Tales from the Turf

by Robin Oakley

  Denman excited the media as much as anything because for most of his career he was owned by the Odd Couple, the seemingly incongruous but effective partnership of the dairy farmer Paul Barber, the countryman personified, and the flashy professional gambler Harry Findlay, in Paul Nicholls’ words ‘an open mouth in search of a microphone’, who called Denman ‘The Tank’. But Denman’s record too was an astonishing one. He won thirteen of his first fourteen races and over a million pounds in prize money. Not only did he win the Cheltenham Gold Cup, beating Kauto Star when he did so, but he twice won the Hennessy Gold Cup under massive weights. He ran six times in all at the Cheltenham Festival and was never out of the first two.

  It was to me a bit like Coe and Ovett on four legs. Both were supreme talents, but the one written about most was the smooth-talking charmer. Kauto Star was an eye-catching Mod, Denman an implacable Rocker.

  To me the most memorable of the three Cheltenham Gold Cups they won between them was the 2008 contest. In that race Kauto Star was defending the crown he had won in 2007. For most people the only question was the margin by which he would beat his stable companion. Most had chosen to forget the Hennessy Gold Cup back in November 2007 when Denman, carrying 11st 12lb on stamina-sapping soft ground, had come home nine lengths clear of Dream Alliance. Leg-weary competitors with lesser burdens clambered over the last few fences that rain-sodden day like slow-motion clockwork creatures. Denman, clear of his field despite his heavy burden, soared majestically over the last two as if on springs. ‘Awesome,’ said jockey Sam Thomas. ‘Awesome,’ said trainer Paul Nicholls. Less decorously but with equal vehemence, part-owner Harry Findlay told everyone the result after the first circuit, roaring: ‘The Tank’s shit it.’

  At Cheltenham for the Gold Cup the next March it wasn’t the cakewalk for Kauto that most had expected. Instead stable number two jockey Sam Thomas, who had been bollocked by trainer Nicholls for an ill-judged ride in the race before, took Denman into the lead for the second circuit and remorselessly ground out a pace which none of the others could live with. Struggling to do so, Kauto Star under Ruby Walsh made jumping errors. Four fences out, ‘The Tank’ stepped up the pace even further. That was how he won his races, using his big stride and his sheer physicality to grind the others into submission and he was the one who came up the Cheltenham hill well clear. Kauto Star closed the gap to seven lengths but there was no doubt about who was the champion that day.

  What we did not realise at the time perhaps was just how much effort Denman had put into his victory. When he came back from his summer break for the new season Denman was listless and permanently hot. It turned out that he had an irregular heartbeat and had to be sent to Newmarket for treatment. He had to be nursed back to confidence and on his return looked a shadow of his former self. But ten days before the 2009 Gold Cup, Paul Nicholls saw a glimmer of the old Denman return and let him take his chance.

  Kauto Star duly won on that occasion. But to general surprise, the only partly recovered Denman still came home in second place and the racing world was all agog for the re-match in 2010, hopefully with Denman fully recovered by then. He certainly seemed to be when he went back to Newbury for another Hennessy in November 2009. He had not been in a winner’s enclosure since his Cheltenham Gold Cup victory but back he came to win again under 11st 12lb from a top-class field, this time ridden by Ruby Walsh, who had to hold off a strong challenge from stable companion What A Friend.

  With a sea of Kauto Star scarves in the stands the next March, we were all entranced as Kauto Star and Denman renewed their Gold Cup rivalry. Again Denman, this time ridden by Tony McCoy, took it up on the second circuit and began to step up the pace. Kauto Star, alas, had crashed out with a hideous fall at only the fourth fence and for a while it looked as though Denman could match his feat of retaking a Cheltenham crown. In the final stages however the next generation asserted and Imperial Commander went by Denman to win. It was second place again.

  The final Gold Cup contest between the two stable companions, both now aged eleven, took place in 2011. This time Kauto Star led from halfway, then Denman took the lead three out. In a finale no scriptwriter would have dared contrive, the two heroes took the last together, with Denman looking the stronger, but they were accompanied ominously by the younger Long Run, ridden by amateur Sam Waley-Cohen, and he it was who asserted up the hill with Denman once again second, seven lengths behind, and Kauto Star third.

  Kauto Star, it must be conceded, was the greater all-rounder, but I would argue that at Cheltenham, jump racing’s Mecca, Denman was at least his equal.

  Singspiel

  One reason that jump racing, or National Hunt Racing as we used to call it until racing’s administrators were called in for lessons in political correctness, has held its appeal in recent years at times when that of Flat racing has flagged is the continuity, the fact that you see jumping horses around for many years more than most Flat racers, racing from the age of four to twelve, or more in a few cases. People get to know them as individuals and relish their quirks.

  Kauto Star was still thrilling us at eleven, racing in the very top class. Sea The Stars, although he gave us a wonderful summer in 2009, winning the 2,000 Guineas, the Derby, the Coral-Eclipse, the Juddmonte International, the Irish Champion Stakes and the Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe, was off to the breeding sheds at the age of three, never tested against the next wave. It was as if Beckham and Ronaldo had been whisked off permanently to a life of celebrity TV shows before they had ever played in a World Cup, as if Ian Botham and Shane Warne had been dragged upstairs to the commentary box before ever playing an Ashes series.

  I have enough years behind me to be prejudiced but I always think of Gypsy Rose Lee’s response when somebody asked her if she was worried about getting older. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘I’ve still got everything I used to have, it’s just that it’s all a little bit lower.’ One of the best ideas the planners have had in recent years, to my mind, are the veterans’ races specifically for those chasers who have been around for a while and who can still thrill the crowds, even if they are slowing up a bit.

  In the same way I have had a special affection on the Flat for the Cup horses, the late-maturing individuals who peak at five, six or seven and are kept in training by masters of the art like Sir Michael Stoute to tour the world picking up prizes in Hong Kong and Dubai, Singapore and Japan. The last of my ‘favourite horse’ choices therefore is Singspiel. It could equally well have been Warrsan or Fantastic Light, Daylami or Falbrav, Swain or Pilsudski but I have chosen Singspiel because I have never forgotten the picture taken of him on the Hollywood Park training track at the Breeders’ Cup in November 1997. In the early morning fog he hobbled off with the leg injury that was to end his career. It was one of those pictures which told you more than thousands of words.

  I wasn’t there. The Spectator’s expenses sadly don’t run to trips to the Breeders’ Cup. Truth be told, they don’t run to a charabanc trip to Fontwell Park. But you did not have to be there to understand that a single frame encapsulated a drama and a tragedy. I wrote then:

  In Singspiel’s career there have been the joyful, colourful, prancing moments that might have made a Degas or a Dufy. But this was a grim and serious tableau in the morning mist, fit only for the sombre tones of a Rembrandt. The worry etched on trainer Michael Stoute’s face and the eyeline of the work riders and watchers clustered about the limping, stricken animal told their own story. The little horse’s neck, which we have been accustomed to seeing arched imperiously with a star’s confidence in the parade ring or thrust out reaching for the line in yet another pulsating finish, was rigid with puzzlement and pain.

  Two days before what was anyway to have been his last race, with Singspiel starting favourite for the Breeders’ Cup, it was the end of his career. Thanks to the veterinary surgeons’ skills it was not also the end of Singspiel’s life and in a few months, his fractured off-fore cannon bone repaired,
he will be fit enough to take up the pleasures of a life at Stud.

  Singspiel’s career, I wrote, was a testament to Stoute’s patient ability to spot and nurture the later developers:

  People tend to forget that Singspiel was not universally admired as a three-year-old. He won only once in his six starts, a Listed race at Doncaster, although it has been pointed out that a one-length bonus, divided judiciously between the races, would have won him also the Thresher Classic Trial, the Grand Prix de Paris and York’s Great Voltigeur.

  His first significant success came only as a four-year-old, at Sandown in April 1996, but then it was back to second place again in the Coronation Cup at Epsom and the Princess of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot. Next came a win at Goodwood over 1m 2f before his illustrious overseas career took off. Singspiel won the Canadian International at Woodbine over a mile and a half two weeks later, picking up £283,000. On the same track two weeks later he was second to his stablemate Pilsudski, winning another £258,000. Then a month after that he was off to Tokyo to pick up £1 million for winning the Japan Cup.

  Versatility, toughness and consistency like that are rare but the gutsy little horse surpassed his four-year-old achievements with his campaign this year at five. Despite the tough race that he had endured under Frankie Dettori to beat the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner Helissio in Japan he came out this year dropping back to ten furlongs with enthusiasm undiminished to beat the American horses Sandpit and Siphon on the dirt track in Dubai, this time picking up £1.4 million. He took the Coronation Cup with ease at Epsom and the Juddmonte International at York. His only defeat was in the ‘Race of the Year’ King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot when a deluge on the day turned the race into a stayers’ slog won by Swain.

  Once there were doubters. At one stage Singspiel had been second in seven out of his last ten contests. But there has been no tougher horse around these past two years. It takes a special kind of grit to travel the distance he did and to keep winning through as long a season as Singspiel did. He finished as an undoubted champion, a winner in Canada, Japan, England and Dubai, the record stakes-winner in European racing history with £3.6 million and the most potent argument we have yet seen for keeping good horses in training beyond their three-year-old careers. For Michael Stoute the Dubai victory, beating the American horses on their kind of track was the crowning moment. But this brave little battler has given us all magic moments. May he enjoy every minute with those mares.

  Betting

  When film stars James and Pamela Mason were bringing up their precocious daughter Portland she was allowed to do pretty much what she liked to encourage her to develop her own personality. She wore lipstick and couture dresses at four and was introduced to cigarettes at around the same time in the hope that it would put her off for life. Asked in later life how the policy had worked, her father replied, ‘Well, she’s down to two packs a day …’

  I sometimes wonder if my life would have been different had my father taken a firmer line over my liking for a flutter, developed in my teenage days. But then he did have a full-time job trying to cure my mother of her addiction to retail therapy. As a student I did once tip him three winners, all at 12-1 or better, on what for him was his dreaded annual corporate visit to Royal Ascot (he worked for the construction company George Wimpey who had built one of the old stands) and he gave me £25 on his return.

  My old squash partner Jeffrey Archer once told me, with all the gravitas of a future peer of the realm, ‘The world is divided, Robin, into those who know how to make money and those who don’t. You, alas, are in the second category.’ But there was one brief moment early in my gambling career when he might have been proved wrong.

  When a church fête was held in the grounds of my school, the sideshows included one of those boards divided into chequered squares, on to which you rolled pennies down a chute. If your penny landed on a square without touching a line you received your penny back multiplied by the number on which it had landed. Somehow I managed to persuade the earnest cleric in charge to let me roll sixpences instead, arguing that he would make six times as much each time I lost. True. But sadly for the warmth and comfort of his parishioners it was much easier to land a little sixpence within the squares and by the time I moved on to the coconut shy I had cleaned him out.

  My betting on horses has not always been quite so successful, although I did tip Jenny Pitman’s Jibber the Kibber at 40-1 in one of my early Spectator columns and I gave Foreign Secretary Robin Cook Gingembre at 33-1 for the Hennessy. I never got a story in return to match the quality of that information.

  To me racing and betting are inseparable companions. Betting is the salt in racing’s soup. Going to the races without a flutter would take away an important part of the relish. To me in my youth there were few word pairings more exciting than ‘betting coup’ and I used to pore over trainers’ and jockeys’ biographies relishing the stories of legendary gambles.

  Away at boarding school my punting was a largely imaginary hobby. I used to read all the racing pages in the school library, make my daily selections and tabulate the theoretical returns, concentrating on handicaps and horses with known form rather than little-raced two-year-olds. I then went racing in the holidays when I could, although on occasion I did have to walk the three or four miles home to East Molesey from Sandown Park after going for broke in the last.

  I am not one for superstition. I once knew an MP who carried a lucky rabbit’s foot on election days but my feeling was that it hadn’t done much for the rabbit and I use no lucky charms.

  One-armed bandits leave me cold and I don’t go to casinos. Nor do I bet much on anything besides horseracing. I did however get 50-1 from Ladbrokes between the two elections of 1974 on Margaret Thatcher becoming the next leader of the Conservative party. We had a nice family holiday on that one and for some years I did well out of predicting by-election results. But I felt it wise to give up political betting after becoming Political Editor of the BBC. I didn’t want the gossip columns accusing me of manipulating the odds in my reporting.

  Occasionally I have been lured, to my shame, into a coincidence bet. But I don’t generally go for traditions like backing the first trainer or jockey you see on entering a racecourse. Pulling up in the car park alongside racing personalities does though have me recalling a story Barry Hills told me of his early days as a trainer. Neville Callaghan was his assistant and they had a horse called Taxanitania well readied after a sighting run under Kipper Lynch and headed for Ripon. Neville was determined to have £1,000 on a horse for the first time and Barry, who had bought his stable thanks to winning £60,000 on Frankincense in the Lincoln, was going for a big punt too.

  They deliberately didn’t arrive too early at the course because they didn’t want to have to tell any fibs when asked about the horse. But as they headed for the ring they were accosted by the owner Sam Lee, who was on a similar mission. He wasn’t the kind of gent who had made his money selling embroidery kits to old ladies and he realised where they were heading. ‘You take my price and I’ll chop your kneecaps off,’ he told them. ‘After I’m done you can do what you like!’

  The training duo held back until he was satisfied, but got their money on too. More importantly Willie Carson brought home Taxanitania the winner by three parts of a length. Willie remembers: ‘The story went about that Taxanitania wasn’t “off”. It was a gull and he was 10-1 and it came off at 10-1.’

  Barry of course was one of the shrewdest punting trainers we have seen. Interestingly he always liked his lads to be punters too:

  They work harder. They get more interested in what’s going on, in looking for success. They need to get some money, don’t they? What’s the matter with tipping a winner if someone puts a tenner on for them? Plenty of people used to put me a score on, like Lord Wigg or Sir Randle Feilden. Phil Bull used to talk about betting as ‘the pursuit of pleasure’. Racing should be about ple
asure. It’s a fascinating, intriguing business.

  Not all trainers, however, make the betting pay as well as the training. Noel Meade once confessed that in his betting days he used to think there was no point unless you could buy a decent new car with your winnings. He would plan eight or ten bets a year and have two or three grand on each. Invariably, he said, some of them got beat. Then there would follow a series of smaller bets for a few hundred to recover the two or three grand. ‘Often I would get the money back. But I never got that new car.’ If he was reduced to chasing losses, what hope do we ordinary punters have?

  The equally wise Willie Mullins once told me that he was always glad to get rid of gambling owners. ‘You don’t want a juvenile hurdler running a promising third, something to be pleased about, and then having an owner whingeing because he’s got a bookie’s ticket burning his arse pocket because he’s had £10,000 on.’ He made the good point too that ‘Trainers who get into gambling never bring their horses to their true potential. They start deviating from the right route, aiming more at bookies’ satchels, running in the wrong races. What’s worse is that horses that have been stopped get confused about what they are there to do and may take two or three runs to recover.’

  I am not a compulsive gambler like one journalist friend who lost both his house and his wife to his gambling habit. You would meet him after the first race with a wad of fivers in his pocket thick enough to stop a church door. After the last he would be touching you for the cost of a taxi to the station. As with anybody who gambles, I have had my good days and my bad days. It was a good day at Newmarket when I backed the 50-1 Land n’ Stars and approached a Tote window that hadn’t got enough cash to pay me. I asked the clerk to tell me again, a little louder, just for the pleasure of hearing it once more. It was a bad day at Newbury when in front of two regular Spectator readers the bookie from whom I collected on a 5-1 second favourite chortled, ‘A winner for you Robin. It must be months since your last one.’