Robin Oakley

‘Racing isn’t a team sport,’ the diehards used to tell us about the Shergar Cup, Ascot’s annual contest for three-rider teams representing Europe, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Rest of the World, and the Girls. How odd then that the annual extravaganza of six handicaps lavishly sponsored by Dubai Duty Free with its frenziedly twirling cheerleaders and belting theme tunes, its jockey team uniforms and its Silver Saddle prize for the top points-winner, should once again last Saturday have attracted a sellout crowd of 27,000, the biggest turnout the course achieves outside of Royal Ascot.

Khalid Abdullah, John Gosden and Frankie Dettori — owner, trainer and jockey — already figured among the great names of racing. After this year’s Qipco-sponsored King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes they were joined in the pantheon by Enable, the astonishing filly who has been the prime focus of their attentions this year. As she stood in the winner’s enclosure, her flanks heaving with the effort but her intelligent eye still flickering around the gathering of racing’s great and good, both she and we had no doubt that we were in the presence of equine greatness. She has huge ability, she has guts and she has presence.

A woman I once encountered at the dining table whose prime years were clearly behind her described herself as ‘approaching fifty’. Noting our raised eyebrows she added, ‘Look dears, I don’t have to say from which side.’ Suddenly the weighing room too seems full of veterans. Lightweight jockey Jimmy Quinn is certainly approaching 50 from the wrong end while Frankie Dettori and Franny Norton, both still in their riding prime, are 46. It was, though, the 49-year-old John Egan, who recently shrugged off a chipped vertebra in a Kempton fall with a teenager’s resilience, who had me comparing.

Having spent three quarters of my life covering politics and the other quarter following racing, I am often asked what the two have in common. One answer is that politicians are often gamblers. David Cameron tried to solve his party’s divisions over Europe by launching the Brexit referendum and failed spectacularly when an irritated electorate overturned the odds. Despite having a workable majority, Theresa May bet the Tory farm on a snap election seeking to increase it and she, too, lost on an apparent certainty. Playing party political games with the nation’s future, neither deserved any better. Certainly, I find few in racing who believe that Brexit, especially May’s beloved ‘hard Brexit’, is going to help them.

Back on the political beat with CNN for the general election, I was reminded how politics is now dominated by personality, or the lack of it. Led by the media, we want our politicians to be authoritative enough to dominate an EU summit yet ‘normal’ enough to know what’s topping the pop charts or who’s in the final of Strictly Come Dancing. It has led to idiocies such as Gordon Brown pretending he listened to the Arctic Monkeys or an ingratiating David Cameron claiming to have voted for Will Young on X Factor at his daughter’s insistence when Young was actually on Pop Idol, which he won before Cameron’s daughter was born.

Nobody I know has ever been interviewed by an opinion pollster. Nor do I ever encounter anybody who has won one of those holidays in the Bahamas we are encouraged to enter competitions for every time we open a crisp packet or pull the tab off a soft-drink can. I used to be equally sceptical of claims that bookmakers lost between £15 million and £20 million on 28 September 1996, the day Frankie Dettori rode all seven winners on the Ascot cards. I know plenty of people who bet on horses, but none who lay out seven-horse accumulators on a single jockey’s rides. This week I am a little less sceptical.

Most racehorse trainers, those at least who didn’t have a legacy from Aunt Agatha to lubricate their way into the business, have attended the School of Hard Knocks, their tutors including some famously celebrated deliverers of colourful reprimands. Think Gordon W. Richards or Barry Hills. Having worked for Jenny Pitman and served eight years as assistant to the seemingly almost permanently incandescent Mick Channon, Joe Tuite, a Lambourn trainer in his own right since 2010, probably has the ultimate degree in bollockings. He was one of five stable lads who on one famous occasion misheard Jenny Pitman’s instructions.

The longer Donald Trump sits there the better Ronald Reagan looks, not least because he had a sense of humour. The President who told his aides that he should always be woken in an emergency, even if he was in a cabinet meeting at the time, once declared that he wasn’t worried about the budget deficit: ‘It is big enough to take care of itself.’ There were moments during the jumping season just ended when our Twelve to Follow had me worrying about a significant budget deficit. Sad to say, after several highly profitable years, our Twelve to Follow this winter left us, on a £10 win stake for every run, with an overall loss of £22 compared with the previous year’s profit of £101.

Any of us can forget little things on leaving home in a hurry. To the chagrin of Mrs Oakley, who might need a pint of milk or a few more tonics on my way home, my mobile phone and I don’t always arrive at the races together. In that regard I have long sympathised with the former Chancellor Kenneth Clarke. He regularly left his government-issue model at home (especially when heading for a day’s cricket) complaining, ‘The trouble with mobile phones is that sometimes people call you on them.’ I even forgot my wallet one day en route to Ascot and had to borrow my day’s staking money from the esteemed financial editor Jeff Randall.

Every Grand National reminds me of a hero of my youth: Beltrán Alfonso Osorio y Díez de Rivera, the 18th Duke of Alburquerque, a Spanish amateur rider who became obsessed with the race but whose only entry in the record books is for breaking more bones in competing in the National than anybody else. I have spent much of the past year working with Edward Gillespie — managing director of Cheltenham for 32 years and the impresario supreme of its springtime Festival — on a book recording the highlights of jump racing over the past 60 years. It was Edward who unearthed an Alburquerque story I had not heard. In 1974, having just recovered from a broken leg, the Iron Duke smashed his collarbone and rode at Aintree in a plaster cast.

Bookmaker Paddy Power once famously declared, ‘Cheltenham is the best craic you can have and if you cannot look forward to it you need to have your doctor check you are still alive.’ This year it seemed that the whole place was in danger of being enveloped in Irish tricolours. Irish-trained horses won 19 races compared with the mere nine taken by horses trained in England. Willie Mullins, despite drawing a blank on the first two days and seeing the previously unbeaten Douvan vanquished thanks to injury, still trained six but was beaten to the Festival championship by Gordon Elliott with another six victories and more second places. With Sizing John’s Gold Cup victory, plus two more, Jessica Harrington became the most successful female Festival trainer ever.

If the championship for training jumpers went to a set of gallops rather than to a trainer it would not be Paul Nicholls’s Ditcheat precipice nor Nicky Henderson’s historic Seven Barrows facilities outside Lambourn or even Colin Tizzard’s Venn Farm on the Dorset border in the lead: the prize would go to the two stiff gallops, against the collar all the way, at Grange Hill Farm, Naunton, in the heart of the Cotswolds and just 12 miles from the Cheltenham course that has been the focus of the jumping world these past four days. The gallops are used by both Nigel Twiston-Davies, the proprietor of Grange Hill Farm, and by this season’s fastest-advancing handler Fergal O’Brien, who turns out his horses from the Upper Yard, which is the other side of the road.

When the generals have lost heart and crept away from the battlefield it is hard for the ground troops to keep up their spirits. Although the Cheltenham Festival buzz is already in the air, BetBright Chase Day at Kempton Park last Saturday definitely had something deflated about it. Everybody was still doing their jobs but the atmosphere wasn’t one of celebration or expectation. The cover of the racecard for which punters had to fork out £3 carried, as it long has done, the words ‘Kempton Park — a Jockey Club racecourse’, but that doesn’t have the same ring about it now we know that the Jockey Club intends, as soon as it can secure a property developer’s signature on the cheque, to turn Kempton into a huge housing estate.

The drumbeats are quickening ahead of the Cheltenham Festival and at this stage there really is no substitute for going racing. Some might have ducked Newbury’s Betfair Hurdle meeting on Saturday because of the bitter wind, which made a hot-water bottle the most prized object on the winner’s rostrum, and because the other two key races on the card were reduced to three and four runners. More fool them. Both produced intriguing contests and vital clues for the Festival. An earnest statistician once asked a northern trainer what the crucial signs were that told her when one of her horses was ready to win a race. She replied, ‘Just one. A grin on my husband’s face after he comes in from the gallops.

Away from frosty Britain, lecturing my way across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro, life has been dominated more by Donald Trump than by Dickie Johnson with passengers seeking refuge in jokes about the new president. ‘Why does Donald Trump keep marrying foreign women?’ ‘Because there are some jobs Americans just won’t do.’ ‘What can Melania possibly see in him?’ ‘Five billion dollars and high cholesterol’ and ‘How does Donald Trump hope to get six million Mexicans back home?’ ‘Juan by Juan.’ Well, it’s either humour or take to drink.

You had to feel for ITV’s new racing team on their opening day at Cheltenham. It was cold, wet and utterly miserable but they opted not to take refuge in a warm studio but to stay close to the action under their brollies, putting a brave face on things. During what I nowadays look back on as my misspent youth as BBC political editor, I once did the same. As I began a live interview for the Nine O’Clock News from an outside balcony at a Labour party conference, bursting to reveal some exclusive information, the heavens opened. I was drenched within 30 seconds but continued, only for the newscaster to cut me off after just one question with a brisk ‘Thank you, Robin Oakley in Brighton.’ Furious, I called the programme editor: ‘What the hell were you doing?

The biggest oohs and aahs on the entertainment scene this winter were nothing to do with the ‘He’s behind you ...oh no he isn’t’ of pantomime. They were the collective gasps of astonishment from 21,000 spectators at Kempton Park on Boxing Day as Thistlecrack, a novice steeplechaser in only his fourth race over the big fences, took on two previous winners of the King George VI Chase and beat them hollow. He beat them not just because of the massive engine within his spectacular frame but thanks to the sheer majesty of his explosive jumping, often taking off far beyond the wings of the fences and soaring over them as if they were matchwood.

It is a long time since I spent a morning on the gallops with the footballer-turned-racehorse trainer Mick Channon (he was in Lambourn at the time), but it proved an education for me and for two inappropriately dressed young owner’s daughters who also turned up. Their vocabularies were extended considerably. National Treasure though he became, as one of our great footballers, Mick Channon the trainer is expletive-driven and easily angered to a Basil Fawlty level, which is disheartening for the jockeys and apprentices he often fires at roughly fortnightly intervals, who are still there the next week. His default mood is somewhere on the downside of grumpy.

Talking to Paul Nicholls earlier this season, I was shaken to hear the ultra-competitive champion trainer say that he wouldn’t want to be starting again now. If younger trainers are to get to the top they need somewhere they can train a hundred horses from, he said. ‘You need to be in the right place with the right opportunity. It’s very, very tough.’ Two young trainers most would back to make it are former Nicholls assistants Harry Fry and Dan Skelton, and the other major figure whose former assistants are making their mark is Nicky Henderson. Those who have graduated in recent years from Nicky’s Seven Barrows equine finishing school include Charlie Longsdon, Tom Symonds, Jamie Snowden and Ben Pauling.

When Theresa May came to power the Turf community was full of hope. Had she not been, if only briefly and in partnership, a racehorse-owner herself? Perhaps, then, she might revive the question Margaret Thatcher used to put to her ministers about any intended senior appointment in Whitehall: ‘One of us?’ Sadly, those early hopes are evaporating fast. It is not just that the pound’s collapse since she confirmed that Brexit means Brexit has given foreign owners a 20 per cent advantage at the bloodstock sales. It is fear of the government’s puritanical streak, a streak that has led to a new gambling review and the suggestion that ministers are minded to ban advertisements for gambling before 9 p.m.