Tales from the Turf

by Robin Oakley

  We already knew there was something special about the youngster whom Fabre had nurtured since he was sixteen. Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin team had swiftly begun using him as an understudy to Frankie Dettori and Barzalona had impressed when he had popped over to Newmarket earlier that season and rode a couple of winners on his first day there. I hoped at the time that his talent would not become distracted: one mature lady of my acquaintance after seeing the dark-haired young jockey (who could easily pass for fourteen) expressed immediately her willingness to take him home and tuck him up in bed. I don’t think it was reading him bedtime stories she had in mind.

  I had in fact backed Pour Moi because I felt instinctively that he was the business. I believe horses have to stay to win the Derby and there was no question in Pour Moi’s pedigree, since he is by Montjeu out of a Darshaan mare. In his previous race he had shown formidable finishing speed, always a key asset in a Classic, and crucially an unusually assertive André Fabre had for the first time ever brought a Derby candidate to Epsom for a trial run around Tattenham Corner.

  When Carlton House, trained by Sir Michael Stoute, had suffered a minor injury during Derby week I had doubled my bet. When you talk to great trainers and read their memoirs it becomes clear what fine-tuning is involved in preparing a horse for big races, on the Flat or over jumps. The smallest setback can frustrate calculations. In 1987 when Jimmy Fitzgerald’s Forgive ’n Forget was favourite for the Gold Cup the race was delayed for more than an hour by snow. Asked afterwards why he had failed to win, Fitzgerald declared, not totally tongue-in-cheek: ‘My horse was trained to the minute and by the time they finally set off he was over the top.’

  The real puzzle was why it had taken those 35 years since Empery’s victory in 1976 for the French to win another Derby. I believe there were several contributing factors: France has no track resembling Epsom, few French races are contested pell-mell the way the Derby is, consequently few French jockeys excel at Epsom. Finally, in recent years with the ‘French Derby’ – the Prix du Jockey Club – taking place the same weekend, French entries for Epsom have been dwindling. When Pour Moi and young Barzalona rewrote the statistics manual the only sadness is that it was at the expense of Carlton House.

  But what about the future of the Derby itself? Of one change in recent years I do approve: long may the race be run on Saturdays. Like the Grand National, the Derby is the people’s race, not just for the racing elite, and should be run on a day when most can get to it, even if most of what used to be called the working class nowadays prefers to take the family car to the garden centre. Switch it back to the Wednesday and it would become like so many other sporting events these days: the preserve of the corporate sponsors and their lucky guests. Crucially, let us leave alone the race conditions.

  Not everybody, I have to concede, is an Epsom fan. I have engaged in amiable debate for example with Mick Channon, who insists that the authorities ought to blow up the Epsom course and start all over again. But on this issue I am a Rocker, not a Mod. Indeed I sometimes fear that what I call the sun-dried tomato syndrome, the craze for modernisation for modernisation’s sake, is taking over the whole of life. Why cannot a chef these days give you a Caesar salad without a sprinkling of beetroot crisps or a crème brûlée without chucking candied cherries on the bottom? Even in a Botswana game reserve one day my steak came with an unordered orange sauce. Classics should be left alone, and that applies to the Derby too. Nobody thinks of training ivy up Nelson’s column or swapping Big Ben for something sponsored and digital; so the modernisers should keep their hands off the Derby. Run it later in the year, urge the experimentalists. Cut back the distance as the French have done from a mile and a half to a mile and a quarter. Transfer it from Epsom’s switchback to a flatter course like York or Ascot. Phooey. The true test of the Derby is that it is an extraordinary race in the full sense of that word – and it is still the race that everybody wants to win.

  When Ruler of the World triumphed in the 2013 Derby it was yet another sign of the Coolmore empire’s domination. Standing on the winner’s rostrum in their dark morning suits, John Magnier, Michael Tabor and Derrick Smith looked like three wise old crows who have collected not just the early worm but a whole lawn-full. This was their third successive Derby victory. The first, third and fourth horses were sired by their star stallion Galileo and the second by his son New Approach. In five years, twelve of the twenty horses who had come home in the first four in the Derby had been owned by Coolmore, all but one of them trained by Aidan O’Brien.

  Does their domination matter? Not to me, I wrote at the time. The dream they dream is of winning the Derby. Not the ‘Epsom Derby’, note. There is no such thing. All the others, the Kentucky Derby for example, need the geographic prefix. They are imitations, quite good ones in some cases, but imitations. The Epsom race is the Derby. What is good for British racing is that Coolmore, owning and breeding the best horses, see it that way too and want to bring their potential stars, lots of them, to Epsom for their ultimate test. As Aidan O’Brien put it, ‘The whole throughbred breed hinges on the Derby. It’s what racing is about for everyone working in stables and on studs.’

  Cheltenham

  To everything there is a season. Shortly before the swankier Russian yachts slip into their South of France moorings for the summer, the seafront bistros suddenly attract a cluster of young ladies with underworked fingernails and minimal bikinis. When the waterholes dry up, vast herds of wildebeest sniff the African air and trundle off to pastures new. As the leaves begin to turn in Britain, swallows seize on the excuse to fly south from the so-called English summer. My favourite seasonal signal is the first big autumn meeting at Cheltenham, the moment when after lavishing attention through the summer on sleek equine whippets I turn my attention to the more substantial figures of the winter jumping game. From then on everything becomes a prelude to the Cheltenham Festival itself. The cars are muddier, the suits less sleek and breast-pocket handkerchiefs are second-generation. These are days that smell of wet Labrador: the churned turf sucks at your shoes and sometimes you buy a coffee simply to thaw out your fingers to turn the racecard pages, but it is all a part of the glorious build-up to the Festival itself.

  One of my best racing moments wasn’t on a racecourse at all. It was having Jonjo O’Neill at his Jackdaw’s Castle yard in the Cotswolds talk me through every yard of Dawn Run’s triumph in the 1986 Gold Cup. She wasn’t a handsome mare, certainly not a friendly one, but she was grittiness personified, filling her lungs and roaring back to win after being passed by three horses. The word Jonjo kept using about the whole Cheltenham experience was ‘magical’, and so it is.

  I have been a Cheltenham regular since my student days at Oxford (when I could cadge a lift) and if I knew I had just four days left on earth I would probably choose to spend them at the Festival. There is no spectacle quite like the armada of horses thundering downhill towards the last obstacle in the Triumph Hurdle or two well-matched speed steeplechasers and their riders eyeballing each other throughout the final gut-busting climb to the winning post in the Queen Mother Champion Chase, the gladiators enveloped in a wall of sound as the crowd cheer on their fancies.

  Somehow at Cheltenham you feel part of the history, a history which includes days like the one in 1990 when farmer-trainer Sirrell Griffiths won the Gold Cup with the 100-1 shot Norton’s Coin having milked a herd of cows before setting off for the course. The great steeplechaser Golden Miller was owned by the eccentric Dorothy Paget, who slept by day and lived by night and was allowed by bookmakers to bet on races after they had been run. Golden Miller won five Gold Cups in a row and was second in the next. In 1983 Michael Dickinson performed the extraordinary feat of training the first five home in the Gold Cup.

  Vincent O’Brien, perhaps the greatest trainer ever, warmed up his career winning a string of Champion Hurdles and Gold Cups before he turned his attention to the Flat. But before he and amateur jockey Aubrey Bra
bazon won the first of them they went into the bar for a couple of stiffening port and brandies. Not quite how it is done these days.

  Horses who became national favourites like the greys Desert Orchid and One Man earned a special cheer for their successes at Cheltenham and the course has a unique added attraction – the hordes of Irishmen and women who pour into this quiet corner of Gloucestershire to support the band of Irish horses who come to do friendly but desperate battle with the best of England. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary was asked one year recently what he liked about horseracing and he replied simply, ‘I’m Irish.’ He went on to add, ‘We Irish love girls, drink and racing, although we sometimes get the order wrong’ and I have to admit that among my Cheltenham recollections are the three young ladies known as the ‘Sisters of Murphy’ who arrived by orange helicopter to promote a popular stout in 1998. Lisa B, Nina and Philippa, clad in various combinations of slinky black leather trousers, hot pants and minimal tops were a walking tribute to female fortitude, not to mention the tenacity of the zip industry. With the amount of flesh exposed they clearly risked what my grandmother used to refer to as ‘a nasty chill on the umby’. Was Lisa betting on the next race, I asked (a correspondent’s life is sometimes awfully hard). ‘In my costume,’ she replied accurately, ‘there’s no room for money.’

  The Irish add a special zest to the massive gambling which goes on, in the past aided by the punting priest Father Sean Breen. He used to hold special services for the shamrock brigade, seeking the Almighty’s blessing on the Irish hopes, adding, ‘Though we do appreciate it’s difficult for you, Lord, with so many Irish runners.’

  Geneva-based financier J.P. McManus has been known to wager more than £500,000 on a race. Indeed, if he were to back every one of his horses that runs for £1,000, that alone would cost a fortune. I asked him at Cheltenham one year how many horses he had in training. He would not say, replying only that ‘There are too many slow ones’. He added, however, with his gentle smile, ‘But I’d know if any were missing.’ Friends say he has more than 200 in training at 40 different yards, costing him at least £4 million a year.

  When the fearless bookmaker Freddie Williams was still with us McManus had £100,000 each way with him on Lingo, which won at 13-2. When he asked Williams, who also ran a Scottish water bottling plant, for £500,000 on another race, the layer inquired wryly if McManus knew that it was water, not whisky, he bottled, but still accommodated him to a further £100,000.

  The late David Johnson, another big owner, took at least £500,000 off the bookies when his Well Chief won the Arkle Trophy. ‘Everyone was on big time,’ he said. ‘We backed him down from 33-1 to 12-1 and then we ran out of money.’

  The turnover is colossal. The on-course Tote alone takes upwards of £2.5 million a day through Cheltenham and with off-course and on-course bookies and betting exchanges it is reckoned that some £400 million is gambled over the four days. Some even come just to watch the more fearless punters, says Edward Gillespie, Cheltenham’s long-time managing director: ‘When people come for the first time they say they’ve never physically seen so much money change hands. In our daily lives we don’t often see such handfuls of notes. It’s the sheer strength of the market. Put on several thousand pounds at Cheltenham and a bookie doesn’t flinch.’

  But the Cheltenham Festival, the annual Olympics of jump racing, is about far more than the betting. There is nothing quite like that moment in early March when the crowd opens its lungs to roar off the start of the first race. The helicopters of the rich will have clattered in over Cleeve Hill. Numb fingers will have wrestled with car park hamper chicken legs and currant cake (surely only the British could picnic in March). The first few thousand of the 170,000 pints of Guinness which will be drained at the four-day Festival will have been sunk and revved-up younger jockeys, struggling into the tights they wear beneath their breeches and striding out into the parade ring with the intensity of fighter pilots on a mission, will be dreaming the dream that this year they will ride their first Festival winner.

  More than 55,000 people a day will be about to participate in the first true rite of the British spring, confident that this is some of the best fun you can have with your clothes on. That first race roar encompasses a whole range of emotions. From racing’s professionals – the trainers, jockeys and stable staff – there is excitement that their highest hopes, fine-tuned to the peak of fitness, are about to be put to the test. For the spectators, the Cheltenham roar is a moment of sheer exhilaration at the thought of the four days of effort, drama, heartbreak, achievement and excess that lie ahead, testing both wallets and livers.

  At Cheltenham, the temple of the jumping horse, the spectators don’t just crowd around the parade ring to take a look at the equine stars, they pack ten deep around the pre-parade ring too, watching the competitors being saddled, the lads and lasses who know their charges by shorter, more familiar names than their racecard titles giving their burnished coats a final brush down. Other courses have thrilling races too. What makes Cheltenham special, and brings greater risk to the horses and jockeys participating, is that everything happens that much faster. Nor is it any coincidence that Edward Gillespie, for so long Cheltenham’s guiding hand, is also a theatre-lover and amateur actor: set against the Cleeve Hill background, Cheltenham is a natural amphitheatre, an effect accentuated by the steep banking around the winner’s enclosure and the long walk back through the stands from the finishing straight where the crowd can applaud both the victors and unlucky losers. A day out at the Festival is pure theatre.

  The Cheltenham crowd has a camaraderie which comes partly from habit, and partly from an acknowledged passion for the efforts of horse and rider and a willingness to support its judgement with hard cash. Most who watch will have their own precious memory of a favourite contest, a winner heftily backed, a moment of glory etched on the inner eye for ever more. Perhaps the older ones were there for the epic Gold Cup contests in the 1960s between the incomparable Arkle and the brave Mill House, others for the popular grey Desert Orchid’s triumph in 1989 or for the third of Best Mate’s big race victories in 2004 when he showed that he wasn’t just an athlete blessed with a high cruising speed but a doughty battler too.

  Extending the Festival in recent years from three days to four has taken away nothing from the intensity of the experience. But if the racing is little changed there are significant differences among the audience either out on the terraces or jammed in busy bars where you can hardly lift your elbow to drown your sorrows over a loser. For some, the rites and sights of Cheltenham are a welcome reassurance that the vision of the English countryside which they fear each year is about to disappear has survived another twelve months. If ever they need a preservation park for the trilby and the Barbour, Cheltenham will provide it. There is no shortage still of tweedy ladies who appear to socialise, shop and probably even sleep in their sheepskins. But these days the crowd is getting younger. There are stretch limos rolling up alongside the four-wheel drives, sharper-suited young men from the City sporting this month’s hair gel and the latest iPads cutting deals in the hospitality boxes.

  What brings all sorts to Cheltenham is the assurance of quality, the knowledge that they will see the best in competition with each other. ‘It is the Olympics of racing,’ Michael O’Leary told me. ‘The best jumps horses from England, Ireland and France. You know that every owner, trainer and jockey is busting a gut to win. That and a very challenging course and the whole carnival atmosphere.’ Unlike some grand Flat meetings, he says, Cheltenham is for everybody. ‘It’s culturally different, there’s none of the pomposity of Ascot.’ One ex-military owner with a traditional trainer calls the Festival ‘the best all ranks event around’.

  If you grow up in a family with an interest in racing, Michael O’Leary says, ‘There are two races you remember, the Grand National and the Cheltenham Gold Cup. To win either is a dream come true. Why? Because it’s so bloody difficult.’ His W
ar of Attrition won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 2006 and he told us then, ‘I’ve died and gone to Heaven.’ Even now he says, ‘When I look back on life as a doddering old man it is something I will remember, along with my marriage and the birth of my children.’

  * * *

  One race that remains particularly vivid in my memory is the contest between The Dikler and Pendil in the Gold Cup of 1973. In their time there was no sharper rivalry in the racing village of Lambourn than that between the adjacent yards of Fulke Walwyn and Fred Winter. Walwyn was the established big name in National Hunt training when the former champion jockey, who had ridden for him, set up shop at Uplands next door and there was nothing Winter’s lads liked more than to win a race against what they referred to as ‘Over the wall’ and have the chance to brag over a pint in the Malt Shovel about doing so. After Walwyn had won the 1964 Grand National with Team Spirit the Winter yard got off to a great start with two early Grand Nationals, Jay Trump (1965) and Anglo (1966). The stable was full of stars like Bula, Pendil, Killiney and Crisp, most of whom occupied boxes in the part of the yard that came to be known as ‘Millionaire’s Row’.

  In 1973 there was huge stable confidence behind the spring-heeled Pendil, one of the most naturally talented chasers seen for years. The odds-on favourite for the Gold Cup at 4-6, he simply exuded class and was unbeaten in eleven races over fences. The Dikler, by contrast, was a big, brave but rather unorganised horse who pulled hard and was never an easy ride.

  On board The Dikler that day was the tough northern jockey Ron Barry, who was nursing a secret. He had broken a collarbone only ten days before (which had not stopped him winning a big hurdle race at Chepstow the Saturday before the Festival) and he was worried that if The Dikler fought him on the way to the start he might not be able to stop him running away with him because of the pain.