The turf

Aficionados came to this year’s Cheltenham Festival hoping to celebrate in Champion Hurdle contestant Constitution Hill a super-horse, a horse being spoken of after only five races as a potential Arkle. We left exhilarated by the exploits of three. Looking at Constitution Hill in a field of grazers, you would not pick him out as an obvious star. As his owner Michael Buckley told me two days after his triumph in the Champion Hurdle: ‘He wouldn’t win a trot in the indoor school.’ He just eats, sleeps and wins races. Says trainer Nicky Henderson: ‘We worry about him but he doesn’t worry about anything.’ As for the future, ‘You could jump a fence, you could go three miles… He has had six races now and barely come off the bridle.

The London Times of 10 March 1922 drily recorded: ‘It is very seldom that Irish racing and hunting people make a determined attack on an English meeting without paying at least their expenses. One gathers that they did more than that yesterday.’ The Times was chronicling Connemara Black’s triumph in the Foxhunters’ Challenge Cup – a victory greeted as Ireland’s first at Cheltenham. Things have moved on since then and at last year’s Cheltenham Festival Irish-trained horses won 18 of the 28 races, not quite as spectacular as their feat of winning 23 in 2021 but still a phenomenon that had England’s racing fraternity scratching around feverishly for excuses.

You don’t bounce so easily at 40 and last Thursday, after 25 years, it was one fall too many. Without fanfare or fuss, a fit Tom Scudamore quit the saddle. There will be days when he will miss the adrenaline-charge of driving a horse to victory in the shadow of the post, the thrill of making up a horse’s mind in the right split second before a jump, the quiet satisfaction of having clicked and pushed a crusty old handicapper for three miles to gain a young trainer an unexpected victory. So when we met on the parade-ring steps at Ascot on Saturday my dilemma was: congratulations or commiserations?  Two minutes before, Thomas Mor, from the David Pipe yard where Tom has spent his working life, had won the Bracknell Handicap Hurdle.

Trainer Olly Murphy was trying hard at Sandown Park last Saturday not to get carried away after his Chasing Fire had extended his unbeaten career to five with a convincing win in the Virgin Bet Novices’ Hurdle. ‘He’s good but I don’t know how good,’ he declared. ‘Could he win a Supreme? I’ve had a second and third but never the winner. I’ve only been training for five years and haven’t had a champion, but I hope this one can be good.’ Particularly delighted that the gelding had won in the familiar blue colours of Diana and Grahame Whateley, the stable’s biggest backers, Olly noted that you have to throw a lot of money at it to achieve success in racing. As he put it: ‘You get to kiss an awful lot of frogs before you find a Prince Charming.

I can always tell when Mrs Oakley has walked our flatcoat retriever. On our next outing Damson nudges my pocket every 200 yards having been encouraged to consider completion of that distance sufficient accomplishment to be rewarded with a treat (although, truth be told, it is Mrs O. who deserves the treat for three-mile dog walks just two months after breaking her hip). Rewards were much harder-earned at Lingfield Park’s Winter Million meeting last Saturday on the all-weather polytrack surface. To my shame I had travelled there grudgingly: plan A had been to watch the mighty Energumene at Ascot, plan B to see if Bristol De Mai could do it one last time at Haydock, but both meetings were frosted off and so I settled for what I thought would be second-rate racing on the all-weather.

Like most people in racing I began 2023 down in the dumps, moaning about insufficient prize money, small fields and declining crowds. Gloom only intensified with racing’s administrators, the British Horseracing Authority, yet again forced into a humiliating U-turn on new rules it had proposed governing jockeys’ use of the whip, doing so just days before the bedding-in period for their implementation began. Lions unled by donkeys once more. In my despondency I had forgotten the actual magic of going racing but it took only a few hours at Sandown on Veterans’ Chase Day to rekindle the sheer joy of the sport and its rich tapestry of characters who will in the end ensure its survival.

In racing’s record books 2022 will be remembered especially for Alpinista’s Arc de Triomphe and Baaeed’s all-round brilliance. But it was the year, too, in which we lost the sport’s most popular owner, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, and the greatest ever jockey, Lester Piggott. His figures still astound. Lester won 30 British Classics including an unrivalled nine Derbies. His 116 winners at Royal Ascot included 11 in the Gold Cup and in all he won 4,493 Flat races. Nobody but Lester could have beaten Rheingold in the Derby as he did on Roberto. But what I will always remember was his victory in the 1990 Breeders’ Cup Mile.

After an autumn of no shows and poor attendances that was more like it. A decent crowd at Sandown Park on Betfair Tingle Creek Day had plenty to cheer about including a definitive victory in the feature race by Alan King’s Edwardstone, which stamped him as the best two-miler around, and a dazzling round of jumping from Jonbon in the Henry VIII Chase which saw him cut to 7-4 for the Arkle at Cheltenham next March. ‘I’m absolutely stealing a living when I go out on him,’ said Jonbon’s jockey Aidan Coleman. ‘He’s push-button.

The government may for the moment have disbanded its circular firing squad, but racing has never shown a greater ability for self-harm. For once last Saturday I was not on a racecourse. Unfortunately, Mrs Oakley had had a late-night mishap with an Ugg boot and after a midnight ambulance, a night in A&E and her hip-replacement operation, my presence was needed elsewhere. Jump jockeys are only too familiar with A&E wards and limb-setting operations, but on our first acquaintance we marvelled not only at the skill and care of the NHS teams but especially at their patience with an astonishingly high proportion of abusive and aggressive patients with dementia. As one trauma ward doctor put it to me: ‘Hospitals are not a place for rest.

When things went wrong in his days running the Daily Mirror, the scoundrel Robert Maxwell used to shout: ‘Which effing idiot thought of doing that?’ Told once by a bolder-than-average subordinate that what proved to have been a disaster had been his own idea, he responded: ‘In that case what effing idiot let me do it?’ Thanks partly to generous layers who pay up to six places in Heritage handicaps, it has been a prosperous punting season for me but at Newbury last Saturday it was bookmakers 7 – Oakley nil and I have nobody to blame but myself. Every year I counsel myself to hold back as the autumn rains start changing the going and making a nonsense of form figures achieved on good to firm.

For a Radio Four programme she was hosting Clare Balding once had the idea that it would be fun to apply the techniques of horse breeding to the political world. Strolling around the parade ring at Newbury we duly recorded an item imagining gene mixing between the will to win of a Margaret Thatcher and the indestructibility of a Denis Healey, the feistiness of Barbara Castle with the sinuous positioning of a Tony Blair. Some of those in the couplings suggested even continued speaking to me afterwards.

The swallows who nest yearly in my garage have agreed that ‘that’s enough baby-making for this year’, and started their 6,000-mile trip to the southern Sahara. Between burps, many thousands of wildebeeste are currently sniffing the Kenyan air and nudging each other south for new shoots on the grassy plains of the Serengeti. To me, Newmarket’s Autumn Double meetings, embracing the Cambridgeshire and the Cesarewitch, bring the same strong sense of seasonal change with the second of those Heritage handicaps over two miles and two furlongs offering a strong challenge to the Flat trainers from jumps specialists warming up their charges for the winter season.

It takes a little bit of magic to train any racehorse. It takes plenty of magic to keep a 13-year-old sprinter bursting with energy and raring to go. I’m there applauding the superstars of British racing on many big occasions, but my racing moment of the year came in a woodland paddock behind Liphook Golf Club in Hampshire where, as he nuzzled his trainer John Bridger, Pettochside, a battle-hardened bay by Refuse To Bend with a white dab on his forehead, gratefully nibbled a few Polos from my hand and sniffed inquiringly at my notebook.

Irish trainer John F. O’Neill owes the stalls handlers at Goodwood a good drink or two. In Ireland this season he has run just three horses – Tullyhogue Fort, Daily Pursuit and Pink Fire Lilly – in a total of 13 races at an average starting price of around 100-1. None has won. Last Saturday, Pink Fire Lilly, who had finished twelfth of 13 in an undistinguished race in Killarney on her previous outing, lined up with three others at the start of the Group Three William Hill March Stakes. The favourite Hoo Ya Mal had a Timeform rating of 131, the Queen’s horse Perfect Alibi was rated 114 and the Cheveley Park Stud’s Animato 102. Pink Fire Lilly’s rating was a mere 73. She had no chance and could be backed at 125-1. But John F.

I don’t miss too many from the political world I once inhabited but I was saddened by the death of Sir Christopher Meyer, the diplomat who was famously made ambassador to Washington by Tony Blair with the instruction to ‘get up the arse of the White House and stay there’. Chris added pepper and salt to the niceties of the diplomatic scene: after being ambassador to Germany he agreed with Mark Twain that: ‘A German joke is no laughing matter.’ I enjoyed jousting with him in his days as John Major’s press secretary and the last time I met Chris, at a Jeffrey Archer party, I reminded him of the seating instruction he gave when planning his Downing Street leaving party: ‘Politicians and journalists one end, human beings at the other.

‘You’re being unfaithful,’ says the punter’s wife brandishing a note found in her husband’s suit pocket: ‘Dorothea 07440 521321.’ ‘No, no, darling that’s a horse I plan to back next week with its form figures.’ Marital harmony is restored. Three weeks later he arrives home to find his wife on the doorstep with suitcase packed and taxi waiting. ‘What’s all this?’ ‘You left your mobile in the hall. Your horse called.

President George W. Bush used to quote his fellow Texan Robert Strauss who famously declared: ‘You can fool some of the people some of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on.’ Listening to the economic arguments of most of the candidates for the Tory leadership last week, they clearly take a similar view. If it’s honesty you want, stick to horse racing. In Newbury’s baking heat last Saturday, Grocer Jack, an expensive 700,000-guinea purchase from Germany for Prince Faisal bin Khaled, led all the way at a sometimes extravagant pace to win the Listed bet365 Stakes by nine lengths in the hands of Tom Marquand. Afterwards trainer William Haggas’s wife Maureen declared: ‘The performance was amazing.

Heading for a holiday in Sardinia, I remembered that the last time we were there our engine-less, drifting boat was rescued by a Mr Dettori. Mrs Oakley’s relief was tempered only by my disappointment that our saviour wasn’t Frankie or even a relative. This time it looks as though it is Frankie, the world’s favourite sardine, who might need rescue. Imagine Morecambe splitting with Wise or Torvill walking out on Dean. The racing world has focused on little else since John Gosden announced, after openly criticising some of his stable jockey’s rides at Royal Ascot, that he and Frankie Dettori are taking a sabbatical.

In a disintegrating country, stuck for the moment with a Prime Minister who can’t see the difference between a proliferation of photo-ops and the act of governing, we needed a Royal Ascot week. No racecourse in the world does photo-ops better than Ascot – the carriage processions, the toppers and tails (and yes, Madam, wear what appears to be a pair of mating macaws on your titfer if that is what rocks your boat), the bandstand singsongs. But at Ascot they know that the show counts for nothing without the substance and in its enthusiastic embrace of internationalism (another contrast with Downing Street) Ascot delivers, bringing top-class contestants from the United States, Australia, Japan, France and Germany to vie with Britain’s best.