dewhurst and the rest go to post next weekend.

Newmarket’s first day stages a race which illustrates just how tough and frankly absurd UK’s horse racing economics are for all bar the super-rich – or those lucky enough to get a superstar for not much money.

The opening maiden of that Friday’s card has a prize of just more than £10k, much better admittedly than some that have been run on the Rowley Mile recently. Many were bought at this time last year, so at around a minimum £2,500 per month that’s at least £30,000 to get to this stage on top of their purchase price.

The happy winning owner on Saturday will receive approximately 70% of the £10,000 first prize, less jockeys’ fees and transport to the course. Sixteen of the 30 entries went through the ring, home-breds making up the remaining 14.

The cheapest of the sales group cost £45k – bought by our friend Sam Sangster and trained by Brian Meehan. The most expensive was £400k for a newcomer from Aidan O’Brien. The average - going for a £7k pot I emphasise - was 135k.

Talking of Sam Sangster and his link with Brian Meehan, Manton's longest-serving present incumbent had a Royal Ascot double this June with Rashabar (Coventry Stakes, Group 2) and Jayarebe (Hampton Court Stakes, Group 3). They had only one run each in the meantime, Rashabar when second in the Group 1 Prix Morny to Whistlejacket, and Jayarebe, also second at Deauville, to Economics. They came to Longchamp with high hopes.

Jayarebe did the business on Saturday in the Group 2 Prix Dollar, making all, while Rashabar was caught only in the last few strides of the Group 1 Prix Jean-Luc Lagardere by Camille Pissarro, the aforementioned O’Brien second string ridden by Christophe Soumillon.

Rashabar will aim at the 2,000 Guineas next spring while it would be no shock if Jayarebe pitched up at the Breeders’ Cup. Meehan won the Turf race there a decade or so ago with Dangerous Midge, who raced in the same Iraj Parvizi colours. Parvizi only came back to the stable after a break of several years with his purchase of Jayarebe.

There were two other notable efforts over the weekend that caught my eye. Apollo One, so often the bridesmaid in big sprint handicaps, gained a first Group-race win at Ascot on Saturday. Peter Charalambous, his owner/trainer/breeder had been frustrated at being beaten close home in the Wokingham, Stewards’ Cup and Portland handicaps this year, but on ground Pete believed he wouldn’t handle, he did, winning almost as he liked.

Secondly, another working on the wrong surface was Hughie Morrison’s Mistral Star, third in Saturday’s Group 1 Prix Royallieu where she was in front until the last 50 yards. I’m confident she would have won on faster ground.

Finally, last week I mentioned Joe Lee and his filly May Day Ready. The pair, with the help of Frankie Dettori in the saddle, got the best of a wafer-thin three way photo (centre, see below) on Friday in the Grade 2 Jessamine Stakes at Keeneland, a Win And You're In for the Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf. Exciting times!

- TS

Monday Musings: Joe Lee

30 September 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

A week short of 30 years ago I was in New York, staying at the late Virginia Kraft Payson’s rather large house (since sadly demolished) at Sands Point, Long Island, writes Tony Stafford. I’d arranged to meet Bjorn Neilsen – bet he doesn’t think it was that long ago! – at his offices in Wall Street.

He had a very friendly receptionist whose name I cannot recall, who whenever I did try to contact him, always reminded me that she thought my accent was identical to that of Robin Leach who fronted a television show for almost ten years called ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’.

Leach, a Londoner, worked on the Daily Mail’s Front-Page team at age 18, before emigrating to the US. He died in Las Vegas four years ago after a very successful TV career.

When I arrived at Bjorn’s offices, having never met the receptionist before, I started: “I’m….” but before I could get another word out, she said, “Hello Mr Stafford, Mr Neilsen is waiting for you.”

After some chitchat, we retired to a nearby deli where the sandwiches were around five inches high. I had intended going on to Belmont Park for the races that afternoon and Bjorn suggested if I went to Grand Central station, I could get the race special.

When I got there, I discovered the specials had finished and I was recommended to go to Jamaica station and take a taxi from there. I remember crossing the busy road to a drab cab rank and was welcomed into the first one by a genial Asian gentleman who waited for me to state my destination.

“Belmont Park, please,” I asked. “Balma?” he replied, but I thought what the hell and as I was short of time, persevered as we moved along. “Balma?” he said once more. I knew the reputation of many New York taxi drivers not having more than a rudimentary understanding of any form of English, let alone the Cockney version, but he was my best bet.

Suddenly on the left-hand side, a green space loomed. He turned in his seat and said, triumphantly; “Park!” Now I was in dread of what might become of me but was soon reassured to see a line of local women on our side of the road standing at a bus stop.

I managed to get my, I must say, very friendly driver to stop alongside it and opening the door, called out to nobody in particular, “Does anyone know Belmont Park?” Eventually a nice lady possibly in her 40’s said. “I do. If you like, I’ll get in and direct the driver most of the way. Then, I must get out close to where I live, but I’ll tell you where he needs to go from there.”

The lady, called Mrs Lee, explained she was among the 75,000 crowd for the visit of Pope John Paul II to Aqueduct racecourse – the one closer to the city – that October 6, 1995.

She started by saying she probably shouldn’t have got into a cab with a stranger. She had lived nearby as a girl, but the area had become much more dangerous, and a woman had been raped right on the spot where the bus stop was, only a few days before.

She excused her rash reaction by saying someone in racing ought to be safe and that her son was in the sport and worked for Godolphin, asking if I had heard of them.

She said that his name is Joe Lee, and he was in Dubai all the previous winter and would be going out there once more that year.

On the day the National Lottery first began, Saturday 19th November 1994, my son had also made his way from the UK for a six-month stint working in Sheikh Mohammed’s sports club mainly to teach his sons the elements of football, cricket, tennis and the like. He’d just left school and was embarking on what turned out to be a gap year.

He was housed in the same apartment block as many of the work riders, including that year Johnny Murtagh, Vince (now Victoria) Smith and, as I was to find out when I called my son later, Joe Lee.

Joe was a good friend, according to his mother, of Jeremy Noseda. This was the year before the famous Frankie Dettori seven out of seven wins at Ascot on its championship Saturday late September card. I had worked with him that year, helping him with his “A Year in the Life of Frankie Dettori” book, which needed an extra chapter when the copy was already all in type. My entire family was at the launch.

Frankie finished his stellar UK riding career last year but has since enjoyed a second blooming (and some hefty prizemoney percentages) across the pond. These have been temporarily curtailed with an injured shoulder sustained in the stalls at perhaps coincidentally, Aqueduct racecourse two weeks ago.

Time is money these days. One of his most lucrative wins of late was in a Listed fillies’ 2yo race at Kentucky Downs. The winner, May Day Ready, is a daughter of Tapit and Nemoralia, which Dettori rode to the first three of her four career wins when trained by Noseda. Her owners were Peter Brant and Joseph Allen. Brant bred May Day Ready, who has been sold twice, first for only $60k and then as a two-year-old at the Ocala, Florida 2yo sale for $325k to the syndicate which races her now.

May Day Ready won her maiden (and $43k) at Saratoga with Dettori on board, as he was when she cleaned up the $463k when winning a Listed race at Kentucky Downs this month. Jacqui Doyle, freshly back from her four-year stint in the US, told me at Newmarket on Saturday that winning jockeys can expect a ten per cent share. So May Day Ready has already earned the itinerant Italian 50 grand. Quite right too, with a fortnight’s not earning to make up for!

And the point of all this? May Day Ready is one of a small team trained by the same Joe Lee. If someone who knows his very nice mum ever reads this, maybe they could pass on my thanks for that moment of Divine, or at least Papal, Intervention, and congratulate her on her son’s great success all these years later.

Frankie was due to end his absence by riding her on Sunday evening at Santa Anita in the Grade 2 Miss Grillo Stakes which is a “Win And You’re In” qualification for the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies’ Turf race at Del Mar in early November. However, the weather intervened and the Miss Grillo is now scheduled for next Sunday, October 6th; what a day of international racing that promises to be.

Jacqui says that daughter Sophie is back riding winners in her adopted country while son James isn’t doing too shabbily as first rider for Wathnan Racing back here. She also stated that the maidens at River Downs carry $43,000 for the winner, and just couldn’t comprehend the prizes of barely £4k for 2yo maidens at Newmarket on Saturdays. But then who can?

Despite our relatively poor money levels, Aidan O’Brien is already past £7.5 million in UK earnings and he had another memorable afternoon when Lake Victoria ran home an exceptional winner of the Cheveley Park Stakes.

All three of her previous wins had been over seven furlongs, so reverting to a furlong shorter for this Group 1 might have seemed over-ambitious, but Ryan Moore never had a moment’s doubt about the daughter of Frankel’s speed.

Taking her to the front after a few yards, she made all the running, at around 40/41 mph in the first half of the race, then drew away at the finish. She did slow a little but not as much as all her rivals. She was faster than the winner of the earlier Middle Park Stakes too.

That winner, Wimbledon Hawkeye, was a clear example of the emerging talent of his youthful trainer James Owen. James Doyle, riding for 92-year-old Bill Gredley, could have a potential Classic candidate here assuming he’s not required to ride for Wathnan. Then again, maybe Wathnan might enquire to Gredley about the colt’s availability.

- TS

Monday Musings: Of Real Racing Heroes

23 September 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Less than a year after areas of Southwell racecourse, including the main grandstand and offices, were flooded to a depth of up to three feet, it played host last Friday to a unique presentation, writes Tony Stafford. No racing there, nor even the Big Trucks event that was lined up for the following couple of days, just one group of five horses galloping for a mile around its Tapeta oval.

Yet the mesmeric draw of City Of Troy and four of his lesser stablemates, accompanied by trainer Aidan O’Brien, was sufficient to entice 1,500 people – that was the pre-event estimate but on the ground the feeling was that the figure had been exceeded – to come to see it.

Here were Ryan Moore, Wayne Lordan, Brett Doyle, Rachel Richardson and Dean Gallagher to ride the quintet in advance of City Of Troy’s Breeders’ Cup Classic challenge at Del Mar, California, in November. (Gallagher amazingly so as it was more than 30 years ago that his dad Tommy asked me if I could find him a job in England. I did and he came to Rod Simpson, yet he is still regarded as sufficiently talented and fit to be asked to take his part in a trial of this importance.)

https://twitter.com/RacingTV/status/1837185812837855338

A few years after Dean had been signed as first jockey for the one-time Midlands greengrocer Paul Green, by then a substantial owner, he rode the Francois Doumen-trained Hors La Loi III into second place in the third of Istabraq’s triple Champion Hurdle sequence, Istabraq trained of course by Aidan O’Brien.

There was no Champion Hurdle the following year because of foot and mouth, but when Istabraq went for the four-timer in 2002, he pulled up as Charlie Swan felt he was wrong, a view confirmed by the vet’s post-race inspection. The winner, Hors La Loi III, by now trained by James Fanshawe but ridden still by Gallagher, beat Hughie Morrison’s Marble Arch, a 25/1 shot into second place.

I can throw in another small personal part to this story. I was asked to try to buy Istabraq from the July sale in 1996 and went to the John Gosden yard at Newmarket a couple of days earlier. I was shown the horse by the late John Durkan, Gosden’s assistant at the time, who said: “He’s a lovely horse. I couldn’t recommend him more highly.”

I had a budget from a Saudi prince who wanted the staying 3yo for the King’s Cup in his home country. I stayed in until 36k but Timmy Hyde, bidding for J P McManus, held sway at 38,000 gns.

I was coming back from Keeneland Sales a few years later when I heard a voice from behind me as we walked to change planes in Cincinnati. It was Timmy Hyde. He said: “Tony, you were the under-bidder for Istabraq. I know because I was standing right behind you! It’s just that that f…ing Danny Murphy is telling everyone he was!” He wasn’t.

The obvious next question was: “How high would I have needed to go?” Timmy smiled and said: “We had 100 grand if necessary!” Hardly an underbidder in truth!

The saddest part of the story was that Aidan wasn’t meant to be training the horse, it was John Durkan who would be leaving Gosden to set up his own operation in Ireland. He even came up to the Daily Telegraph’s office in South Quay Plaza, the one between Fleet Street and Canary Wharf, with our photographer Ed Byrne and Conor O’Dwyer.

But then he contracted inoperable cancer and was unable to proceed with his plans. JP McManus gave the horse to Aidan and four consecutive Festival wins, starting with the 2m5f novice and then three Champion Hurdles, earned him a place in jumping folklore, along of course with his owner and trainer. I’ve never forgotten how honest he was about the horse even though if JP had bought him, he would be training him. Istabraq died this summer at the age of 32, much lamented by his owner and family.

JP has stayed mainly in that environment, dominating owners’ championships on either side of the Irish Sea, while O’Brien has been unchallenged on the flat in his homeland and more than a match for Gosden, Hannon and the rest for most years over here.

When interviewed after a big win, Aidan invariably remembers all the people he considers have played a part in the particular horse’s preparation. It’s not about him, everyone else almost.

On Friday, as Pat Keating awaited his boss’s delayed arrival – there was a crash on the way from the airport - replying to his question: “How long <have they been walking around the paddock>? answered “Forty-seven minutes”. Aidan said: “They are set to go then.” Thirty is the usual requirement. The jockeys mounted, setting off around to the far side of the track for the American-style stalls especially brought for the event.

The imperative, apart from City Of Troy working well and acting on the surface, was a fast pace and the short-running duo that broke best, ensured that would happen. Up the straight, the markedly elongated stretch of the Derby winner’s stride not for the first time struck connections Paul Smith, son of Derrick, his son Harry and Mike Dillon, former Ladbrokes man and a close friend.

The workout was the day job. But then we saw the true Aidan. He had a quick post-work de-brief with the jockeys, giving each the chance to comment, but obviously then having the crucial talk with Ryan on how it went.

But then the crowd saw something I doubt even those that travelled from far beyond the East Midlands would have expected. Aidan smiled throughout whenever cornered by a gallop-goer to sign the nice little racecard designed by Nick Craven, one of Weatherbys’ bosses. Each signature, because we are in 2024 and not 2004, had to require a selfie. None of which the personable O’Brien refused.

There was a lengthy television interview for Sky Sports Racing with Jason Weaver, while Brough Scott added his wisdom of many years to the proceedings. Then Aidan spent ages talking to mainly young aspiring journalists, none of whom could believe this giant of racing would give them so much time.

I guess almost an hour and a half after the workout – the pre-event blurb said he would stay for 45 minutes - he went off smiling for the car to the airport, long after Keating, his travelling head lad, had caught his eye and pointed to his watch.

Aidan O’Brien may be no Frankie Dettori but where the Italian has showmanship in the extreme, Aidan has a modesty and innate kindness that you would need to go a long way to see replicated by any public figure.

It could have been a fiasco, but Aidan’s plan to give his horse an awayday must be termed a great success, not least in PR terms. I’m certainly glad I was there to see it. And I know that the final line of people waiting patiently for his signature, selfie and smile, all got their precious reward for their trip. Well done, Southwell, well done Aidan, Ryan and the rest.

Mentioning Marble Arch in relation to Hors La Loi III and Dean Gallagher reminded me that Hughie Morrison has been around for a good while, too. Not So Sleepy hasn’t been with us for quite as long but he did win first time out as a two-year-old at Nottingham ten years ago and in the following May, won the Dee Stakes, the pre-Derby warm-up for winners Oath and Kris Kin, the latter for Sir Michael Stoute who will retire from training at the end of the season.

Not So Sleepy has raced at least four times in each of the next nine seasons, never once having his flat handicap mark drop below 94 and now, after a wonderful repeat win in a valuable Newbury handicap on Saturday, will surely end his career rated over 100 – he was 99 on Saturday. I’ll be shocked if that has ever happened before.

Hughie trains with a rare sympathetic view of his charges – “Each one that gets injured I feel it so much”, he says. But consequently, few trainers have a comparable facility for extending their horses’ working lives. He won a Group 1 with the stayer Alcazar when that horse was ten years of age, but his achievements with the difficult to manage Not So Sleepy dwarf even that.

He finished in the first four in three Cesarewitch Handicaps and was seventh last year. He also ran in four consecutive Champion Hurdles. Despite not taking up hurdling until the age of seven, his three Grade 1 wins include a dead-heat with previous Champion Hurdle winner Epatante in the Fighting Fifth Hurdle, a feat he followed with a second win in the Newcastle race.

Last December, he won a Grade 1 hurdle at Sandown in a procession, a few days short of his official twelfth birthday. Few horses have achieved half as much as Sleepy. His owner, Lady Blyth, seemed very keen as with Quickthorn recently to ascribe lots of credit to rider Tom Marquand, a sentiment reciprocated in their interviews with Matt Chapman for Sky Sports Racing.

Never a mention of the trainer and the usually forensic Chapman didn’t seem to think of bringing in his name either. Maybe Hughie was being courted and given his rightful credit for the horse’s achievements by ITV, but I have only one television set.

Also Saturday was the final day’s riding for Franny Norton, and he chose Chester, where he has been the “King” for so long, for the farewell. He did it in style, notching a treble, and it would be fitting if the course made him an ambassador for the future, especially at the May meeting.

It was a lovely weekend at any rate for some real racing heroes.

- TS

Monday Musings: The Jugglers

16 September 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

The second Saturday in September illustrated how trainers and jockeys’ agents need to be expert jugglers at this time of year, writes Tony Stafford. We had the Irish Champion Stakes, worth a total €£1.15 million (€712k to the winner) and the Betfred St Leger, £830k and £421k to the winner, yet three UK champion jockeys were riding more than 3,000 miles away from either venue.

The trio - Oisin Murphy, William Buick and Frankie Dettori - all lined up in the Grade 1 Natalma Stakes for 2yo fillies over a mile and worth £177k at the Woodbine racetrack in Toronto, Canada. Buick was on the 4/5 favourite for Godolphin and Charlie Appleby, the dual early-season winner Mountain Breeze, but she could only manage eighth place.

Ahead of her were Murphy, fifth on 65/1 shot Ready To Battle, for dominant local trainer Mark Casse despite being the outsider of his trio; and Dettori was one place behind on the Christophe Clement filly Annascaul, the race second favourite.

He was the only one of our itinerant trio to have a ride in the next Graded race, the Ontario Matron (G3) on the Tapeta track. He finished fourth for Casse who again had three runners without securing the win.

Only five turned up for the E P Taylor Stakes for fillies and mares, run on the turf track. In the past the E P Taylor was a frequent target for UK and especially French runners. It honours the Canadian breeder Eddie Taylor. He stood Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Northern Dancer, the stallion who first tickled the fancy of Vincent O’Brien and led, with Robert Sangster and John Magnier’s help, to the legacy of Sadler’s Wells and, through him, to his even more influential son Galileo.

This year, the E P Taylor was a tame affair considering there was £266k for the winner. Oisin got a ride here but could do no better than fourth of five on Blush for French-based trainer Carlos Laffon-Parias. All three of the visiting riders had been previous winners of the race.

Charlie Appleby and Andrew Balding staged a rematch from a Listed race on King George Day at Ascot in July, with Al Qudra, the winner of that race for Charlie and Will, going into the bet365 <they get in everywhere!> Summer Plate over a mile on the turf as favourite, having beaten New Century by just over two lengths then.

Here Oisin turned the form around on identical terms, winning by one and a quarter lengths from Al Qudra in another Grade 1 again worth £177k, as with the juvenile fillies earlier. The share of the spoils made Oisin’s awayday worthwhile and even in defeat Buick got his mitts on a portion of the 60 grand for second.

The principal reason for the Appleby/Godolphin attack was presumably the featured Rogers Woodbine Mile, with a hefty £355,000 to the winner. The Buick mount, Naval Power, was the 11/20 favourite but finished only fourth to a couple of Mark Casse runners, siphoning up between them a good deal more than half a million Canadian bucks. Naval Power had been a very close second on his previous start when Dettori had the mount in a valuable supporting race on Kentucky Derby Day at Churchill Downs in early May.

If you feel sorry for Frankie, the pensioner (in jockey terms) started out the previous weekend looking forward to a hatful of Aidan O’Brien mounts at Kentucky Downs, but only Greenfinch, who finished fourth, ran, the others being withdrawn. But then, a week yesterday at the same track, May Day Ready won a £483k first prize and that was supplemented by a double at the same track on Wednesday. Dettori won the £238k Gold Cup with Limited Liability and then the Dueling Grounds Oaks Invitational with Kathymarissa and another £720k.

His win prizes amounted to £1,323,000 over the week. No wonder he loves being in the US!

What did they miss while waiting for Saturday in Canada? At Doncaster there was an eighth St Leger win for Aidan O’Brien as the inexperienced and in some ways still green Jan Bruegel edged out Illinois in a thrilling tussle up the Doncaster straight. Both colts are by Galileo and at the final opportunity, his sons dominated yet another English Classic.

Impossible to separate in the market, it looked like a potential dead-heat in the race until Sean Levey, who started out life as an O’Brien apprentice before relocating to the UK, forced his mount’s head in front close to the line.

Behind in third and fourth, also locked together, were Deira Mile and Sunway who crossed the line only a nose apart. I thought it a mealy-mouthed decision by the stewards to turn the form around, denying Deira Mile’s ever-adventurous Ahmed Al Sheikh of Green Team Racing another placed run in the English Classics of which he is so enamoured.

Bay City Roller was a good winner of the Champagne Stakes that opened the card, but it might have been a different story had not Chancellor prematurely burst out of the gate. The Gosden colt, a smart scorer at the track last time, was third at Ascot in the race where Al Qudra beat New Century.

The raft of unlikely horse/trainer/jockey partnerships on this unusual day continued in the Portland Handicap, one of my favourite races with its intermediate sprint distance of around five and a half furlongs.

Here, the unluckiest horse in training, Peter Charalambous’s Apollo One, got the services of no less a partner than Christophe Soumillon. The Belgian, a multiple champion jockey in France, had just got his mount’s brave head in front of a gaggle of horses on the far side when the favourite American Affair flew down under the stands rail under Paul Mulrennan to beat him by a nose.

It was a notable win for Jim Goldie and, given the way he finished on Saturday, the Ayr Gold Cup in five days’ time must have its appeal. Peter Charalambous is adamant he would never ask Apollo One to run in the likely soft ground at Ayr, but it would be nice to think he would win a big sprint handicap before too long.

Over the past two seasons he has finished second in four big sprints, the Wokingham and Stewards’ Cup last year and the Stewards’ Cup and Portland in 2024. His total losing distance is barely two and a half lengths in those races.

Irish Champions Weekend featured a fine return to form by the slightly unpredictable but undeniably ultra-talented Auguste Rodin. He ran a great race in the Irish Champion Stakes but just failed to cope with the tenacious favourite Economics.

It had been a brave decision by William Haggas to resist running his colt in the Derby after his sensational <I use the word advisedly> Dante Stakes romp at York and, nicely rested, Haggas had given him an ideal warm-up run at Deauville last month for his main target here.

Economics came from some way back, as did Auguste Rodin. Tom Marquand sent his mount into the lead halfway up the short Leopardstown straight, when it appeared that Ryan Moore on the dual Derby winner was going marginally the easier, even getting his head in front in the last hundred yards. Economics, to his credit, pulled out extra and, despite battling all the way to the line, Auguste Rodin had to be content with an honourable second place.

The path for both horses is set in stone. Economics will now go to the Qipco Champion Stakes for what will be only his sixth career start. Auguste Rodin has the Breeders’ Cup Turf, which he won last year, as his autumn objective.

Just behind in third and fourth were the Japanese horse Shin Emperor, who should make a bold attempt at being the first from Japan to win the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe, and fast-finishing Los Angeles, who probably would have fully extended his two stablemates at Doncaster.

His range of entries, from the Champion Stakes (ten furlongs) at Ascot to the British Champion Long Distance Cup (two miles) the same day and, a fortnight earlier, the Arc over one mile and a half reflect his untapped potential and versatility. I’d go the stayers’ route if he were mine – wishful thinking in the extreme!

Yesterday, Messrs Buick and Murphy made it back to the Curragh for the second day of the Irish Champions Weekend. They might not have won as they rode respectively Vauban and Giavellotto into second and third in the Irish St Leger, but at least they got a close-up view of the remarkable Kyprios.

Aidan O'Brien's six-year-old entire was taking his earnings past £2 million with an authoritative performance under Ryan Moore. It was Kyprios' 13th win in 17 career starts. After last year's injury problems and a curtailed season of only two second places, he has now repeated the same first five victories of his unbeaten four-year-old campaign and in the same races.

That year (2022) he ended the season with victory in the Prix Du Cadran over two and a half miles - by twenty lengths! If he goes there and wins in three weeks it would be a double unbeaten six-timer, four of them at Group 1 level, surely a record, and one that will be exceptionally difficult to match in the future. He deserves to be regarded as at least the equal of Yeats as a stayer. Many will think him superior.

- TS

Monday Musings: Play it again, Sam

9 September 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

Visitors to Ascot racecourse on Saturday, at least the older ones, might have been excused for having their memories jolted back to a 1970 Woody Allen film, Play It Again Sam, writes Tony Stafford. Woody plays a man obsessed with Casablanca, the 1942 film in which Ingrid Bergman asks Dooley Wilson to "Play It Sam, play it."

The song she was asking for was As Time Goes By, and she was about to leave Humphrey Bogart. Everyone, however, remembers her words incorrectly as “Play it again, Sam” - and Sam Sangster was certainly playing it again with another of his fiendishly cheap yearling buys.

On the same course where in his late father Robert’s treasured colours Rashabar was the 80/1 winner of the Coventry Stakes at the Royal meeting from the wrong (far) side of the track, now it was Law Of Design. On only his second start, Law Of Design showed he was already worth many times that yearling price of 25 grand from whence he was recruited into another of Sam's Manton Thoroughbreds syndicates.

The common theme of course is the revived Brian Meehan training them both on the Manton estate which the late Robert Sangster bought in 1984.

I’ve often referred to Sam Sangster’s inherent understanding of what makes a racehorse when perusing the animals at the sales, almost always in Brian‘s company. Law Of Design is from the first crop of the Prix du Jockey Club and then, at four, Prix de l’Arc to Triomphe winner Sottsass, a son of the great sire Siyouni.

Siyouni stands in France for €200k. His top-class son, who also has a further Group 1 win on his record of six victories from 12 starts, is standing for one-eighth that amount at Coolmore stud.

There’s an uncanny similarity between Sottsass so far and the early stage of Galileo’s stud career when his first crop was slow to get going – until they were able to run over seven furlongs and then bam! The rest as they should say, rather than history, was transformative of the entire breed.

I’m not suggesting that Sottsass will be another Galileo, but with the gelded Law Of Design’s smooth win at Ascot, he now has three winners, two of them fillies, so this was his first male victor. The shortest winning distance is seven furlongs, with a runaway Christopher Head filly at half a furlong more in France and the Dr Richard Newland/Jamie Insole inmate Veraison winning at the third time of asking at Wolverhampton.

With two wins each on all-weather and turf this year, the Insole half of the partnership has been concentrating greatly on juveniles in their revamped operation. Insole is the main force in that direction and Veraison wasn’t cheap. She cost €120k at the sales.

Jamie Insole is from an Irish family, his grandfather Victor Kennedy, first a jockey who rode Bigaroon – I backed him! - to win the Irish Cesarewitch, then became a successful trainer. Jamie grew up in Billericay in Essex but learnt to ride on frequent trips to the family home in Ireland.

He had spells with Alan King and then as assistant to Charlie Hills before coming to the notice of the Grand National-winning trainer, Dr Newland. The new partners, like another jump specialist Warren Greatrex and his stable owners Jim and Claire Bryce, have made a great start to training on the flat.

The 2023 haul of twenty or so yearlings included 19 who went through a sales ring. The Sottsass filly was the most expensive, but they have certainly given themselves a chance with the average price at around the 50k mark. Greatrex’s story differs as their juveniles were acquired at breeze-up sales this year.

Sottsass stands at €25k at Coolmore, a similar figure to what Galileo was standing for after his first season’s runners had been on the track.

I’ve mentioned many times the Royal Ascot card when eight of his first-crop three-year-olds competed in five different races on the same day. Just because Galileo had been a Derby, Irish Derby and King George winner, it still wasn’t guaranteed that the Coolmore partners who owned him would immediately dominate ownership of the mares sent to him. Each of the eight horses that ran on that Friday at Ascot had a different trainer and all bar one had been through the sales.

Red Rocks and Sixties Icon were second and third in the King Edward VII Stakes, trained respectively by Brian Meehan and Jeremy Noseda. Sixties Icon went on to win that year’s St Leger, Red Rocks the Breeders’ Cup Turf.

The Queen’s Vase, then a two-mile race for three-year-olds, featured Galient in second for Michael Jarvis and fourth-placed Road To Mandalay, running in the Michael Tabor colours after being bought for 420 grand at the sales from Timmy Hyde’s Camas Park stud. He was the lone O’Brien runner from the octet. Kassiopeia, bought in by his vendor for 195,000 gns, was unplaced for Mick Channon.

While the Dermot Weld home-bred filly Nightime ran poorly in the Coronation Stakes, she thrived later in her career. At stud, she is notable as being the dam of world champion Gaiyyath, coincidentally a stallion also making a halting start to his new career for the boys in blue.

Two further competitors on the day were Lake Poet, trained by Clive Brittain (57k) and fourth in the King George V Handicap, and the unplaced The Last Drop (75k) for Barry Hills. All top trainers and it wasn’t until the exploits of the unbeaten champion two-year-old Teofilo for Jim Bolger that the die was effectively cast and the bulk of the Galileos stayed at home.

Sottsass raced for one of the semi-inner circle at Coolmore. Peter Brant bought the colt for €340k at the Arqana Deauville August yearling sale in 2017 and sent him to be trained by Jean-Claude Rouget. After his spectacular exploits on the track, Brant chose to send him to stand at Coolmore with his good friends Messrs Magnier, Tabor and Smith. He is in several of the Coolmore racing partnerships too – often those that run in his green colours.

You would think that the Sottsass progeny would appear in the list of Aidan O’Brien juveniles. They do, but only once, a colt out of a Hat Trick (Japanese) mare. He was bought in partnership by Brant and M V Magnier at the same Deauville August Arqana sale last year for €380k.

Just because a horse has great form it doesn’t follow automatically that he will be a top stallion, or indeed be given preferential treatment before he shows himself deserving of it. No Nay Never and Wootton Bassett, two of the rising, indeed arrived already, stars at Coolmore both needed to show that they had what it takes. Then the boys go full bore, even buying Wootton Bassett when it was evident there was promise aplenty to come.

I’m not sure how Sam Sangster managed to get the half-brother to three useful winners trained by Richard Hannon (two) and William Haggas for just the stallion’s covering price, but it says for the umpteenth time he knows what’s he’s doing. Why not? It’s bred in him, and Brian, a dual Breeders’ Cup-winning trainer, fits into the profile so well.

The second of Brian’s Breeders’ Cup Turf wins came with Dangerous Midge and, after more than a ten-year gap, those colours of Iraj Parvizi have returned with a vengeance with Jayarebe. The Royal Ascot winner might not have been able to handle Economics in France last time, but not many horses will.

As to fellow Royal Ascot winner Rashabar, he showed his class and potential for the future when only narrowly edged out by an inspired Ryan Moore on Whistlejacket in the Prix Morny at Deauville last month.

Rashabar had the worst of the draw that time too, coming very wide up the middle of the track, probably not near enough to respond to the O’Brien-trained winner as he might have done if they had been racing closer together. Brian said on Saturday after Law Of Design’s win that Rashabar will probably go next to the Prix Jean-Luc Lagardere at the Arc meeting next month.

As to Law Of Design, the future is looking bright. With both horses – for now – still in the Manton Thoroughbreds ownership, they will need to avoid each other, although their stamina profiles are very different.

There’s no chance of a UK Classic campaign for him as he is a gelding, but the way in which he drew away in the last furlong at Ascot – two and a half lengths, the official margin, looked nearer four! - he could be a major player at a mile next time, and over a mile and a half next year! Play it again, Sam – and Brian, of course.

- TS

Monday Musings: Chasing Records

2 September 2024/in Monday Musings/by Tony Stafford

I chased after the young man at York, definitely arousing his interest, but with no definitive response, writes Tony Stafford. Yesterday morning, on a 22-minute call to his agent in Cambodia, I think I’d got a fair way along the road, but again, no reply from Gavin Horne.

It’s all so different now. Could you imagine 25 years ago being able to live 6,221 miles away and six time zones ahead of the UK and still sort the rides with such certainty for the now guaranteed four times champion Oisin Murphy? “He’s been with me for ten years and is the only jockey on my books, but it’s still a tough existence,” he says.

“I owe a lot to WhatsApp”, says Gavin, “I have everything ready for the trainers when they get to their offices at 6 a.m.” So far, the formula has brought a career-best 22% wins of his mounts, with 168 victories, 52 short of his best of 220 in 2019.

Four championships will be something to be proud of, but a shade insignificant in numerical terms compared with the 11 each by Lester Piggott and Pat Eddery. But one name – in flat racing terms anyway – stands above all others: Sir Gordon Richards, 26 titles and a peak of 269 in 1947.

It took the force of nature that was Tony McCoy to exceed the single-season tally with 289 jumps wins in 2002/3, one of 20 consecutive titles the dominant jumps rider amassed.

Returning to my first point. My initial question to Oisin was to ask whether he was likely to be away for large parts of the winter. He said not, so the prospect of lucrative stints in either Hong Kong or Japan was unlikely. Gavin Horne confirmed that supposition.

So we sit, with barely seven weeks of the Flat Race Jockeys’ Championship remaining to divvy up the honours and, after Champions Day at Ascot, that’s it.

What I was trying to emphasise to young Mr Murphy was that at the present rate of progress he would comfortably exceed the necessary 102 wins to beat Sir Gordon’s 77-year record and have a fighting chance to topple the McCoy tally.

This was the idea I floated, seemingly getting a positive response. The idea first came to mind based on the recent example of the 2023/4 jockeys’ championship in South Africa when Richard Fourie beat the existing record by more than 40 victories.

Turf Talk, my weekday daily read of all things South African racing, latched on to the Fourie phenomenon early, and issued a daily Barometer, as they called it, of his likely finishing figure.

It brought tremendous interest over there, unsurprisingly as he ended on 378 wins, despite putting the handbrake on with some more leisurely weeks as the conclusion came nearer.

My contention to Murphy and Horne was that the last weeks of the UK season on the flat, solely all-weather for seven weeks after the conclusion of the final meeting at Doncaster, needs a little enlivening.

Jump racing is of course the main diet of those times, but if we got a severely cold or excessively wet period, all-weather steps forward into the role for which it was first intended more than three decades ago (October 1985, when Conrad Allen won the first race and is still going strong!)

Other major jockeys will be elsewhere, but with their massive strings, Andrew Balding, Murphy’s boss, and many others have to keep going with their later developing juveniles and horses that need to get a win on the board, something that can be easier as the season draws on.

Gavin described Oisin’s last few days as “like a snowball going downhill and getting bigger and accelerating all the time.”

On one of our brief encounters at York, I asked if he’d given it any thought. “I need a winner here first,” he said. Naturally, he won the next race and four in all, one a day at the meeting.

Since then, though, it has indeed been the accelerating snowball. He rode two winners each day at Goodwood on Sunday, Epsom on Monday, Lingfield on Tuesday, Kempton on Wednesday and Sandown on Friday, topping it up with three at the Esher track on Saturday. Eleven different trainers contributed to the tally.

I’m pretty sure that if he did declare that he would be going all out, the rides would come in exponentially, requiring Mr Horne’s knowledge of the form book to sort the multiple chances in various races.

That 17-winner spell from York to Sandown came in 11 days. To beat Richards, he needs 25 wins a month and a couple more. To beat McCoy it’s another five a month, so virtually a winner a day in all. But I’m sure trainers would be falling over themselves to get his services, knowing that it would guarantee a committed ride by one of the best three jockeys in the weighing room.

Referring to this year’s action, Gavin said that Oisin had hardly over-exerted himself in collecting 46 wins up to early May when the championship took over; “He was pretty much messing around in the US,” he says. “If he’d have been at full throttle from January 1, he could have had a lot more winners by now,” he added.

Naturally, there would need to be an incentive and I’m pretty sure that one of the big bookmaking firms might like to get involved. The Oisin Betfred Barometer has a ring to it and I know from a quiet word with Ed Chamberlin that ITV would certainly like the extra excitement. With AP a regular on ITV for the jumping season, it would be interesting to see if his score was exceeded, whether he would be as gracious as Alastair Cook was when Joe Root beat his record number of Test match centuries at Lord’s on Saturday.

In the final analysis though, Murphy might not fancy the cold, winter days, up early to drive (or be driven) across to the all-weather tracks that are within comfortable reach of his base in Lambourn. You wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t fancy it, but how I’d love to see someone beat a great racing historical record that Piggott, Eddery, Dettori, not to forget Jason Weaver, never managed. And, of course, for Oisin to make his own little piece of history.

Talking of champion jockeys and agents, I was at a party yesterday hosted by Graham Smith-Bernal at his Newsells Park Stud in Hertfordshire. I sat at the same table as Tony Hind, agent to Ryan Moore, William Buick and many others. Tony is the flat-race equivalent of Dave Roberts, who looked after McCoy for all his career, but so many other top-notchers.

‘Bony Tony’, as he loves to be called, and his wife, along with friend Charlie Pigram and his better half, were all fully in step with the Tottenham Hotspur vibe, (as an Arsenal fan I wasn’t too upset when yesterday’s result came through), with former player Davd Howells also on our table.

Across the way were Ossie Ardiles, Steve Perryman (Bony’s idol whom he had never met before) and John Pratt, who played cricket with me at Lord’s I think in 1964. Hard to believe it was so long ago.

Buick was on family duty, often happily carrying his younger child outside the tent on a rare free day in the summer. To think I knew William, introduced by dad Walter in the press box at Newbury racecourse, when he was ten years old.

The party was arranged to thank members of various syndicates. The one involving Charlie and Bony includes Smith-Bernal, who retains 25%, and the Stud name includes club legends Ardiles, Brazil (Alan) and Hoddle (Glenn). The boys all made a £30k investment in several horses in which they have a share and Miss Fascinator, a daughter of Mehmas trained by Roger Varian, is likely to bring a big return.

Already a winner at Ascot and Newmarket, the two-year-old, bought for Newsells by Jamie Piggott for 72,000 Guineas, is rated an official 95 and, if she went to the sales, would probably be worth at least four times the purchase price.

Incidentally, Jamie Piggott was at the table alongside older sister Maureen Haggas and husband William who reported the “promising” Economics <as he called him> will be taking on the cream (minus City of Troy) of Aidan O’Brien in the Irish Champion Stakes next weekend.

His last run, when he got to and drew away from Brian Meehan’s smart colt Jayarebe at Deauville recently, got a big boost from the other side of the Atlantic this weekend. Jayarebe had won the Group 3 Hampton Court Stakes at Ascot before taking on Economics in France.

The third home at Ascot was Andrew Balding’s Bellum Justum, ridden by Murphy, and he went on to be a closing second to Jan Breughel in the Gordon Stakes at Goodwood.

Balding might have a massive string nowadays, but he is certainly aware of opportunities around the globe. On Saturday at Kentucky Downs, Bellum Justum went for the DK Horse Nashville Derby Invitational and won easily under Frankie Dettori. The prize? £830k to the winner! Nice to see Frankie’s still earning a crust!

- TS

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