Tag Archive for: Adam Beschizza

Monday Musings: The Ups and (Kentucky) Downs of Racing

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One of the enduring funniest moments in all of racing to my mind was the time when jockey Adam Beschizza was called into a stewards’ inquiry at Newmarket, writes Tony Stafford. Not one of the “faces” among the jockeys at the time, the lead in the stewarding panel asked him his name. “Beschizza”, he replied, omitting to add the requisite, “sir” after the name. The steward continued, “Well, Mr Biscuit.”

I doubt he has had a similar episode in the now eight years he has been riding in the United States. He left in 2017 when he rode 39 winners – his joint-best tally – all his mounts earning £266,382.

On Saturday evening at Kentucky Downs, riding the two-year-old newcomer Ground Support in a maiden special weight race, he came home in front. As the horses passed the post, 40/1 jumped up on the Sky Sports Racing screen. The starting price in the Racing Post on Sunday morning was 101/1.

Normally you might expect a lesser disparity, and more often the other way around. It ended a notable day for Adam’s family. His aunt and cousin, Julia and Shelley Birkett - Julia formerly trained as Feilden, her maiden name, until joining forces with her daughter earlier this year – had a great evening themselves nearer home at Chelmsford.

From three runners, Sam’s Express (16/5) and Rusheen Boy (9/2) both won, while their middle runner Mrs Meader, a soft-ground specialist forced to run on AW but declared overpriced by her trainers, was second at 40/1. If she had come in first, the 1,025/1 hat-trick would truly have taken the biscuit.

Enough of contrived intros and now we must mention the shock news that Ryan Moore, said by Aidan O’Brien to have been riding with a broken leg for the last two months, is likely to miss the rest of the season.

Additionally, Ballydoyle and its Coolmore paymasters will also have to accept the absence of their highly effective number two Wayne Lordan for a while. He collected a ten-day riding ban at Goodwood last Sunday, a sanction which he is aiming to overturn. If he fails, the big Irish Champions weekend will have to go on without him, as will the St Leger, a race the stable has won eight times including the last twice.

Aidan O’Brien’s span has been from 2001, the first of them being Milan. That was the year when Michael Tabor, Jeremy Noseda and I watched on for hours in the lunchroom of our hotel in Lexington, Kentucky as the scenes from the bombing of the twin towers in New York earlier that day made such an impact on the world.

We were all there for Keeneland sales, the first day of which had to be postponed for 24 hours. With travel plans disrupted, Tabor’s plane home was very much in demand from UK trainers and others, and I just missed the cut on the Friday, I think, so missed getting back in time for the big race. John Magnier, of course, got out a day earlier!

Aidan’s speed of acquisition of England’s oldest Classic is impressive, but he needs to up the ante in both numerical and time terms as 19th Century trainer John Scott won the races 16 times in a 35-year span from 1827-1862, a record they said at the time, “would never be beaten!” You never know with the master of Ballydoyle.

No doubt jockey agents will be on the lookout for possible rides for their employers, with the top squadron like Oisin Murphy, William Buick and Tom Marquand offering obvious attraction. At home Aidan has been giving plenty of rides to the 5lb claimer Jack Cleary.

He had a mount yesterday at Tipperary but Lordan, whose ban is yet to kick in, was in the saddle for the stable’s three remaining runners, in a maiden, a Group 3 and a Listed contest.

Such a blow for Ryan Moore comes at a most inconvenient time of the year when so many massive prizes are available around the world, and the O’Brien stable is often represented in them. Fortunately, the 41-year-old has built up a nice cushion over the years as he has deservedly earnt the accolade as the best jockey in the world, and not just from professionals in the UK and Ireland either.

If losing their main jockey for a lengthy spell was a blow for Coolmore, their long-term major rivals Godolphin suffered an even more devastating setback last week. Ruling Court, the winner of the 2,000 Guineas this spring, has had to be put down due to laminitis, a serious and often incurable foot condition.

A son of Justify, the US Triple Crown winner and already a prolific sire on both sides of the Atlantic, Ruling Court held off Field Of Gold in the Newmarket Classic, a race that cost Kieran Shoemark, the runner-up’s rider, his job with the Gosden stable.

Third on his next run behind Field Of Gold in the St James’s Palace Stakes at the Royal meeting, he ran what was to be his swansong with another solid third place behind Delacroix and Ombudsman in the Coral-Eclipse Stakes at Sandown in early July.

He would have been an obvious potential successor to the ageing but still firing Dubawi at Darley Stud where he would have commanded a substantial fee for his first season as a stallion in 2026.

Many of Godolphin’s finest days were achieved with Frankie Dettori in the saddle and the former champion, now residing with much material and emotional satisfaction in the US, teamed up with three UK-based trainers to collect some of the even more substantial prizemoney at Kentucky Downs, scene of Adam Beschizza’s earlier score. Adam’s race was worth $101,000 to the winner, so would have been equivalent to three months’ activity for him back here in 2017 for just over a minute’s work!

Dettori was operating at a far higher end of the scale, teaming up with James Owen on the Gredley family’s Wimbledon Hawkeye, whose form this year ties in with Ruling Court, to whom he was fifth in the 2,000 Guineas. He has been toiling all season, usually getting close to the better three-year-old milers and middle-distance horses.

Last time out before Saturday, Wimbledon Hawkeye was nosed out by the rapidly improving William Haggas horse Merchant in the Gordon Stakes over a mile and a half at Goodwood. That run alone was enough to send him off the favourite for a 10.5-furlong Grade 3 race that carried only around 20 grand less than the Derby to the winner and was called the DK Horse Nashville Derby Invitation Stakes.

Dettori’s day was sublime with a third place for Charlie Hills in a Grade 2 and fourth for Hugo Palmer in a second Grade 3. Kentucky Downs has been a track that from modest beginnings has rapidly become an entity with high prizemoney. James Owen mused that more UK trainers should be targeting the races there as the course is all grass with no US dirt to be seen. Why this emerging training talent in which Bill, son Tim and the rest of the family operation have put so much faith, should want to advertise the track’s splendours, I can only shake my head in wonder.

Next year though, for this fixture, the top stables will be chartering the planes and no doubt the evergreen Mr Dettori will be happy to offer his skills. Tim Gredley goes back a long way with Dettori and says at one time they lived next door to each other. They have both had exciting lives to say the least since then, with Tim enjoying great success as a show jumper and point-to-point rider until taking charge of his nonagenarian father’s racing interests.

And of Frankie, what more is there to say? Well, how about that he rode a 2391/1 four-timer at the same track last night!

- TS

Monday Musings: Shocks on the Derby Trails

/in /by

So the age-old Derby formula will not be holding this year, writes Tony Stafford. Third in the 2,000 Guineas (well fourth it used to be, as I conceded last week) meant first in the Derby at Epsom, but Luxembourg is lame. He will therefore not be carrying the Coolmore/Westerberg colours into yet another very probable annexation of English racing’s most sought-after prize.

Just as well then that a legion of bench-warmers took the opportunity at Chester and Lingfield to step up into the principal positions. First it was Changingoftheguard, running all over Godolphin’s theretofore Derby second favourite, New London, in the Chester Vase. It was great to see a revitalised Ryan Moore dominating the entire three-day fixture with superlative tactical riding from start to finish.

Chester revealed Ryan back to his very best, remarkably so in the face of the continuing serious health problems of his younger brother Josh, which have brought universal messages of sympathy from all around the racing world.

Changingoftheguard won the Chester Vase by a wide margin and then, in picking up the Dee Stakes with Star Of India, the Ballydoyle team had already started stacking up the back-up squad for the first Saturday in June.

It’s probably worth mentioning that their other three runners at the meeting - the filly Thoughts Of June in the Cheshire Oaks (there’s a name to conjure with!), Temple Of Artemis in the three-year-old handicap on the Thursday, and a lone Friday runner, Cleveland, who picked up the Chester Cup almost as an after-thought - all also crossed the line in front.

Then on Saturday it was on to Lingfield for their Derby Trial and, faced by another Godolphin/Appleby/Buick favourite in Walk Of Stars, Ryan and his mount, United Nations, were comfortably the best on the day.

Paul Smith, son of Derrick, was quizzed at every call on Saturday (as was Kevin Buckley at Chester) as to where he thought the pecking order might now be behind Luxembourg, but that was before yesterday’s news that the favourite will not run. Now I’m sure if you were to ask Paul or Derrick Smith, or Michael Tabor, or John and the junior Magniers or Georg von Opel or even Peter Brant in whose colours he runs, they would all shout in unison, “Stone Age!”

Where did that colt suddenly appear from, you would be entitled to ask? Well, certainly not from the upper reaches of the Classic consciousness after his five winless, although not promise-free, runs as a juvenile.

They brought a couple of second places in Group races, notably a one-length defeat behind the James Ferguson-trained Kodiac colt El Bodegon in the Group 1 Criterium de Saint-Cloud over ten furlongs in testing ground in late October. If it proved Stone Age’s stamina credentials – as if they were ever in doubt – it certainly also hurried Ferguson into the upper stratum of international racing.

El Bodegon has yet to appear since, but he has a Dante entry at York this week and then is a 25-1 shot for the Derby. That makes him ten times the price of Stone Age after a 13-length reappearance win at Navan on March 22 and then a five-and-a-half length romp in the Derby Trial at Leopardstown yesterday.

Each successive winning triallist won with authority, with Changingoftheguard and Stone Age showing the most. It will shock nobody to learn that all four colts – and the Cheshire Oaks heroine, too, are by Galileo, his famed Classic-winning genes still as effective a year on from his death at the age of 23.

Talking of Chester, only one of the five O’Brien winners was not by Galileo. Cleveland, who was stepping up a mile from his longest previous race distance to win the great staying handicap, is by Camelot, also the sire of Luxembourg. Camelot will doubtless have other chances of siring the winner of the second Classic he won.

The hardest part for any trainer is to break into the big league. Last week George Boughey won the 1,000 Guineas with Cachet and Ferguson must also be harbouring that dream, probably first imagined in the years his father John was, with Simon Crisford, at the helm of running the Godolphin interests of Sheikh Mohammed.

Another young Newmarket handler who may not be too far away from joining them is Tom Clover. On Saturday Clover took the Oaks Trial at Lingfield, his first stakes win, with the unbeaten Rogue Millennium, a bargain buy for the Rogues Gallery from the Shadwell dispersal. She was bought on the strong recommendation of her previous handler, Marcus Tregoning, who never got her to the track. A beautiful, strong daughter of Dubawi, she cost 35,000gns at auction and with her pedigree, looks and above all ability must be worth half a million!

I’d love her to win the Oaks. Tom and his wife Jackie, daughter of the late and much-missed Classic trainer Michael Jarvis, are showing signs of moving smoothly onto racing’s top table;

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One necessary ingredient in racing is luck. Another is the ability to take an opportunity when it comes along. On Friday morning in Kentucky, one of the original 20 horses in the field for the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, Louisville, was withdrawn owing to a late injury.

That left the way for the 21st acceptor on the list, Rich Strike, an 80/1 shot trained by Eric Reed and ridden by the unknown South American jockey Sonny Leon, to squeeze into the line-up and race from the widest draw of all.

His two best runs this spring had been placed efforts (third and fourth) in minor stakes behind Tiz The Bomb, favoured on both occasions, each time as a 20/1 shot or longer at Turfway Park. That horse was also in Saturday’s field and started a 30/1 shot.

Race commentator Larry Colmuss couldn’t have considered him much either because the second highest-priced winner of the race in the past 110 years had already run past the two favourites into the lead before he even noticed him.

Rich Strike bolted up and afterwards his trainer, who had the mortification of losing a large part of his string, his records, trophies and memorabilia in a stable fire a few years ago, said he had been very hopeful as he knew he would stay.

I don’t know what the horse is like in his stable but I can honestly say I have never seen so graphic a sight of one horse trying literally to savage another. For several minutes as Sonny Leon was trying to participate in a post-race interview his horse was attacking the pony, despite all the efforts of that horse’s rider.

Eric Reed certainly had luck on his side when he decided to claim the colt out of a race on the same Churchill Downs track last autumn. You pay your money beforehand over there, and if they run badly you have to bite the bullet.

Eric Reed and his owners didn’t have a bullet to bite, just the thrill of seeing the horse, bred and raced in the famed Calumet Farm colours, romp home by more than 17 lengths. Even then, thoughts of the Kentucky Derby must have been some way from even their optimistic minds.

It is hard not to sympathise with the jockey who rode him that day. That young man had to endure each of the two days of the meeting riding a single unfancied and unsighted horse, before watching the Derby. An Englishman who between 2010 and 2017 rode between a high of 39 and low of 15 wins over those eight seasons, he left for a new career in the US the following year.

Initially his move to the US brought great success and by early December 2018 he had ridden well over 50 winners, enough to put him second in the Fair Grounds, Louisiana, jockey standings.

No doubt he would never have expected to have ridden a Kentucky Derby winner in that horse’s only previous career win. The way Rich Strike finished on his return to Churchill Downs offers hope that the winning will not stop there.

Anyway, have you guessed the identity of the jockey? I think I’ d like to delay the revelation to allow me what I have always thought was the funniest moment ever at a disciplinary inquiry in the UK. Up before the terrifying if slightly out-of-touch gentleman in charge of the inquiry, upon being asked for his name, our hero said: “Beschizza” which the gent misinterpreted as “Biscuit, sir”. “Well Mr Biscuit,” he began. No wonder Adam of that name thought he’d better go elsewhere to ply his trade.

A nephew of Julia Feilden, he’s very much from a racing background and if he hasn’t quite made the big time in the US he will always be able to tell his grandchildren of the day he rode the horse that was to win the Kentucky Derby to a 17-length win also at Churchill Downs.

- TS