More from life

Having spent most of my life among politicians I guess I have become unaccustomed to candour. The only example I remember was the Danish prime minister I interviewed for CNN before his country’s referendum on joining the euro. ‘Prime Minister, the trouble with referendums is that people often don’t answer the question. They vote on the popularity of the person asking it. Are you popular enough to win this referendum?’ ‘Probably not’, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen replied — and was proved correct when the Danes voted to stay out. In racing too we have all grown used to jockeys and trainers making excuses. ‘The ground didn’t suit him’, ‘He was short of a gallop’, ‘I was cut up round the bend’.

Making racing profitable depends on getting information at the right time. In the Stewards’ Cup at Goodwood two Saturdays ago I had a fancy for trainer Clive Cox’s Tis Marvellous and plunged accordingly. He finished 25th of the 25 finishers. Last Saturday he was racing again at Ascot where I spotted a friend with connections to his stable. ‘Any chance?’ I asked. ‘Good horse but I won’t be having a bet,’ he replied — so neither did I. After the diminutive but determined Hollie Doyle had brought home Tis Marvellous to win the opening race of the Shergar Cup competition at 6–1, Cox explained the sprinter’s contrasting performances: ‘You can take a horse to water but you cannot make them drink.

On a foggy November day in 1965 the young son of a Barbadian police chief was one of six contestants tried out in the commentary box at Newbury to find a new BBC television racing correspondent. Peter O’Sullevan had put in a good word for Michael Stoute but on his first sight of jump racing that day he finished runner-up to Julian Wilson, the only one of the applicants who had travelled first class from Paddington. Sir Michael, as he is today (the knighthood awarded for services to Barbados tourism), would have made a fine commentator with his rich voice, knowing smile and appealing chuckle, but it has been to racing’s immense benefit that he then went off instead to Pat Rohan to start training racehorses instead of talking about them.

For Coleridge, ‘…the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us’. Not in racing it isn’t. However sharp the instincts of bright young apprentices on the way up, however exciting the pace shown by a novice horse on the home gallops, there is simply no substitute for racecourse experience. Odd, then, that English trainers have mostly been slow to make use of one of the world’s most battle-hardened front-line jockeys, who has chosen this season to base himself in Britain.

Let’s get the crowing over first. The returns from our Twelve to Follow over jumps last season were somewhere well south of disappointing but for those who kept faith the Flat season is bringing handsome recompense. Almost immediately, Hugo Palmer’s Labrega won at Haydock at 9–2. Then, in the very first race at Royal Ascot, the Queen Anne Stakes, Eve Johnson-Houghton’s Accidental Agent flew home under Charles Bishop, named as the jockey to follow this season at a whopping 33–1. ‘Stand by for a shower,’ said the emotional trainer after landing not only her first Royal Ascot winner but also her first Group One.

On the famed Whitsbury gallops, as corn buntings and stonechats fluttered from the fence posts, a dozen of Marcus Tregoning’s team were stretching nicely. The sun reflected from the chestnut flanks of the filly Viva Bella. The handsome head of Moghram, a muscular Sir Percy colt owned by Hamdan Al Maktoum, stood out against the blue sky above the lush downland where horses have galloped since the 1880s. It called for poetry, not prose. But at Whitsbury you are never very far away from history either. In the spacious main yard, with its thatched roof, riders used to get their orders from Sir Gordon Richards. In Major’s Yard, further down the hill, is the box that Desert Orchid occupied when the spectacular grey was collecting King Georges like postage stamps for David Elsworth.

In the previous 17 runnings of the Derby this century no fewer than nine had been won by horses trained in Ireland. The Ballydoyle genius Aidan O’Brien had won four out of the last six for ‘the lads’ behind the Coolmore operation, and with his Saxon Warrior (already the winner of this season’s 2,000 Guineas) the odds-on favourite at Epsom, and four more O’Brien horses in the field of 12, bookies and punters alike were expecting this year to be ‘déjà vu all over again’. The day before, O’Brien and the lads had won the Oaks, the fillies’ equivalent, with Forever Together, sired like so many of their winners by the 2001 Derby winner Galileo and ridden by Aidan’s youngest son Donnacha.

In his days as a novice jockey in the West Country, Bob Davies, who was to ride more than 900 winners, asked the trainer of the horse he was about to partner over 24 fences: ‘How does he jump?’ ‘No idea,’ came the reply. ‘That’s for you to find out.’ The pair survived the experience and Bob Davies has just retired after 35 years as the clerk of the course, company secretary and general manager who put Ludlow on the map. Having at one stage simultaneously held similar roles at Hereford and Bangor, he was a one-man demonstration of changing times. In times past, it did not occur to the powers that were that former jockeys might hold official posts in racing.

I suppose, given the income and the opportunity to indulge, you could eventually tire of even Meursault, Mauritius and Mrs Oakley’s sublime chicken pudding. Guiltily, because racing means nothing if it is not a celebration of the best, I notice a fleeting thought going through my mind as I slalom through Swinley Bottom and approach Newmarket for the first of the season’s Flat racing Classics: ‘Please can somebody other than Aidan O’Brien win the 2,000 Guineas this year.’ Before this year’s race, the genius who prepares the horses for John Magnier’s Coolmore operation at Ballydoyle Stables in Co.

When the photo finish confirmed that Tiger Roll and Davy Russell had held on to win the Grand National by a head from the fast-finishing Pleasant Company, the crowd’s exultant cheer could have been heard over the other side of the Mersey in Birkenhead. As ever there was a grand storyline: the oldest jockey in the race, at 38, won on the smallest horse running for an owner (Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary) who had once sacked him while urging him to prove him wrong. Continuing that process, Russell will be this year’s champion jockey in Ireland. He was the leading rider at this year’s Cheltenham Festival and his own words afterwards made it utterly fitting that on the 14th attempt Davy should have made it on to the Grand National’s honours board.

William Haggas’s Addeybb heralded the opening of the Flat season by winning the Lincoln Handicap on 24 March but I find it hard to engage with racing that isn’t over obstacles until the excitement of this weekend’s Grand National is over. That said, recent devastation of the jumping programme by Britain’s monsoon season and the improved quality of all-weather racing, particularly Lingfield’s Good Friday championships, has lately given me a new interest in the contests taking place on fibresand, Tapeta and Polytrack surfaces at Lingfield, Newcastle, Chelmsford, Wolverhampton, Southwell and Kempton Park.

At soggy Newbury last Saturday racegoers were still reliving memories of an epic Cheltenham Festival. ‘Were you there for that mano a mano Gold Cup between Native River and Might Bite?’ people were asking each other. ‘With the likes of Presenting Percy, Balko Des Flos, Footpad, Samcro and Laurina flourishing are we ever going to beat the Irish at Cheltenham again?’ No excuses, then, for taking my first opportunity for Festival reflections, especially since Roksana, the winner of the most important event on the Newbury card, the Grade Two EBF and TBA Mares ‘National Hunt’ Novices’ Hurdle Finale, was ridden by Bridget Andrews.

In the days when it was fashionable to mock the IQ of an American President who had taken the showbiz route to office, a Congressman reported the burning down of Ronald Reagan’s library. ‘That’s sad,’ said the hearer. ‘Yes. He lost both books.’ Racing folk don’t read much either; writers of racing books rarely stray far from the poorhouse precincts. But any aspiring trainers whose wallets have survived the Cheltenham Festival should consider buying one volume. Last year’s Gold Cup winner Sizing John did not turn up this week to defend his crown. Past winners rarely do, reminding us what an extraordinary feat Henrietta Knight achieved by capturing three consecutive Gold Cups with Best Mate.

You can tell by the tone of the jokes how most occupations are regarded and we’ve all heard the traditional ones about the old enemy. ‘Why don’t sharks attack bookies?’ ‘Professional courtesy’. ‘Why did God invent bookmakers?’ ‘To make used-car salesmen look good.’ ‘Why are bookmakers buried an extra six feet down?’ ‘Because deep down they are very nice people.’ OK, such stories are applied to lawyers too. And journalists. But as a Racing Post headline confirmed last week, bookmakers are under heavy pressure. William Hill has been fined £6.2 million for breaching regulations on social responsibility and on money laundering.

Write a few books and you have to listen politely at parties as people who have never opened yours tell you, at some length: ‘I’ve always felt I had a book in me.’ Many things in life look easy until you have to knuckle down to it, hence the golfer Gary Player’s sardonic comment to someone who remarked on his good fortune: ‘Yes, and it’s strange how I’ve found the harder I practise, the luckier I get.’ Player’s remark came to mind after Jack Quinlan’s success in Saturday’s Betfair Hurdle at Newbury when he rode Amy Murphy’s Kalashnikov to a convincing victory in the Betfair Handicap Hurdle, the richest of its kind and the hottest contest yet this season.

If there hasn’t yet been a hurricane called Bryony there should be. The impact of Bryony Frost, just 22, this jumping season has been quite extraordinary. Since turning professional last summer, the 5lb claiming conditional has won six races on Black Corton, including the Kauto Star Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day, making her only the second girl after Lizzie Kelly to win a Grade One. She won Wincanton’s Badger Ales Chase on Present Man, she won Warwick’s Racing Post Chase on Milansbar. Last Saturday I went to Cheltenham hoping for a quiet chat. Some hope. Yet again Bryony dominated the day’s ITV coverage.

I have never been one for system betting but one little piece of guidance returns to my mind at the start of every year: back Nicky Henderson’s horses at Kempton in the run-up to the Cheltenham Festival. His runners always do well at the Thameside track, although that is not the only reason why the champion trainer has promised to chain himself to the earthmovers if the Jockey Club perseveres with its shameless plan to sell off the course for housing. Like me he simply cannot see any sense in destroying one of the fairest venues for quality jumping, home of the iconic Boxing Day sporting event the King George VI Chase, won four times by Desert Orchid and five times by Kauto Star.

The Taiwanese seem besotted with food. The National Palace Museum in Taipei has almost 700,000 objects in its collection, but the most popular two items are a piece of jade that looks like a pak choi cabbage and a stone which resembles a slice of pork belly. You can judge a nation by what it treasures most — and we only had three days in Taipei, so we decided to let the city’s culinary life dominate our experience. My boyfriend Ed and I arrived at night — hungry and awake. Unlike Bangkok, where we had just flown from, Taipei seemed to be a sleepy city. On a side street, away from the comfort of the Mandarin Oriental, we found a restaurant serving something. It was unclear what, but we ordered two bowls.