Robin Oakley

It is around 3 a.m. in Northern Ireland in the early 2000s as two British soldiers share a dank ditch waiting for the dawn. ‘What will you do when you leave the army, Sir?’ asks Corporal Jordan Wylie. ‘I’m going to train racehorses,’ says Captain Jamie Snowden. ‘And I’m going to make some money and send you a horse to win the Grand Military Gold Cup.’ As an in-demand amateur rider starting with point-to-points at 16, Jamie had already won Sandown’s trophy for services riders. At Sandhurst in 2002 on a day when his platoon were due to endure the rigours of gas attack training, he was booked out instead to ride Folly Road in the historic race when the originally booked rider couldn’t make it following a mortar attack.

A generous new Levy deal would be nice, as would English-based trainers producing as many winners as their Irish counterparts at this year’s Cheltenham Festival. But perhaps the most important development for British racing in 2025 is that the massive gamble being taken by the 53-year-old Anglo-Iranian Kia Joorabchian should begin to pay off. Joorabchian, who has made a tidy fortune from investment companies and football dealings, has been a racehorse owner for more than 20 years and over 200 winners have carried his colours. Now he has committed himself to ambition on a totally different scale.

Hallelujah, he’s back. What we needed to take racing’s attention off the miseries of inadequate prize money, shrinking attendances and structural problems was a genuine superstar, and when Constitution Hill galloped elegantly and professionally to Boxing Day victory in Kempton Park’s Christmas Hurdle, over the formidable Irish mare Lossiemouth, that was precisely what we saw. In the social-media age, every saloon bar grump’s six-pint mutterings seemingly qualify as expert opinion Lossiemouth is trained by the legendary Willie Mullins. Her sex allowance gave her a 7lb advantage in the weights and she had already had a race to sharpen her up, while Nicky Henderson’s charge hadn’t run since he won the corresponding race the year before.

You didn’t want to approach Davy Russell before a race. He spurned selfies with owners and didn’t talk to the lad or lass leading up because he was ‘in the zone’ – his mind focused totally on the race ahead. Yes, in Davy Russell: My Autobiography (Eriu, £20), written with the knowledgeable Donn McClean, we get the stories of his two Grand National victories on Tiger Roll, his Gold Cup success on Lord Windermere and his years as Ireland’s champion jockey. But it is his reflections on race-riding which make it  my racing read of the year.

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.

Long before I could afford to go racing I began collecting racing books, my first jumble sale acquisition the marvellously entitled Sods I Have Cut On the Turf by 1920s jockey Jack Leach. Leach, who was friends with Fred Astaire and Edgar Wallace, kept his weight down by jogging wearing four sweaters and three long johns under a rubber suit but always had a good steak dinner with wine. ‘If possible I used to take off an extra 3-4lb so that I could have a small sandwich and a glass of champagne before racing started. This made me feel a new man – and if I had a few ounces to spare I had another glass for the new man.

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.

There’s no shrewder punter than J.P. McManus who likes to say: ‘There’d be many more fish in the sea if they could only learn to keep their mouths shut.’ Last year, clever young Emmet Mullins won the Cesarewitch with J.P.’s The Shunter but when Emmet let it be known that he was aiming for the other half of the Autumn Double, sending This Songisforyou to Newmarket for last Saturday’s Cambridgeshire, there was no way of keeping a lid on things. The money poured on him for days.

Billy Connolly once declared that Scotland had only two seasons: June and winter. Perversely, though, just as the northern swallows are setting their alarm clocks and checking departure times for Cape Town and Johannesburg, it has become the Oakley tradition to head for the Isle of Mull. In recent years the accompanying essentials, Mrs Oakley, a case of good wine, long wellies and a surf-addicted flat-coat retriever, have been supplemented by author Felix Francis sending me in late August his latest forthcoming ‘Dick Francis novel’.  When Motivator won in 2005 he had more owners than any Derby winner in history – 230 of them Racing’s continuance owes much to partnerships and syndicates.

There is a new dilemma for racehorse trainers. ‘What do I do?’ some of them are now worrying. ‘Do I put up signs saying, “Please don’t pee in the boxes” or “Urination forbidden at all times”?’ Such measures, they appreciate, are hardly going to attract a young couple who’ve come into money and are being shown round the yard thinking of investing in a couple of horses. But if they do not take such steps they risk facing draconian punishments. Let me explain.

Gary Lineker once summed up football as ‘a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.’ Ascot’s Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup, a team contest in which four teams of three international jockeys, one of them restricted to female riders, compete for points on randomly drawn horses, is going the same way. In this month’s contest the Ladies team, led as usual by everybody’s favourite girl next door Hayley Turner and including Yorkshire’s Joanna Mason, won for the fourth time in six years. Hayley herself triumphed in two of the six races and for the third time collected the Alistair Haggis Silver Saddle for the most points.

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.

We are blessed these days with a rare stream of jockey talent including the likes of William Buick, Ryan Moore, Tom Marquand and Rossa Ryan. Well clear of the pack though in the chase for the jockeys championship is former champion Oisin Murphy, and five minutes in the winners’ enclosure rather than on the track left me convinced at Newbury last Saturday that if I still had shares in a horse, Oisin would be the one I’d want riding it – and not just because of the two trebles he notched up last week. Successful trainer Hugo Palmer wasn’t in evidence but surrounded by a gaggle of owners after the 4.10 Novice Stakes, Oisin truly earned his £162.79 rider’s fee by giving them a state-of-the-art debrief.

Politicians pretty well have to be gamblers. You give up a promising career in, say, dentistry, teaching or accountancy for a world in which all but a fortunate few are almost bound to end in tears. No matter how diligent and attentive a constituency MP you may be, if the national mood swings against your party, you will be voted out of a job. Your party may be taken over by a dominant clique of head-bangers with views alien to your own. Even if you make it through to ministerial office, some departmental disaster created by others may have you hounded by the media until you are forced to resign.

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.

The Flat season proper has opened with an almighty shock and a cruel tragedy. First City of Troy, the latest horse to be anointed by the incomparable Aidan O’Brien as the best he has ever trained, flopped like a wet sponge in the 2000 Guineas. Then with Charlie Appleby’s Godolphin team mopping up top races to demonstrate that their comparatively poor 2023 was merely a blip, their Hidden Law passed the post as an impressive three-lengths winner of the Chester Vase. As bookmakers’ fingers flicked laptop keys to instal the Dubawi colt as a new favourite for the Derby, a few yards further on he took a false step and shattered his right foreleg. Within minutes he was euthanised.

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).