Horse racing

Newbury is as fair a test for a racehorse as you can get with its galloping track and a wide-open finishing straight that minimises hard-luck stories. It also gets the little things right: in contrast to the skimpy offerings from places such as Kempton Park, last Saturday’s racecard was a model, containing details in colour of runners at other meetings, a feature with jockey Jason Watson and good historical detail about past winners of the featured Lockinge Stakes.

So the Silver Fox has called it a day. We will never see Ruby Walsh, the man whom even Sir Anthony McCoy modestly calls the best jump jockey ever, riding competitively again. Though sad for his countless fans in Britain, it is entirely understandable that Ruby chose to announce his retirement at his beloved Punchestown last week after riding Kemboy to victory in the Gold Cup. But the racing authorities here must find an appropriate way of celebrating his stellar career. Ruby wasn’t as physically resilient as A.P. and had to cope with some dreadful injuries along the way, but there has never been a more intelligent rider over obstacles.

There are people I know who regard racing as a cold-hearted business that exploits animals and achieves little besides putting money into bookmakers’ pockets. Sadly for them they will never ever see the passion, subtlety or teamwork that goes into persuading fragile, sensitive or complicated horses to produce their best; the almost parental pride that trainers can’t help but show when an objective is achieved by one of the specially talented ones in their care. We witnessed it in the winning enclosure a few times this past winter when Warren Greatrex’s zestful, bold-jumping mare La Bague Au Roi was winning her races.

As jockeys, trainers, punters and media folk gathered at Newbury on Saturday to say farewell to Noel Fehily, the ultimate professional who fittingly rode Get In The Queue to victory in his final race before retirement, I couldn’t help contrasting his departure with the picture of her Cabinet allies and those lovely forgiving folk in the ERG jostling simultaneously to force Theresa May out of No. 10, with a crowbar if necessary. Racing does its farewells decently whereas political careers almost invariably end in tears. Mrs May once had a share in Dome Patrol, a winner trained by Willie Muir, and she could do worse than seek solace in the racing world when she finally emerges from her Brexit morass.

Encountering a generous-hearted bookmaker is normally as rare an occurrence as finding a picture of the Duchess of Sussex without her hand on the Markle pregnancy bump. All credit, then, to Coral and Betfair and one or two others for their behaviour last Saturday. After a thrillingly close finish to the EBF Matchbook VIP Novices’ handicap hurdle at Sandown Park, the topweight One For Rosie, ridden by Sam Twiston-Davies, was declared the winner over the public-address system. Since I had backed him at 12–1, a certain amount of undignified jumping up and down ensued over which my racing companion was remarkably forbearing.

International Women’s Day is the official appointed day on which to celebrate women’s achievements. But actually, I’d argue that the first day of the Cheltenham Festival is as good a day as any to celebrate women in racing; and there are lots of them. Women are making their names in racing, on an equal playing field with men, whether it’s International Women’s Day or Christmas Day; a Friday or a Tuesday. Go to any racing yard in the country and it’s likely that many of the staff will be female. It’s a cliché, but girls like ponies, and over half of all stable staff jobs in the UK are filled by women. But historically, racing has very much been a man’s world.

The pre-war Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb apparently had a pre-marriage agreement. It wasn’t like today’s Hollywood prenups, designed to protect the assets of high earners when lascivious eyes roll on elsewhere. They simply agreed that Sidney would make the big decisions and Beatrice the small ones. Beatrice, however, had it sorted: she was to pronounce which was a big decision and which a small one. Lately the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) has been getting a lot of small decisions wrong. First it issued a ruling that in future all racehorses should be shod on their hind feet as well as their forefeet.

‘Deer-stalking would be a very fine sport,’ W.S. Gilbert once observed, ‘if the deer had guns too.’ We who love jump racing have to acknowledge that there are plenty of folk out there who feel that horses, too, are helpless victims with no alternative but to hurl themselves at obstacles to profit heartless owners, trainers and riders. Trying to change the minds of such critics is probably akin to urging Jacob Rees-Mogg to stand a round for the EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker, but I just wish that some of racing’s critics could have been in the winners’ enclosure at Kempton last Saturday.

I don’t know who coined the old racing saying ‘The only person who remembers who came second is the guy who came second’ but he was wrong. What draws us aficionados to racetracks on blazing summer afternoons when we would be better off in a swimming pool, or on soggy winter days when sensible folk are curled up in front of the fire watching a DVD, is the prospect of a memorable race, an eyeball-to-eyeball clash of skills and determination between two finely honed athletes with the final outcome in doubt until the very last moment. Racing in 2018 gave us plenty to celebrate. Needing only one winner at Royal Ascot to pass Sir Henry Cecil’s record of 76 winners there, Sir Michael Stoute produced four.

The Scudamores are one of the bedrock families of jump racing. After being shot down and spending two years as a PoW, Geoffrey Scudamore trained racehorses in Herefordshire, including a Cheltenham Festival winner ridden by son Michael. Michael, one of the great horsemen of his day, won the 1957 Gold Cup on Linwell and the 1959 Grand National on Oxo. But in November 1966 a horse slipped up: a punctured lung, a broken jaw and cheekbone, a cracked skull and an eye injury forced him, too, to turn to training. Michael’s son Peter was initially nervous of approaching the wired-up Martian-like figure who emerged from hospital.

It may yet turn out that the most significant development in racing this year was the sale of some 250 dairy cows. Back in 1995 Colin Tizzard, a dairy farmer on the edge of the Blackmore Vale, started training point-to-pointers for his son Joe to ride. Joe Tizzard, one-time stable jockey to Paul Nicholls, went on to become a leading rider. Colin steadily progressed from being a farmer who trained to becoming a trainer who farmed, though often with a stockman’s shrewdness, preferring to take a third prize of £14,000 in a Graded race rather than the headline glory of victory in a £6,000 handicap. Now, with Joe and his sister Kim as his assistants, he handled Cue Card, the public’s favourite jumper of recent years, to win a King George.

Trainer Dan Skelton and his jockey brother Harry have 100 winners on the board already but for most of us the jumping season proper has only just begun. It wasn’t long, though, before I was reminded of one essential difference between the Flat and jumping codes: the sheer fun element of the winter game. In the Agetur novices’ hurdle at Newbury, the 40-year-old owner-rider David Maxwell looked like being beaten to the line on his French import Ecu De La Noverie when he was headed as the post loomed by the 13–8 favourite Mister Fisher, ridden by the teenage wunderkind James Bowen. Instead the determined amateur conjured one last thrust from his mount and regained the lead to win by a short head at 33–1.

Fairy tales can happen. On Sunday the filly God Given won Italy’s only Group One race of the season, the Premio Lydia Tesio, providing Newmarket trainer Luca Cumani with his 50th Group One winner. Just days before he had moved many of his staff to tears by announcing that on 1 December he will retire and sell the Bedford House Stables where he has operated for 43 years, sending out two Derby winners in Kahyasi (1988) and High Rise (1998) and winning a host of big races around the world. Only Sir Mark Prescott and Sir Michael Stoute have run Newmarket yards for longer and there has been no doubting the genuineness of the tributes paid by the whole racing community to the elegant and highly astute English-domiciled Italian. Sometimes his style has seemed more English than the English.

Watching whip-thin jockey George Baker, just short of six feet, greeting his mounts used to make me think of the weight-reducing regime described by the 1920s rider Jack Leach. The elegant Leach always dined well. Next day he would go jogging in three sets of underwear, four sweaters and a rubber suit before taking a Turkish bath. He took off extra weight so that at the track he could have a sandwich and a glass of champagne. ‘This made me feel like a new man, and if I had a few ounces to spare the new man got a glass too.’ Not quite how modern riders do it in these breath-testing days. George Baker suffered a growth spurt and in a matter of months moved from riding comfortably at 8st 1lb to ‘having to waste my arse off to do 8st 9lb’.

Racing is full of risk-takers, not least those who fork out hefty sums to buy yearlings or unraced two-year-olds. Back at the Keene-land Sales in 1983 Sheikh Mohammed paid a record $10.2 million for Snaafi Dancer, a colt by the great Northern Dancer. Snaafi Dancer alas proved so slow that he never made it to the racecourse. Retired to stud, he had fertility problems and only ever sired four foals. In 2006 a frantic bidding war at Fasig-Tipton between two great racing empires — Sheikh Mohammed’s John Ferguson bidding against Coolmore’s John Magnier — saw Coolmore pay a new world record price of $16 million for The Green Monkey.

Mill Reef, who won the Derby, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the Eclipse and the King George by far enough for jockey Geoff Lewis to declare ‘daylight was second’, was one of my first equine heroes. One image has always stuck in my mind. Trainer Ian Balding sent Mill Reef and a companion out on a watered gallop at Lamorlaye for a final pipe-opener before the Arc. Afterwards the trainer walked over the ground and noted that on the firmer patches, while the companion’s hoof prints were clearly visible, there was no trace of where Mill Reef had run. On the softer patches, the other horse had cut in deep and turned over the turf; Mill Reef’s feet had barely left a mark. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘as if a ghost had galloped by.

An American trainer was once asked to name the greatest quality of the legendary jockey Willie Shoemaker. He replied: ‘The way he meets me in the Winner’s Circle.’ British racehorse owners would probably give the same answer about the Middleham-based trainer Mark Johnston. When Poet’s Society passed the post first in the Clipper Logistics Handicap during York’s Ebor Festival last month, Johnston became the winningmost trainer in British racing history, passing Richard Hannon Snr’s total of 4,193. The athlete Jesse Owens once declared: ‘In the end it’s extra effort that separates a winner from second place. But winning takes a lot more than that, too. It starts with complete command of the fundamentals.

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.