My meeting with ‘The Godfather’ of flat racing

Trainer John Gosden is a colossus in Newmarket, the centre of the horse-racing industry. Two-and-a-half-thousand horses are trained here and the most sought-after bloodstock is also bred in the surrounding studs, then traded in the sales ring at Tattersalls.

Forty-seven years ago, Gosden left Vincent O’Brien’s yard in Tipperary, Ireland, to set up in California – with just three horses. Since that pioneering venture, he has conquered the racing world and is now considered to be ‘The Godfather’ of flat racing in this country.

So my heart should have been dancing at the prospect of shooting the breeze with him last week at his Clarehaven stables on a gloriously sunny afternoon, and looking at his three-year-olds, who have taken all before them this season. But as I drove into Newmarket I couldn’t help remembering the first time I made that journey, 48 years ago, in a beaten-up Morris Minor pickup with two petrol cans in the boot, which just about got me to my journey’s end: Harry Thomson Jones’s immaculate yard, where I was considered to be so scruffy they hid me from the trainer in the tack room.

I’ve been overawed by Newmarket ever since, although I think I’ve fared marginally better in the intervening years than its high street, which has seen the demise of not only the iconic Rutland Arms Hotel, but also the less iconic strip club. The high street now hosts four betting shops and two slot arcades.

Gosden compared notes with one of the barn managers and chatted to every groom we passed

But there is no one like Gosden to put you at ease. As we walked round his stables, meticulously developed over the years since he headed back to Newmarket, he couldn’t have been more relaxed.

We wandered down to the colts’ yard to admire the King and Queen’s very promising Portcullis, sired by the mighty Frankel, who stands just down the road at Banstead Manor stud. He won the Wood Ditton Stakes impressively. God knows whether he beat anything of merit, but he couldn’t have done it better. ‘We’ll see,’ was Gosden’s guarded appraisal. The early season classics will come too soon for Portcullis but Royal Ascot will almost certainly be the target if he comes through his next test.

Gosden compared notes with one of the barn managers and chatted to every groom we passed; we spent more time with the guy raking the sand horse-walk than anyone else. The new water bowser is doing a great job. Kipling’s ‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue’ sprang to my mind.

Clarehaven has been improved ingeniously by Gosden over the years. The focus has been perfecting the ventilation in the stables rather than creating a ‘statement yard’. There’s a fine line between ensuring a flow of fresh air but not creating a draft. And the boxes are dispersed across the site as much as possible to reduce the spread of respiratory infection, the bane of every trainer’s life – and death probably.

Tucked away in one of the snug fillies’ barns was I’m The One, a gorgeous type by Sea the Stars out of a Camelot mare bred by the equally gorgeous Gaynor Rupert from South Africa. She won at Newbury recently, but she didn’t look as if she’d had a race when I admired her. Always a good sign, even if the opposition had been an unknown quantity. ‘We’ll see’ was, again, the trainer’s response to my nudging.

What she achieved at Newbury should be put in the context of cold nights and mornings in Newmarket. ‘The colts are quite well forward, but the fillies aren’t enjoying the temperatures here yet,’ Gosden observed. I’m The One has a strong pedigree and enough stamina to be an Oaks filly at Epsom – and if you haven’t booked your spot at The Spectator picnic that day, get on with it. Much classier to go to a good picnic with as much sparkling wine as you can drink than eat some awful lunch in a naff corporate box in the grandstand.

We then moved on to the Golden Horn yard, where I got the distinct feeling that caution was being thrown to the wind while we admired the scopey Water To Wine, owned and bred by George Strawbridge, the American anglophile who has been a long-time ally of Gosden. Water To Wine won his first start only the other day, so he’s playing catch-up. ‘We’re going to supplement him for the Derby,’ Gosden said with a glint in his eye. ‘But he’s a big rangy horse – maybe the St Leger,’ he added.

The first time I met Strawbridge he kindly offered to fly me in his plane from Virginia to Lexington, Kentucky. Five minutes after takeoff, George seemed somewhat irritated and exclaimed: ‘Goddammit, they haven’t mended the plane.’ That was a flight I won’t forget.

Horses admired, it was time to retire to the kitchen. Tragically it was 5.15 p.m. and I was driving back to Oxford to see if my daughter needed a hand with her homework. Buns.

‘White no sugar please,’ I requested.

‘Biscuit?’

‘Good God no. I’m prediabetic,’ I said mournfully.

The great man looked concerned. ‘Well,’ I protested, ‘better than actually being diabetic, and I’ve upped my Metformin.’

Over our cup of tea, which wasn’t quite strong enough, we raked over the challenges that racing faces. ‘I think with urbanisation there has come a divorce from nature,’ said Gosden. ‘At the turn of the last century horse racing was very much the major sport in this country. And people were used to seeing horses on a day-to-day basis. Obviously, that has changed now. I wouldn’t say there’s an alienation, but there is a distance that has come.’

But then we got talking about the growing stature of Royal Ascot and the soft power that racing wields and everything was good in the world.

I declined a second cup of tea. It’s a long way round the M25 if you get caught short.