by Robin Oakley
Thanks to the Tote monopoly I found that NZ$2 (then rather less than £1) gave me entry to a nicely landscaped course, a pleasant though not luxurious grandstand and a ten-race card. Inside I learned that New Zealand then had some 80 mini jockey clubs running 60 different racecourses for the population of just three million. Maths was never my strong point but proportionately that would give us about 625 tracks in Britain rather than the 55 we have. Perhaps that embarrassment of riches had something to do with the fact that New Zealanders, as one Ellerslie Park punter told me, ‘will bet on anything that moves. And if it doesn’t move they will kick it and bet on it when it starts to move.’
They called the parade ring there ‘the birdcage’ and kept it uncluttered by owners and their hangers-on. The horses were then accompanied to the starting stalls by men in hunting pink. The first thing I noticed at that particular New Zealand track was that most of the jockeys were a lot prettier than those in Britain, largely because more than half of them were female. My written comments on that when back home were picked up and developed in the New Zealand media. I had reported:
One race had ten lady riders in a 14-horse field. To the prejudiced who still believe that women do not have the strength to punch home in a tight finish I have to say that nearly all the races were hotly contested and seven were won by women riders. Despite the Jockey Club’s planned lifting of the minimum weight at the end of this season from 7st 7lb to 7st 10lb, fewer jockeys in our well-nourished society are going to be able to do the lower weights without starving to danger level, taking pee pills and laxatives and driving to the races in sweat suits with the heater full on. Most jockeys riding today are six inches taller than their father’s generation and unless minimum weights are raised regularly there will surely be more and more opportunities for women riders. My advice to the girls who hope to seize them is to head to New Zealand fast and acquire experience where there is so much less fuss about the gender beneath the silks.
New Zealanders certainly work their horses. The Queen was surprised to learn that the nine-year-old mare Brilliant Venture was having her 92nd outing on a racecourse. The unbeaten Derby winner Lammtarra only had four runs in his life, although admittedly they also included the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
France
It isn’t always easy finding what you want in France. The US film director Billy Wilder had been asked to bring home a bidet one time and he finished up sending a telegram: ‘Unable to locate bidet. Suggest handstand in shower.’ I was luckier with finding a French racetrack on a day off from reporting a presidential election campaign for CNN in April 2002.
It was the perfect spring morning in Paris. The rabbits on the Porte Maillot roundabout were safely back in their burrows. The sun was shining. Long-aproned waiters were washing down the pavements outside their brasseries, taxi drivers were warming up their horns, more out of habit than in expectation, and on my day off it was to be either the Louvre or racing at Maisons-Laffitte. Simple choice.
Unlike Londoners, racing-minded Parisians had it easy. In close range were Longchamp, Saint-Cloud, Auteuil and Vincennes. With a short hop on the Métro, a train from the Gare St Lazare and a taxi from the station I was within 50 minutes sitting at the Pur Sang (‘Thoroughbred’) restaurant just outside the Maisons-Laffitte Hippodrome gates sharing a table with a gigot d’agneau and an amiable half-bottle of Brouilly as the odour of stable drifted on the breeze and early race entries clopped their way across the tarmac from their horseboxes. I had long wanted not so much to attend a grand French racing day like the Arc as a journalist but to compare an average day’s racing both sides of the Channel as a punter and to see if, handicapped as I was, I could actually find a winner or two.
The first handicap was language. After a week or two my French gets me by in politics or restaurants but I struggle with the more specialised vocabulary of the Turf. The second handicap was my lack of knowledge of Gallic form or of the less internationally minded French trainers and jockeys.
Inside the course I was initially impressed. Entry was less than £2.50. There were plenty of families in the small crowd, which confirmed that France can still supply central casting with enough perma-tanned males with elegant silk handkerchiefs and impossibly shined brogues, the sort who usually got the girl in Riviera romantic comedies starring Audrey Hepburn. The atmosphere was informal, the course and the paddock beautifully planted with limes, horse chestnuts, maples and even a splendid Cedris Atlantica Glaucia (I am showing off here – Mrs Oakley once planted one in our garden).
The loos were clean and plentiful, the grandstand was capacious and the Maisons-Laffitte track has an astonishing 1,800-metre straight. There were helpful notices explaining the functions of trainers, jockeys and lads, where and when to see the horses and how to make a bet. As for my wagering, travel clearly clarifies as well as broadening the mind: I finished up with three winners in seven races and it would have been four in eight if a confused French punter had not spent so long arguing about his bet in front of me that I missed the off for the sixth. It wasn’t quite Waterloo but by my standards it wasn’t far short of it.
My good fortune was thanks largely to Olivier Peslier and the prodigy Christophe Soumillon, both well respected this side of the Channel. I took a particular interest in anything either was riding and looked out where I could for early-season condition in the paddock. Where the two coincided I plunged. In the day’s biggest race, the 41,000 Prix Matchem, Peslier brought Thattinger with a devastating burst, paying €17.80 to a single Euro and €5.30 for a place. I liked Peslier’s in the next too but he finished down the field. Pity I didn’t switch to Soumillon, whose mount came home at 24-1.
The fifth was an amateur race for ‘Cavalières et Gentlemen-riders’ as the racecard put it (we do help them out a bit with the language). Feminists look away at this point. I decided shamelessly to accept my ignorance by backing the prettiest cavalière riding for a top stable. My selection, the diminutive Mademoiselle Blanche de Granvilliers brought Manchester with a great run through the last furlong but just failed to catch the winner Montfalgoux. Her smile in the unsaddling enclosure would have brought instant forgiveness from any disappointed punter. Red-blooded males wanted to vault the barrier and carry her saddle back for her.
The sixth race was ruined for me by the disgruntled French punter. But in the seventh, playing by now with pari-mutuel money, I backed both Peslier’s and Soumillon’s mounts each way and cheered them home first and second with Peslier an easy winner on the 6.8-1 Barangay. When I had a word with him afterwards he grinned and said, ‘It was just like an English race.’ I think he meant that it was run at an easy pace early on, enabling him gradually to wind up the tempo in front, rather than the fact that it was conducted during the day’s only shower. After the late swoop on Thattinger it really showcased Peslier’s talents. He clearly enjoyed his day and I won enough for a decent meal even in a Paris restaurant.
So why, despite the technical excellence of what was on offer (bar the scrappy single-sheet racecard with no display of the jockey’s colours) will I not be rushing back to race in France? Sadly there was a total lack of atmosphere. Tote monopolies may make for good facilities and better rewards to owners but without the bookies the off-track scene definitely lacks colour. It wasn’t, well, racy enough. It was utterly disengaged. There were no paddock interviews with the jockeys and trainers, no presentations to the winners. The announcer might have been listing departures at King’s Cross rather than a thrilling lifetime’s best for a participant. It all worked like clockwork but it sounded as soulless as clockwork too. At least the English look as though they are enjoying their racing.
Hong Kong
Two places in the world lived up to my imagination when I finally arrived there: Venice and Hong Kong. I love the buzz and bustle of Hong Kong, a city state which does not need a national flag or flower. It has instead a national sound, t
he near-permanent clatter of the pneumatic drill as Hong Kong strives constantly to better itself with still swankier hotels, yet taller office blocks. Hong Kong has one more advantage. A land with a betting mad public who wager one in seven of the dollars they earn truly can claim horseracing to be its national sport.
A gushing hostess once asked Bernard Shaw as he left her party if he had enjoyed himself. ‘Yes madam, and it was the only thing I did enjoy,’ he replied. Going racing at Sha Tin in Derby week 1997 was an object lesson in the different ways people do enjoy themselves.
Sha Tin had wonderful electronic gadgetry, marvellous viewing facilities and a buffet dinner in the air-conditioned restaurant at £20 a head offered the rarest of rare beef, excellent curries and puddings which any French pâtissier would have been proud to claim as his own. Races started to time, horses which played up in the stall were rapidly ruled out and jockeys’ dropped whips, steering problems and bumps in running were meticulously detailed in stewards’ reports as the swallows wheeled in and out under the floodlights. I was, I admit, short of the Cantonese for ‘Go on my son’ or ‘Stick in there Majestic Conqueror’ as the crowd seemed to cheer their favourites home. But there were no bookies as on English tracks and something was lacking in the atmosphere, something made plain to me by old Red Socks. There he was, respectably dressed and sitting on the ground near the lifts as I went up for the first race. There he was five races later as I came down again. All that had changed was the heavy underscoring on his folded up newspaper and the pile of betting slips beside him. With a TV monitor close by he had never moved further than the 25 yards to the Tote windows. On the course too there were no excited post-race clusters within the winners’ enclosure. There was no sense of involvement. I suppose that like Bernard Shaw, old Red Socks had enjoyed himself. But I was so pleased to be back at Epsom that Saturday amid a crowd straining to get close enough to see the sweat on Benny The Dip’s coat and raucously cheering jockey Willie Ryan, the honest understudy who was enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame on a horse his trainer had run only for the place money. Involvement was the word, whether you were wearing a topper or a kiss-me-quick. British racing may lack the big money but it has the character to make you care.
I did though want to give Hong Kong another try and when the BBC gave me, as a parting present for eight years’ service as Political Editor, the right to choose my own venue to present a holiday programme, I opted for Hong Kong at International Race Day time in December 2000.
There were downsides. For another part of the travelogue they had me do a fashion shoot at Shanghai Tang which involved my dressing in what kind friends tactfully called a kimono but which felt uncomfortably like a dress – and I am definitely not Kate Moss. But this time the racing was sublime.
In the Hong Kong Mile the long-time local hero Fairy King Prawn, trained by Ivan Allen, was being blown home by the crowd as he failed by a short head to catch Sunline, a tough New Zealand race mare, after giving her a five-lengths lead into the straight. The locals made Cheltenham on Gold Cup day sound like a mere tune-up. I have rarely heard a racecourse din like it.
Familiarity with British form fortunately proved no hindrance. Having been bought by Hong Kong property millionaire Robert Ng Chee Siong to join Ivan Allen’s string, Daliapour was running his final race for Sir Michael Stoute and he showed all his class in taking the Hong Kong Vase by a comfortable four lengths. It was Fantastic Light though, trained by Saeed bin Suroor, who did me a real favour. When I interviewed Frankie Dettori before the race he was so bullish about his chances that I urged all the camera team to back his mount. Frankie delivered in style, coming home a length and a bit clear of the Stoute-trained Greek Dance. Just as well for me as the next day we were filming an item on Chinese medicine, which involved my imbibing what looked like a concoction of flaked dried lizard skin and pickled sea slug. Had my tipping skills failed I suspect it might have been a case of ‘We’ll need another take on that one Robin … and another …’
The $40 million International Race Day staged by the Hong Kong Jockey Club and watched by a billion people worldwide was a real eye-opener. When I spoke to racing director Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges he outlined a simple philosophy: top-class racing, top-class information to the betting public and top-class integrity. He put the meeting’s growing international status down to Hong Kong’s readiness to stump up top prize money and to offer the best hospitality for owners and trainers. They certainly provide that and the racecard was an object lesson too. So was the scrupulous cleanliness of the premises. The cameraman recording my frustration over a narrow loser had his next shot planned as I tore up my betting slip but he could not execute it: even before my shredded ticket had reached the ground an eager cleaning lady had dashed forward with scoop and broom.
We saw winners on the day from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong. The Anglo-Italian Frankie Dettori’s win on Fantastic Light clinched victory for the pair in the Emirates World Series. Ireland’s Johnny Murtagh won on Daliapour, New Zealand’s Sunline was partnered by Australian Greg Childs and South Africa’s Basil Marcus rode a double in two of the domestic races. You really can’t get any more international than Hong Kong.
Chief executive Lawrence Wong explained proudly that they had 23 Group One winners from ten countries on the card. There were, he said, 80,000 spectators at Sha Tin and their sister course Happy Valley, where the track is surrounded by high-rise apartments. Their punting and the efforts of 4,000 telephone staff saw the issue of 100 million betting tickets on the day (the Hong Kong population is just short of seven million people) and with $12 billion of an $84 billion a year turnover the HKJC provides 11 per cent of the Hong Kong government’s entire tax take. No wonder the Hong Kong authorities share the British government’s alarm at the growth of offshore internet betting.
Cyprus
Racing in Cyprus on a holiday there was different again. That November day in 2002 Mrs Oakley had unaccountably decided that she preferred being wrapped in seaweed derivatives and sipping cool white wine on the hotel terrace near Polis to six hours driving there and back across the mountains and crawling round Limassol to the Nicosia Race Club’s track. But for me it was worth it.
With a ten-race card twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturdays and entry an amazingly cheap 50p there was plenty of reason for locals leaving work to head off to the pretty little sandtrack with its pineapple palms, neatly manicured trees, oleander hedges and beguiling odour of freshly roasting kebabs behind the grandstand. They could still catch the second half of proceedings which had begun at 2.00pm, aided after sundown by floodlighting.
How enduring a political legacy Britain has left around the world is disputed. But in most places locals seem grateful for the racing traditions we handed down. In Cyprus, said Panayiotis Kazamias, the Race Club’s general manager, racing started after the British takeover in the 1870s when moustachioed cavalry officers in baggy jodhpurs took each other on for sidestakes. The Nicosia Race Club was legalised in 1936. Most of the thoroughbred stallions are imported from England, the Cyprus Turf Club rules were modelled on those of the Jockey Club and the urine samples taken from winners and others were sent to Newmarket for testing, which was then costing £124,000 a year.
There were differences of course. You would not find punters in the Members Bar on English tracks with plates of figs and black olives in front of them. There were no winners’ enclosure ceremonies and no triumphal interviews with winning trainers. After a perfunctory photo the jockeys disappeared and the horses were led back to the racecourse stables. The racing was well organised, the camera patrols and photo-finish equipment were state of the art and the Tote computers system was formidable, but I would have liked a little more ceremony.
The riders, by British standards, were not particularly well-rewarded. The monthly salary for jockeys was 273 Cyprus pounds, the equivalent of about £321. Riding fees were CYP22 a race and the 29 j
ockeys employed at the track divided CYP183,000 between them as their 5 per cent share of prize money last year.
Some things of course are the same the world over. The commentary was, alas, all Greek to me but by the end of the afternoon I could do a passable imitation of ‘Go on my son’ in the noble tongue. I had a pretty good idea of what ‘That shifty little bastard never tried a yard’ sounded like in Greek as well.
The informality was relaxing. I don’t think I saw a tie in the parade ring all afternoon and when the stalls handlers in their yellow T-shirts were brought back from the 1,600 metre start to the 1,200 metre jump-off they all piled into a little white shack on wheels that reminded me of student games trying to see how many people you could squeeze into a telephone box.
Finding winners proved easier than expected. The form, as far as I could read it, made the favourite Only Olivers a cert in the first. I was slightly disconcerted to see that he was ridden by one Chr. Pavlou, a piratical-looking figure with a goatee beard, a single gold earring and a ponytail. But Mr Pavlou rode a copybook race, jumping his mount into an early lead, giving him a breather before the final turn and keeping a bit in hand to beat off his single challenger. In the second, for two-year-old maidens, I was so taken with the appearance of Amathus Desire, a gorgeous chestnut filly, that I looked no further. Despite some unfortunate racing colours that made her jockey look like a giant Neapolitan ice cream, the further they went, the further she was ahead. I went for a coincidence bet in the third on Lovely Christy because a woman, a total stranger, once asked me to inscribe that in one of my books and then walked away without paying for it. I felt that Lovely Christy owed me one but alas sixth was all she could manage.
I struck once more in the fifth race, backing the local champion jockey Nicos Nikolau on Asygritos. He stepped up the pace nicely from the front and won looking around. The nattiest thing on the course by far, with his extra-elegant riding boots, immaculate breeches and trendy goggles, Nikolau looked the local equivalent of Frankie Dettori. Good thing he didn’t try a flying dismount though. Try that in the chute through to the weighing room where most dismounted and you could stun yourself on the roof. Never mind: three winners in five races I will settle for any day.
