Horse racing

Dear oh dear, as exasperated kings are known to murmur – just look at the state of rugby union. But if our monarch had to pass judgment on the catastrophe enveloping the game in England, you imagine his language would be stronger than that. Mind you, a decent king is just what rugby needs: heads have to be seriously knocked together – off the field – if the game is to survive in anything like its current form. This column feels no shame in returning to this theme; after all, it’s not often that a major sport finds itself looking down the barrel.

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.

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.

The Irish aren’t just good at winning horse races: they are in the Super League when it comes to celebrating victories. After Shark Hanlon’s Hewick had collected the £90,000 first prize in the bet365 Gold Cup at Sandown Park last Saturday, the red-haired trainer said with a twinkle: ‘The plan was to go home this evening. The plan just changed.’ I hope the craic was good: the year before, when Shark had his first Grade One victory with Skyace, he went home and fed 50 calves before opening a bottle of champagne only for his boxer bitch to start producing a series of eight pups – a process that engaged him until 5 a.m. There is nothing sinister about the name Shark.

For Barbara and Alick Richmond, Living Legend’s game 12-1 victory in Kempton’s 1m 2f Magnolia Stakes last Saturday was their first in a Listed race and it showed. Living Legend had been driven to the front two furlongs out and held on bravely to prevail by a nose. ‘Come here you,’ said Barbara to the treasured Joe Fanning, the veteran jockey who had judged his finish perfectly, and enveloped him in a huge affectionate hug. You felt that if she could she would have picked him up, tucked him under an arm and carted him home to sit on the mantelpiece as a trophy. Of Living Legend, a lightly raced six-year-old who has had injury problems since running in the Dee Stakes at three, she declared proudly: ‘What more could you ask for in a racehorse?

You don’t always have to win to enjoy it. At the end of the £100,000 Paddy Power Imperial Cup at Sandown on Saturday the exhilarated 7lb claimer Archie Bellamy jumped off Lively Citizen with a grin on his face you could have driven a car through. ‘I got some spin off that,’ he declared. ‘You’re turning in and he just takes off. I had such a lot of fun out there.’ So he had, riding a well-judged race on the 28-1 shot to take the lead two out and keeping on well. Lively Citizen’s handler David Jeffreys, who trains at Hinton on the Green, Worcestershire, proved almost equally chuffed: ‘He’s a real trainer’s horse,’ he beamed. ‘He wears his heart on his sleeve and gives you everything.

Even when the authorities were refusing Milton Harris the right to renew his training licence after he got his finances in a tangle and went bankrupt in 2011, they acknowledged that nobody questioned his ability to train racehorses. Nor can they. On Saturday, in Kempton’s Adonis Hurdle, Milton’s Knight Salute, purchased for just £14,000, took his unbeaten record over hurdles to five. His trainer has had 42 winners this season at a strike rate of 21 per cent and is one of the few British handlers ready to take on the Irish at Cheltenham this month. Knight Salute is a 10-1 shot for the Triumph Hurdle and no British victory would be more celebrated. Said MiIton: ‘The Irish horses are all talented but some of them have been beaten and we haven’t.

Certain sections of the media love to run a knocking story and when champion trainer Paul Nicholls’s horses failed to win as many races as usual over the past three weeks, the groaners were soon at it. Was the magic missing? Had the maestro mislaid his baton? The Nicholls response was characteristically bold. He sent out his star young chaser Bravemansgame, his best hope for the Cheltenham Festival, to contest a novice handicap at Newbury last Saturday in which he had to give lumps of weight to a couple of handy performers in the shape of Grumpy Charley and Pats Fancy.

There is nothing like visiting a stud early in the foaling season. As amiable mums-to-be saunter up to the paddock rails, it both rekindles the basic passion — admiration for the magnificent animals that give us such pleasure contesting their prowess — and recharges the optimism sometimes sapped by racing’s structural problems. In Friday’s winter sunshine, at Alex and Olivia Frost’s Ladyswood Stud near Malmesbury, the Dubawi mare Empress Consort, once trained by Andre Fabré and now in foal to the mighty Frankel, nibbled my notebook while Malaya, formerly a classy hurdler with Paul Nicholls, arched her neck and nuzzled up to help Alex reach her favourite scratching spot.

A joyful Saturday at Ascot recently reminded me that when the old Hurst Park Racecourse (near Hampton Court Palace) closed to become a Wates housing estate, the turf was taken to Ascot to form the basis of the jumping track then being established there. It was living beside Hurst Park — where the seven-furlong start abutted the Thameside Upper Deck swimming pool and jockeys focused on bikini-clad local lovelies sometimes missed the off — that turned me in my boyhood into a racing enthusiast, standing on the saddle of my bike perched against the boundary fence to watch the horses flash by or goggling at Prince Monolulu in his headdress flogging tips outside the front gate.

In the first such case for 20 years, former rider Freddy Tylicki, paralysed and wheelchair-bound since his mount Nellie Dean clipped heels in a Kempton Flat race with Madame Butterfly, ridden by Graham Gibbons, has been suing Gibbons for £6 million in the High Court. Arguments have centred on whether Gibbons made a fractional misjudgment in an ambitious manoeuvre or whether he showed a punishable disregard for his colleagues’ safety. It hasn’t helped racing’s image that Gibbons is a jockey with a history of drink problems and that former champion jockey Jim Crowley testified that he smelled alcohol on Gibbons’s breath that day.

I know what Keats was on about with his mists and mellow fruitfulness, but autumn is less of a joy when you daren’t rock up at the local petrol station with a jerry can to fill the mower for fear of being lynched by fuel-hungry vigilantes taking you for a hoarder. For me this time of year is defined more by my annual quest to bring off the autumn double, finding winners two weeks apart for the Cambridgeshire and the Cesarewitch. This year I managed two seconds with Anmaat (11–2) and Burning Victory (13–2): the dream goes on.

My best fun, through ten years reporting European politics for CNN, was bumping around the Continent with sparky young producers and the cream of international cameramen. Among the shooters was Woj, a pony-tailed Pole with a sardonic sense of humour and so unpronounceable a surname that when we were late joining a flight an airport announcer demanded: ‘Mr R. Oakley and Mr… Mr… Mr Oakley’s companion must go immediately to Gate 23.’ Todd was the only person I ever met who drank Coca-Cola with breakfast. Scotty had his hair parted by a sniper’s bullet in Iraq and lived to tell the tale. Darren was a film director manqué who framed each piece to camera with the meticulous attention of a Dutch miniaturist painter.

The emphasis may all be on speed horses these days, with breeders interested only in horses that struggle to get a yard more than ten furlongs without the aid of a horsebox. But I remain a devotee of the St Leger, the last and longest of the English Classics run at Doncaster over a mile and six furlongs. In this year’s contest it took only one look at the favourite Hurricane Lane, five furlongs out, to know that the money was as good as in your pocket. Jockey William Buick had him in the perfect rhythm in midfield and was clearly unworried when rival Rossa Ryan, on the handsome Mojo Star, struck for home three furlongs out to test the stamina of the chasing pack. A furlong later, Buick eased Hurricane Run up to the leader and won authoritatively by two and a quarter lengths.

A Sandown Saturday proved the perfect send-off for 12 raceless days on the otherwise wonderful Isle of Mull. A Frankie Dettori win on a progressive colt who could bring the Queen a Derby victory in her Platinum Jubilee year of 2022, another victory that restored the rumbustious Jane Chapple-Hyam’s faith in her best filly, and a talk with a jockey whose career is taking off nicely thanks to hard grafting after an early mistake left me in perfect holiday mood. I was bouncing anyway thanks to a meticulously researched family history that Mrs Oakley had bought me to celebrate a birthday with a big zero attached. Links back through a few generations of Worcestershire farmers and teachers were no surprise. These were intermingled with labourers, grate fitters and a waterworks stopcocker.