York is my idea of a holiday, writes Tony Stafford. Four days of wonderful racing, dinner in excellent restaurants peopled by friends from the racing world, and accommodation – or rather – home from home, at the elegant town house of Mary and Jim Cannon, midway between the station and the racecourse – not bad eh!
From City Of Troy on the opening day – dry coat after the Juddmonte, unlike sweaty at Sandown, his hardest race by my inexact barometer – to the facile Ebor win of Magical Zoe on Saturday, events flowed into each other. The four days provided a melange of thoughts as I drove home down the A1. The reverie was soon expunged when the diversion took us across to the M1 – in all an extra 48 miles on the journey and around an hour on the time.
But back home, checking the later results, after leaving before the last, I was thrilled that having wished William Knight luck as he arrived with one of his owners just after midday, I saw that he had provided the last-race exacta. His old-timer Sir Busker (12/1), a Group 2 winner on the track two years ago and the stable star for longer than that, beat Dual Identity.
There were two winners on the day, the other being Tom Clover’s Melrose Stakes hero Tabletalk, also at 12/1, that nicely rounded up a great spell for both trainers, and a situation that earlier in the year you would never have thought possible.
William Knight endured a horrific 2023. He’d kicked off with three UK wins by February 8, and went off to Dubai with stable star Sir Busker hoping to get some of the big money on offer. You could predict that maybe the kickback on the dirt track there might prove troublesome. In the case of Sir Busker, it was a piece of turf propelled in his direction that went into an eye, causing serious injury.
He needed an operation straight after and then to convalesce for several months before he could be brought back. William did well to get him ready to run in the autumn and in an upside-down season kept him going through the winter, picking up some place money at Newcastle around the turn of the year.
Then came his “winter break” – April to August – when he returned to Glorious Goodwood three weeks ago, a lovely day out for the Kennet Valley Syndicate that had already collected more than half a million pounds for his career exertions.
But to return to 2023 and the aftermath of Dubai. Knight had three early all-weather wins on the board, but from February 8 to September 12 last year, 171 days, he won just three further races – two in June and one in July.
“I did nothing different to always, but we just couldn’t get going. Thank God we had that little flurry at the end of the year,” he said.
A further ten wins came from September 6 to December 18, a Lazarus-type return from the dead as far as the racing community was concerned, and just in time to have a little confidence going into the yearling sales season.
One of the late winners was the filly Frost At Dawn and after her easy win at Chelmsford in early November, William took the calculated risk of sending her to Dubai – not least with the memory of Sir Busker still fresh in his mind.
But owner Abdulla Al Mansoori’s acceptance of the plan paid handsome dividends. On the fifth of her six runs at Meydan, she out-sprinted the Godolphin odds-on shot Star Of Mystery in the Nad Al Sheba Sprint. Dreams of a win in the £600k-plus championship on Dubai World Cup night did not materialise, but the grey filly had done everyone proud.
Project forward to the 2024 season. As we’ve indicated above, Knight had won only three races in the more than five months of last summer, the seventh win of the year coming on September2.
This year, following Frost At Dawn in March, Knight has won 28 races; one in April, four in May, ten in June, eight in July and with Sir Busker on Saturday, another five in August.
Almost all have come from handicaps – “At least when they run as badly as ours did last year, the handicap marks have to drop.” True enough, but horses like Atlantic Gamble, off a mark of 79 at Kempton winning for the fifth time this season having started the run on 56; and Blenheim Star, three wins starting from 51, is rated 69 with the prospect of more to come.
Always approachable, he can also point with satisfaction to Saturday’s opening race third with the recently gelded Checkandchallenge. A 33/1 shot, he looked the likely winner until a little ring-rustiness allowed a couple of horses to pass him.
If William Knight’s good form has been heartening for me, I’m also chuffed that the Tom Clover stable seems to have ridden out the unexpected (at least to me) of the Rogues Gallery horses.
Tom and wife Jackie brought that syndicate’s Rogue Millennium, a daughter of Dubawi, from a 35k 2yo buy to a £1.6 million guineas sale, in the meantime collecting a couple of stakes races and running well at the top level. Rogue Lightning won valuable handicap sprints, turning an 80k breeze-up acquisition into a £1 million sale to Wathnan Racing, who have kept him with Clover.
Then in the spring came news of a parting of the ways, The Rogue apparently becoming uneasy about another syndicate muscling in on their territory, or that’s how it read at the time.
No sooner had the 2024 Horses in Training book come out in March/April than the 16 horses listed under the Rogues Gallery had been dispersed far and wide – well all around Newmarket anyway. Talk about gratitude. I’ve no idea if Tony Elliott bought the two stars on his own judgment or that of Tom Clover, but I immediately got the dead needle to their horses.
The Thursday before York, I went to Chelmsford and the flashy red vehicle emblazoned with Rogues stuff was parked next to me. If I had been a little more mobile or less conspicuous, I might even have let the tyres down!
Mr Elliott might well be a great bloke and his syndicates do well and are endorsed by a couple of influential figures, but I was delighted when their Rogue Invader finished a place and two lengths behind Fire Flame, albeit himself a beaten favourite, the horse I was there to watch.
On Friday at York, the Clovers ran recent arrival Al Nayyir in the Lonsdale Cup and if he had had another ten yards to travel he would have beaten Vauban rather than lose by a short head. The six-year-old will be one to watch out for in any long-distance race from now on.
They had a winner elsewhere that day and another at Goodwood on Saturday, but the main event came in the Melrose Handicap, now much stronger as the three-year-olds are excluded from the Ebor, which follows later in the card.
Their lightly-raced Tabletalk came through strongly to win comfortably, beating Coolmore’s The Equator, in a faster time than Magical Zoe took to win the Ebor. He can go a long way as can Tom and Jackie, who have matched last year’s tally of 22, even without the rogue element.
Tabletalk was an appropriate winner that I suggested in response to a request for “a winner” from the three lovely Scottish ladies on my table on Saturday. Once something like that wins, you become fair game for the rest of the day. Nice though.
On Wednesday evening in the inevitable Italian restaurant Del Rio, Irish photographer Pat Healy posed the question “Vincent or Aidan?” a conundrum that could never be adequately resolved. That brought the conversation around to the late Gerry Gallagher, Vincent’s long-term traveling head lad.
One year, Vincent, to Pat’s recollection, had five winners at Goodwood and a couple more on his way back home from there and Gerry backed them all.
When he returned to Ballydoyle, he told Vincent that he’d made a nice pot of money and wondered whether he could buy a bit of land there on which to construct a house.
Vincent asked where he had in mind. Gerry said: “There’s a rough patch of land just to the right of the entrance.” Vincent said to leave it with him and after a couple of days called Gerry in and said yes, he could buy it.
Gerry realised it might not have been the greatest idea to tell the trainer how much he’d won, but anyway asked what he wanted. Vincent took a breath and said: “One pound.” The house was duly built and Gerry and his family lived there for the rest of his life.
Two days later, I was sitting down to lunch when Polly Murphy, the lady who always comes to greet visitors to Ballydoyle and takes them to wherever they need to go, sat down next to me.
I told her the story and asked her if it was true, as it was such a heart-warming incident. Polly said: “Do you see the lady sitting at the table behind us, ask her, she’s Gerry’s daughter Trish.” “It is, and while I’m married now, my brother still lives there,” said Trish. Small world.
- TS
