Robin Oakley

As André Fabre walked off the Derby course following the success of Pour Moi, I watched one of the horse’s connections embrace him and declare, ‘I’ll tell you one thing. He’s a cocky little bastard, isn’t he?’ It wasn’t the horse the hugger had in mind: jockey Mickael Barzalona, despite winning by just a head after coming from further behind to win than any Derby jockey most can remember, had stood bolt upright in the stirrups and waved his whip in exultation a couple of strides before reaching the post. A jockey who had done that for an old school trainer like Barry Hills might well have had a crack of the whip across his own backside the next morning on the gallops.

Mrs Oakley hopes it will be a lesson to me after all the abandoned umbrellas, mislaid mobiles and washbags left in hotel-room bathrooms over the years. When changing planes at Mumbai Airport at one o’clock in the morning en route for Hong Kong, I failed to pick up my laptop after the security check. Retrieving it from Britain took seven weeks. The airline didn’t want to know and airport authorities would hand it only to a personal representative. It only ever came back thanks to old friends at CNN: thank God, I still work occasionally for an international organisation. ‘Never mind the £150 in airport fees and freight charges,’ I thought as I popped into CNN’s London office to collect it. ‘Things can only improve now.

The debate on whether or not the extraordinary Frankel should contest the Derby seems to be concluded, at least in Henry Cecil’s mind, which is the place that matters. The common view seems to be that no mere horse could repeat over the undulations of the four furlongs longer Derby course the extraordinary physical explosion, the sustained surge of power which won him the 2,000 Guineas over a mile at Newmarket,  and so we won’t see the best horse around in the most glorious race there is. Life is rarely that tidy. Henry Cecil felt it was too soon to test such a speedy horse even over the mile and a quarter of most Derby trials and who can blame him.

Racing folk sometimes wince as the whiskered commentator John McCririck, a professional chauvinist, refers to his wife Jenny as ‘The Booby’. He was at it again in the racecards for this year’s Cheltenham Festival, but I will worry on her behalf no more. Two days after the Gold Cup, I was lecturing on Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 as we steamed through the South China Sea en route from Hong Kong to Vietnam. Those on board were treated to an unmissable aeronautical display alongside the liner as a hundred big birds soared, dived, skimmed within an inch of the waves, wheeled, glided and co-ordinated flight tracks with the precision of the Red Arrows.They were, the commodore confirmed, Red-footed Boobies.

The most colourful sight at Sandown on the Saturday before the Cheltenham Festival was not the jockeys’ silks but the vivid bruising around Ruby Walsh’s eye as he returned on his first winner since breaking his leg in November. The blues, reds and yellows visible on his stitched-up face were the result of a fall on King of the Refs at Naas three days before. Had he feared the worst as his mount had gone down? Oh, no, said Ruby matter-of-factly, in a jump jockey’s life there is all the difference in the world between ordinary nuisance pain and ‘oh, my God, I’ve broken it’ pain.

Truth is as strange as Dick Francis’s fiction. Newbury’s meeting on Saturday when, in a bizarre accident, two horses were electrocuted in the parade ring was a tragic and hideous experience. Those who heard the dying squeals of Andy Turnell’s Marching Song will never forget them. It was all the sadder because it should have been a day for us all to celebrate Nicky Henderson’s achievement the day before of clocking up 2,000 winners as a trainer, an achievement he might well have underlined by winning the Totesport Hurdle, the richest handicap hurdle in Europe, with one of his three contenders. Instead, racing was quite rightly abandoned after the first race by the Newbury stewards. A few other trainers have managed bigger totals.

‘Why should those of 60-plus use valet parking?’ inquired one of my Christmas cracker mottos. ‘Because valets don’t forget where they park your car.’ Life does catch up on you, as I recently discovered when my son beat me 3–0 at table tennis despite the secret training session I had sneakily put in before we knocked up. (In the Oakley household table tennis is not a gentle ping pong: it more closely resembles war to the death.) What really stung was his gracious reference afterwards to how the results used to be the other way round, even if only by a point a game, and to the inevitability of the ageing process.

The more unctuous of vicars tend to assure us through December that ‘the true joy of Christmas lies in giving’. There are moments, however, when one’s faith in such advice is sorely tested. After trawling most of the West End, Mrs Oakley had this year secured the ultimate outfit for Grandchild No. 5. Unfortunately, when we moved house in early December, the package containing dress, blouse, headband, etc. disappeared. Ultimately, there was no option but to search through the remaining 53 unopened boxes of books, which have been stowed in an icy cold, unlit outhouse until we build shelves to accommodate them. The removers, we felt, just might have tucked the item inside one. In box 52, and I kid you not, I found the precious parcel.

When I told a story involving Elizabeth Taylor at a charity lunch lately my host capped it with a better one. Princess Margaret and the screen superstar once dined together in New York. Part way through the meal La Taylor thrust forward her hand, on which glittered one of the chunkiest, most famous diamonds in the world, and asked, ‘What do you think of that?’ Looking disdainfully down her nose, Princess Margaret declared, ‘Personally, I find it rather vulgar.’ At which her dining companion whisked the ring off her finger, slipped it on to one of Margaret’s and inquired challengingly, ‘So what do you think of it now?’ That comes under the heading of Good Questions. There are others.

Life certainly had its moments at Newbury’s Hennessy meeting. Emma Lavelle’s Tocca Ferro had impressed many on his seasonal return at Ascot and looks set for a rewarding future after his victory in the sportingbet.com intermediate hurdle showed an increasing professionalism. Then there was the double with Sarde and Regal Approach for Kim Bailey, who has remained amiable through some cruel dips in fortune since his Cheltenham Gold Cup and Champion Hurdle winning days and who is now at last back in the form of old... Sarde was handled ably by stable amateur Charlie Greene, but Regal Approach was given a true professional’s ride by Sean Quinlan whose 19 winners in the season to that point had all been for the Bailey yard.

Only over the past two or three weeks has the horse-racing community turned its attention to jumping but the National Hunt world has not been standing still. When Flat racing ended at Doncaster on 5 November, the racing phenomenon known as A.P. McCoy had already ridden 115 winners in the jumping season, which still has five months to go, while his perpetual pursuer Richard Johnson was on 88. Sadly, the same day came a stark reminder of the perils of the winter trade. If this is A.P.’s year, cemented by the great wave of public admiration and affection that greeted McCoy’s Grand National victory on Don’t Push It, it certainly hasn’t been Ruby Walsh’s year.

Nobody communicates his pleasure in winning with a more all-embracing bonhomie than professional gambler Harry Findlay. Labrador puppies presented with a dog treat are a model of restraint by comparison. Even so, the degree of Harry’s enthusiasm as I presented him with the trophy earned by his Inler in the Barry Hills Biography Stakes at Doncaster on Saturday came as a surprise. It turned out that his joy in accepting the capacious ice bucket, the £7,546 he will share with the Sangster family and a free copy of Frankincense and More was just a little supplemented by learning that he held eight of the 14 winning tickets in that day’s Tote’s Scoop6, giving him a decent chance of picking up the £1 million rolling bonus this weekend.

Former champion jockey Bob Davies once walked into the paddock and asked the trainer of the horse he was about to ride over three miles and 24 stiff fences, ‘Does he jump?’ Back came the reply: ‘That’s what you’re here to find out.’ ‘When they say that to you,’ Mick Fitzgerald told me on Sunday, ‘then you know you are in trouble.’ We were talking at a Cheltenham Literary Festival lunch to promote his new book, The Cheltenham World of Jump Racing (Racing Post, £25), and with the jump season proper starting at Cheltenham this weekend there could not have been a better time to hear the views of a man who rode that undulating course as well as anyone has ever done.