The turf

 Faced with a field of 13 two-year-olds in the British Stallion Studs EBF Maiden Fillies Stakes at Goodwood last Saturday a friend and I agreed the best thing for our Placepot was to go with experience. Just three of the fillies had run before and sure enough two of those three, Jakarta and Royal Equerry, came home first and second, separated by just three-quarters of a length, with the previously unraced Jewel of London the same margin away in third. Expect all three to be winning races this season. Abdulla Al Mansoori paid 250,000 guineas for Jewel of London, whose trainer Richard Hannon was in Ireland watching his Rosallion and Haatem finish first and second in the Irish 2000 Guineas.

The Flat season proper has opened with an almighty shock and a cruel tragedy. First City of Troy, the latest horse to be anointed by the incomparable Aidan O’Brien as the best he has ever trained, flopped like a wet sponge in the 2000 Guineas. Then with Charlie Appleby’s Godolphin team mopping up top races to demonstrate that their comparatively poor 2023 was merely a blip, their Hidden Law passed the post as an impressive three-lengths winner of the Chester Vase. As bookmakers’ fingers flicked laptop keys to instal the Dubawi colt as a new favourite for the Derby, a few yards further on he took a false step and shattered his right foreleg. Within minutes he was euthanised.

You don’t often walk into a racing yard and find the trainer engrossed with two owners –apropos of horse names – discussing the role in the French Revolution of Count Mirabeau,  but Dominic Ffrench Davis is a rounded man. When I first met Dominic 25 years ago he was a young start-up trainer who’d had to wait a year for a couple of winners. But these days he is being noticed for more than just the unusual moniker (worked into the family line by a female forbear with a touch of grandeur who didn’t fancy being just another Davis).

However hard some people try to make it a business, jump racing remains a sport and the Grand National its greatest race. Two fences out this year 20 horses were still in contention, ten still seemingly in with a serious chance of winning. As Ruby Walsh noted: ‘If that doesn’t convince people it’s a wonderful sport I’m not sure what will.’ Of the 32 starters 21 finished. Four horses unseated their riders and seven were pulled up but not one fell. The Grand Nationalwill remain a great race. But it is changing Still in the battle two out were the three ‘story horses’. Latenightpass was point to point trainer Tom Ellis’s first runner under Rules, owned by his mother and ridden by his wife Gina Andrews.

A famous American horse-handler – after seeing an English trainer who had been his assistant starting to win races back in the UK – declared: ‘I taught him everything he knows.’ He then added: ‘But not everything I know.’ With a friendly but intense end-of-season battle this year for the Jump Trainers’ Championship between Paul Nicholls and his former assistant Dan Skelton, I suspect that Paul is secretly hoping that he too has retained an edge despite their successful years together. Paul has been telling us that it would mean more to him this year for his stable jockey Harry Cobden to win his first Jump Jockeys’ Championship than for him to clinch his 15th trainers’ title, but I think he is kidding himself.

Writing a fortnightly column about a sport happening daily can be cruel. These words had to be delivered before the Cheltenham Festival’s Tuesday opening so I can only declare what I hope might have happened: that England’s trainers have responded as effectively to the advance taunts that they would fold in the face of Irish raiders as the England rugby side did. Realistically, it may take years to redress the racing balance. What matters is that the efforts of homebased greats like Nicky Henderson and Paul Nicholls, who will not be around for ever, are supplemented by upwardly-mobiles like Dan Skelton, Fergal O’Brien and Ben Pauling. Where Ben is concerned Sandown last Saturday hopefully gave us a foretaste of what’s to come.

Back in November, 20 horses went to post in the Troytown Chase at Navan. Fourteen were trained in Co. Meath by Gordon Elliott, who provided the winner Coko Beach and four of the first five home. He broke no rules. To those who objected to his mass entry, Elliott retorted that he hadn’t stopped any horse running in the race by running the number he did. It had not filled to its capacity and his entrants had a range of owners.

Who’s afraid of Willie Mullins? Pretty well every other trainer and certainly the bookies who made his French import Ocastle Des Mottes a 7-2 hot favourite for the Betfair Hurdle – which is the richest event of its kind run in Britain – at Newbury on Saturday. You can see why. The ever-courteous Mullins holds the record for the most winners trained in a season by an English or Irish trainer at 245 and the most Grade One victories in a season at 34. No one has trained more than his 94 winners at the Cheltenham Festival. On Cheltenham Trials Day a fortnight before, being more concerned with the then oncoming Dublin Racing Festival, Willie sent over just two horses.

Cheltenham’s end of January meeting is supposed to be an amuse-gueule to give us a few form lines for the four-day Festival in March. Instead, this one gave us everything including emotional victories for an 18-year-old jockey and a 92-year-old owner, a demonstration round by a new female hurdling superstar and defeat by inches for the most popular horse in training. It also underlined the many qualities needed to be a successful racehorse trainer. To keep a 12-year-old like Paisley Park relishing his racing the way he clearly still does takes a special talent First things first. The Clarence House Chase, run at Cheltenham after being frosted off at Ascot the weekend before, was supposed to be a formality for Nicky Henderson’s chaser Jonbon who went off at 1-4.

I’m not sure how the BBC would have taken it in my Nine O’Clock News days if after a tough interview I had embraced a disconsolate politician (though I can guess and it wouldn’t have been to the corporation’s credit). It was, though, the best moment in the ITV coverage of last Saturday’s racing, when presenter Alice Plunkett put her arms around Laura Morgan and hugged the tearful trainer who had just lost her star horse. Earlier in the programme, Alice – who seems to be friends with everyone in racing, from the merest muck-shoveller to owners campaigning £200,000 jumpers – had interviewed Laura following the success of her stable’s J’Ai Froid at the same day’s Warwick meeting.

Some people seem to get all the bad luck. No Cheltenham Festival regular will ever forget the 2020 Triumph Hurdle when Goshen, trained by Gary Moore and ridden by son Jamie, came to the final hurdle coasting and 12 lengths in the lead, only to make a fractional misjudgment and hurl his rider into the turf. The communal ‘Oh my God, no’ gasp of horror that swept the stands lives for ever in my mind. But for the Moores things got worse. In December that year Jamie broke his back. In May 2022, brother Josh nearly died after a fall in which he broke his leg, many ribs and suffered a punctured lung – injuries which forced him to quit the saddle.

‘There are just not enough horses’ heads looking out of the boxes,’ said William Jarvis as he ended a 140-year-old family dynasty training in Newmarket. We are losing too many like him. But racing has surmounted previous downturns as a remarkable new book reminds us. George Stubbs is credited as the first great equestrian artist to present galloping horses correctly, with all four feet off the ground rather than splayed out like rocking horses, but James Seymour – to my eye an equally talented artist – had at least experimented with the idea.

For the past two years anybody who has asked Harry Cobden, Paul Nicholls’s stable jockey, which horse in the yard he was most looking forward to partnering, the answer has always been the same: Bravemansgame. But when declarations were made for the Grade 1 Betfair Chase at Haydock last weekend, the rider’s name attached to King George winner Bravemansgame was that of Daryl Jacob. Jacob was thus in line for the jockey’s share of the £112,000 prize. Cobden, said Nicholls, would be riding the yard’s entrants at Ascot instead.

The cockerels of jump racing had better look out: the Hen is back. At 76, Henrietta Knight, whose feat of training Best Mate to win three consecutive Cheltenham Gold Cups will probably never be equalled, is to renew the licence she relinquished 11 years ago to care for her late husband, Terry Biddlecombe. Racing fans will be delighted; perhaps a few of the 27 trainers interviewed in depth by a ‘retired’ Henrietta for her revealing book The Jumping Game: How National Hunt Trainers Work and What Makes Them Tick slightly less so.

When famous folk die you sometimes fish for memories of any encounter you may have had with them. The memorial service for Nigel Lawson spurred no memory-searching for me. I will never forget meeting him at around 4 a.m. on the pavement outside The Grand in Brighton on 12 October 1984, surrounded by blue police tape and with emergency service sirens blaring following the IRA’s attempt to blow up Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet at that year’s Conservative party conference. He was in pyjamas and a blue, braided dressing-gown; I was still in my suit having fortunately walked out of The Grand about half an hour before the bomb went off.

Aidan O’Brien is a superb trainer. You name it: he has won it. The Derby nine times, the Irish Derby 15. The 2000 Guineas ten times, the Irish 2000 on a dozen occasions. This year he passed the worldwide total of 400 Group One or Grade One victories. He is an innately modest man who always credits every member of his team and suggests the big decisions are made by ‘the Lads’ of the Coolmore operation, John Magnier, Michael Tabor, Derek Smith, et al. But that doesn’t mean Aidan cannot be extravagant in praising his winners, notably the progressive youngsters: the multi-billion dollar operation that is Coolmore is, after all, in the stallion-making business. Many have been praised along the way as the fastest he has trained, the most resolute, the most consistent.

The definition of good luck in Russia is state security knocking at your front door and demanding ‘Ivan Denisovich?’ when you are able to reply ‘Ivan Denisovich lives two doors down.’ Sometimes you just have to be thankful it is someone else’s bad day. Steaming around the M25 on Saturday towards Newmarket’s Juddmonte-sponsored Cambridgeshire Handicap day, I suddenly noticed there was no traffic on the other side of the motorway. Soon I realised why: a huge overturned truck was blocking all three lanes. As I passed mile after mile of frustrated motorists, some leaning on their car bonnets for a smoke, I realised that if it had been on my side I would have been lucky to get to headquarters for the last race.

Top owners are quitting horse racing because bookmakers nervous of a government and a Gambling Commission that know remarkably little about the horse-racing industry and ignore even the modicum they do know are making it harder and harder for them to have a significant bet, closing the accounts of those who refuse to acquiesce to ever more intrusive demands about their personal finances. The biggest bets, though, are made without interference from officialdom by those who buy unridden, untested and expensive racehorses before they ever set foot on a racecourse purely on their looks and their breeding.

Racing at Cartmel probably began in the 15th century when Brother John wagered a mug of ale with Brother Cain at Cartmel Priory that his mule could give his fellow monk two lengths start and beat him back to the Abbot’s orchard. Nowadays Cartmel is one of racing’s precious smaller jewels. The tiny track nestled in a Cumbrian valley and reached by a tangle of winding country lanes not only attracts jump racing crowds of up to 20,000 (only Cheltenham and Aintree do better) but it also gives them an experience not to be found anywhere else. Where else would the racecourse commentary declare: ‘And as they pass the Sticky Toffee Pudding Shop…’?

When the nine equine athletes involved in the seven-furlong contest for Newbury’s Saturday highlight, the Group Two BetVictor Hungerford Stakes, strolled around the parade ring there was nowhere else in the world I would have preferred to be. As the sun gleamed off perfectly burnished coats and perfectly toned muscles rippled in sturdy hindquarters I wanted every one of them gift-wrapped and delivered to a paddock behind my garden. The classy Chindit, a Wootton Bassett colt trained by Richard Hannon, looked glorious. His stable companion Witch Hunter, sired like this year’s wonder-horse Paddington by Siyouni, gazed intelligently around him.