Racing

With farmers outraged, the nation’s biggest employers warning the Budget will bring increased prices and lost jobs and growth out of sight, Rachel Reeves has certainly confirmed that economics is the dismal science. It hasn’t got any easier either finding winners. For the previous two Flat seasons this column’s Twelve To Follow showed profits of £59 and £157 to a £10 level stake. The jumpers last winter rewarded us with a handsome £246. But currently I’m like a US senator unseated at an election. He called in his staff and declared: ‘That was an unmitigated disaster: so get out there and mitigate.’ Soaking wet gallops and soggy tracks didn’t help. King of Steel and Classical Song were injured and didn’t see a racecourse.

World politics is dire but so long as Mick Herron is writing spy novels, David Mitchell is raising laughs and Bukayo Saka is scoring goals there is joy available and I have lived to see the start of another proper jumps season at the Cheltenham Showcase meeting. Saturday’s racing did, however, provide a sharp reminder of how the Irish dominated last season’s Cheltenham Festival, winning 18 of the 27 races, including 12 of the 14 Grade One contests. Irish trainers Ian Patrick Donoghue, John McConnell, Gordon Elliott and Henry de Bromhead won four out of the seven races, and you have to wonder how hard some home-based handlers are trying when only one of the five runners in the William Hill novices hurdle came from an English yard.

Somebody up there doesn’t like me much at the moment. The bank insists that two cash machines which failed to deliver me £400 actually did and is charging me accordingly; Mrs Oakley’s entire cooking range has to be expensively renewed because no one will replace a cracked induction hob; and when our sewage pipe blocked the other evening I couldn’t contact the drain company because the village’s telecoms chose that hour to go offline. ‘Those who don’t change their minds get stuck in a rut. You have to be open-minded in this game’ So it continued at Newmarket last Saturday. On a visit to Ralph Beckett’s Kimpton Down yard three days before the Arc, which he won with Bluestocking, I had never seen so many beautifully bred horses bursting with health.

You wouldn’t want to have been collecting the empties from Robins Farm, Chiddingfold, last week. There is no more sociable man in racing than George Baker: when I parked alongside him at Royal Ascot once, he had a flask of Bloody Marys on offer almost before I had the car door open. Nobody could have been better suited to celebrating triumph in the Goodwood Stewards’ Cup as he was on Saturday after Pat Cosgrave had led all the way to win the historic sprint on the 40-1 shot Get It. The cheery band who constitute the MyRacehorse & Partners syndicate and their friends provided the most joyous scenes I’ve ever encountered in the Goodwood winners’ enclosure.

You tend to like a jockey who has just ridden you a 16-1 winner, as Callum Shepherd did last Saturday at Ascot, bringing home Isle of Jura with a perfect ride as the three-length victor of the Hardwicke Stakes. But it wasn’t that which has elevated him to my top ten favourite riders: it was the maturity of his words afterwards. Just a month previously, after riding Ambiente Friendly to victory in the Lingfield Derby Trial, Callum had been ‘jocked off’ by the owners, who gave the ride to Rab Havlin for the real thing at Epsom. He was not the first jockey to be so snubbed, nor will he be the last. Some become embittered by the experience or lose their confidence.

Enjoying the election? It was a colleague from my days with CNN who alerted me during Donald Trump’s first contest to an obituary notice in a US local newspaper which summed up the feelings of many: ‘Faced with the prospect of voting either for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland chose instead last Sunday to pass into the eternal love of God.’ There is no reason to suppose Labour would be anti-racing. Starmer’s wife, Victoria, is said to be an enthusiast For British racing the very calling of an election has been a blow. Poor prize money levels compared with its international competitors and falling attendances have been further imperilled by the cutback in wagering occasioned by the clumsy affordability checks involved in proposed gambling reforms.

 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.

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.

You couldn’t miss the heartbreaking irony of one of the greatest rugby players who ever pulled on his boots passing away just as the latest tournament was getting under way featuring 18-stone behemoths smashing into each other. Barry John, who retired at 27 and died last Sunday at 79, could have walked through brick walls and emerged unscathed. Was he the finest fly-half ever? He was certainly the most beautiful to watch. He played just 25 games for Wales and a handful for the British and Irish Lions, including the 1971 tour of New Zealand when he helped them to their only series victory against the All Blacks. It was then that the Kiwi press, not known for its admiration of players not wearing black, christened him ‘King John’.

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 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.

The engine wasn’t what it was, they said. At ten years old the spark that had once made him a champion was flickering only intermittently at best. The fire in his belly had gone out. There had been five runs since his last victory and when Paisley Park, a horse who once nearly died of colic, whipped round at the start of Cheltenham’s Cleeve Hurdle last Saturday and gave his four top-class rivals a start of some 15 lengths it seemed all over. Ruby Walsh, the greatest Cheltenham jockey of them all, was watching for ITV. Asked if he would now persevere on Paisley Park he replied: ‘No, you don’t. You just give up and come back to the parade ring. He’s going round now in a race he can’t possibly win.