Irritatingly, I couldn’t make it to the two big races over the weekend, but watching from home didn’t diminish the experience of seeing three bright lights dominate the first Classic of the European season, writes Tony Stafford. Bow Echo, his young trainer George Boughey and barely-out-of-his-teens rider Billy Loughnane, treated Newmarket to its finest hour since Frankel slaughtered his opposition back in the 2000 Guineas of 2011.
Both Boughey and Loughnane have sprinted through the normal gestation period in their respective careers. Boughey went from a handful of horses and two wins in 2019, having left his role as assistant to Hugo Palmer in Newmarket, to the first of four successive centuries in 2022.
Loughnane’s rise has been even more meteoric. The son of trainer Mark had his first rides in 2022 on the all-weather yet by the end of that winter had 41 successes, winning the apprentices’ AW season award just beyond his 17th birthday.
Comparisons with Lester Piggott are inevitable, but Lester was able to start riding at age 12 whereas the earliest allowed nowadays is 16. At 20, Loughnane has what will prove the first of many Classic wins, I’m sure, and he will be a major threat to Oisin Murphy’s hold on the jockeys’ championship starting now.
Last year Loughnane rode 223 winners and was on 65 for this year after Saturday’s exploits. Of course, the jockeys’ championship, oddly, only includes racing between mid-April and October, but it isn’t far-fetched to suggest he might have a little more hunger than Murphy. The champion will need to keep his own well-publicised demons at bay in face of what will be the most serious human challenge yet to his pre-eminence.
Comparisons with horses of previous generations are often meaningless, but Bow Echo, who won by almost three lengths from Coolmore’s hastily re-entered Gstaad after a costly glitch from the Ballydoyle office computer, looks very much in the Frankel range of ability on their comparable Guineas runs.
Tom Queally allowed Frankel to run his rivals into submission a long way from home, winning by ten lengths on the way to a blemish-free lifetime tally of 14 from 14. Bow Echo is thus ten away from that after this exceptional performance. Had Gstaad not been included as the sole Aidan O’Brien runner, the margin theoretically could have been ten lengths, thus firmly in the Frankel range.
Had Bow Echo not been in the field or not lived fully up to Boughey’s expectations – a friend told me in the week that the trainer thought him a certainty – Gstaad would have won by eight, just the job to keep the Coolmore machine in full flow. Their PR department would have been Frankelising the performance.
Saturday’s winner, along with the third home, Distant Storm, the eventual joint-favourite with the runner-up, are both sons of the 2014 2000 Guineas winner Night Of Thunder. His Guineas success was notable in that he came right across the track in the closing stages yet still had enough under Kieren Fallon to catch market leaders Kingman and Australia as a 40/1 chance for Richard Hannon.
Night Of Thunder was hardly over-trumpeted in his first season as a stallion at Darley’s Kildangan Stud when his opening fee was €30k. Success breeds excess in terms of stud fees though and he is up to €200k as a result of his being champion stallion in the UK and Ireland last year.
In the 14-horse field on Saturday, he had four representatives – the others being Billecart in 12th and Needle Match in 13th. Three more 2000 Guineas winners were also represented. Apart from Frankel, they were Sea The Stars (2009), who went on to win the Derby and the Arc, and Saxon Warrior (2018).
The latter’s son Padraig Dawn is trained by 24-year-old Charlie Pike, who is in his first season with a licence. That horse gave him his first and, so far, sole winner at Southwell in February from 35 starters, although in finishing eighth only three lengths behind the third horse, he deserves a big mention.
So too, Coolmore-based and raced Saxon Warrior, result of a trip to Japan for his smart mother Maybe to be mated with Deep Impact. He won the Classic eight years ago and is still on Coolmore’s books but very much at the basement end. His 2026 fee is only €10k, as against £350k for Frankel and €300k for Sea The Stars. Two Coolmore stallions were doubly represented with Starspangledbanner and St Mark’s Basilica, so eight of the 14 were sired by only three stallions.
In yesterday’s 1,000 Guineas, looking from far away on the screen, as the fillies went into the stalls, you had to be impressed with how True Love looked: big, strong and also well found in the market. There had been doubts about whether Ryan Moore’s mount Precise would get to the race but as she shortened to 7/4 favouritism those had seemingly been dispelled.
Meanwhile, True Love, winner of the Cheveley Park last year and a returning winner this spring, had the time-honoured Classic profile and she won in fine style, making it an eighth 1000 for Aidan O’Brien, this time with Wayne Lordan in the saddle. She might not be an exact equivalent of Bow Echo, but she looks the type to progress through the year.
Most of the sires represented on Saturday are either at Coolmore or under Godolphin/Darley management. That is vastly at odds with the 18-strong line-up from Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby, first leg of the US Triple Crown, staged late on Saturday evening.
Only one stallion had more than a single runner and that was champion sire Into Mischief, whose fee is $250k. But only one stallion represented in the field had won the Kentucky Derby, the 2016 hero Nyquist, and as the line-up says, competitors in the Run For The Roses come from all directions.
Only Gun Runner of the other 16, at $250k matches Into Mischief’s covering fee, while the winner of the race Golden Tempo, was sired by Curlin, now a 22-year-old, most remembered for winning the 2008 Dubai World Cup. His fee is $225k.
Golden Tempo came from 'downtown', as they say, his jockey Jose Ortiz 18 lengths off the lead after half a mile, and deploying similarly exaggerated waiting tactics to brother Irad, on Renegade, who ran on for a close second. And this was a first Kentucky Derby win by a female trainer, Cherie DeVaux adding to her growing haul of records.
Gun Runner had a better day on Friday when he supplied the one-two with Always A Runner (Chad Brown) and Meaning (Michael McCarthy) as well as two of the backmarkers in a 13-strong field for the Kentucky Oaks. Brown was further cementing his reputation as a supreme trainer of fillies, on dirt as in the Oaks, but also on turf.
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I would have made this my lead today had it not been for the excellence of Saturday’s big race winner and to a slightly lesser extent the runner-up. I remember when Sea The Stars was going along, Aidan used to have a pop at him with different horses trying to find chinks in his impregnable armour without ever managing to do so. The rest of the season among the milers will be fascinating.
What wasn’t fascinating was the treatment meted out to the three-year-old King’s Courtier, trained by Julia and Shelley Birkett at Exning, near Newmarket.
Three, I must say, talentless runs at two brought the son of Bated Breath an initial mark of 30. In the past, horses so far out of the handicap were allowed to run, but off what is the nominally bottom-weighted mark of 45. Now, the Rules state you cannot run and must find a maiden to try to improve the rating.
So, four months after his feeble 12th of 13 at Chelmsford, he was loaded into the horsebox for the 250-mile round trip to Wolverhampton. Mindful to get the best possible placing, unlike a few less in need of such an urgent situation, the three-year-old started 66/1 and got within eight lengths of the winner.
The misfortune was that the horse immediately ahead of him was rated 53, questionable in that only once in three had he run anything remotely worth that mark.
Result, the BHA handicapper raised him 27lb – that’s near enough two stone for finishing fourth in a modest at best race.
Now Julia, an experienced and well-respected trainer since 2000, who joined forces with daughter Shelley last year, was in a right pickle. Recently, the rule which enabled horses 1lb and 2lb above the ceiling mark in handicaps to run, was taken away in Class 5 and Class 6. That meant King’s Courtier could not run in a 0-55 and would have to go to 0-60. “There aren’t any for him,” says Julia, so she had to go up to 0-65 for his first handicap run. “There’s no way he’s that class,” she lamented.
So, it was a shorter road and a bit easier on the diesel, trip last Thursday that was undertaken for King’s Courtier for a seven-runner race at Yarmouth. Julia/Shelley’s horse started 50/1 and finished 18 lengths behind the penultimate runner in the race. We all know that handicappers do not like dropping horses – except for certain top trainers it sometimes seems! – so Julia is anxiously waiting on tomorrow’s revised mark.
Unless they drop him to 45 it will be a travesty of justice, but they won’t. Indeed, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the Civil Service types that seem to fill the job nowadays, say: “He couldn’t have run anything like to form, so let’s leave him where he is.”
Make no mistake this is a massive scandal, and I would suggest to Dominic Gardner-Hill (if he’s still the man?) that he has a serious look at the reasoning whereby life has been made so difficult for an honest, hard-working stable and the man who has been paying the bills for the past 20 months! Not no mention the ever-spiralling administration charges.
- TS