Robin Oakley

The Wagnerian tenor Lauritz Melchior was supposed to conclude an operatic scene one night by leaping upon a mechanical swan gliding across the stage. Unfortunately the appointed swan arrived, and departed, before he had concluded the key aria. More than a little miffed by the failings of the production team, Melchior turned to the audience and inquired acidly, ‘Anybody know the time of the next swan?’ I too have a fairly spectacular missed-bus problem. Although most readers will not see this article before Friday or Saturday, The Spectator’s production schedule requires the copy to be delivered on a Monday. This offering cannot therefore reflect on jump racing’s major event of the year, this week’s Cheltenham Festival.

I like the sound of the restaurant that has apparently opened in a former bank with a banner urging ‘Put your mouth where your money was’. Actually, after Kempton on Saturday, there is a little more of it than there usually is. Money, that is. I cannot recall the last time I had five winners on a card which, since we all remember our winners better than our losers, probably means there wasn’t a last time. Sadly, since Mrs Oakley’s 20-year-old food mixer coughed itself to death last week, the winnings will probably be put to practical rather than celebratory use. Food mixers these days, I have learned, come at about the same price I paid for my first car.

There is no certainty today. For years we humble wage-earners were told that City bankers were sage repositories of special expertise who could be entrusted with that little that is left when the taxman and the bookies have finished with us. In reality, it turns out, they were greedy spivs who knew no more about the financial packages they dealt in to feed their bonuses than the betting shop loud mouth who claims infallible information about the winner of the forthcoming 2.30. Now in racing, too, we are riven with doubt.

Racing isn’t just about speed and style. Sometimes it is all about sheer guts. On trials day at Cheltenham, with the tacky ground sucking the life out of every leg, with every extra pound on a horse’s back feeling double on the lung-busting uphill drive to the post, courage mattered. It was one of those heartening occasions too, so much more likely in jump racing, when smaller yards shared the spoils with the big boys. Not many in the Cheltenham crowd, I suspect, would vote left of centre. But racing crowds thrill nonetheless to a bit of redistribution of income and the victories of Joe Lively in the big race, the Letheby and Christopher Chase, and of The Sawyer in the Grade Three betchronicle.com Trophy were cheered to the echo.

One of my favourite spectator sports is sitting, glass in hand, watching Mrs Oakley in the kitchen. There will be a stock reducing here, a pan with a few chopped leeks and onions there. A pinch of this, a sprinkle of that. A handful of coriander and a scrinch of lemon, a shlurp of rather better wine than should really be devoted to culinary purposes — and then probably another shlurp. It is all done with the confidence of a surgeon taking the first slice into a patient, the dexterity of a master cooper. There is no sign of the hesitation that seizes Mrs O when she is asked to choose from someone else’s menu in a restaurant. In short she is not a book cook but an instinctive cook. And most of the best trainers are the same.

When, back in the mists of history, I proposed to Mrs Oakley (in the rather naff Caribbean cocktail bar of what seemed at the time to be a fashionable London venue patronised by a set we could not afford to join) I prefaced my question with a long preview about the perils of marrying a journalist. Fortunately, she did not take me seriously. A young CNN producer told me the other day that she was warned on starting her journalism course in a Spanish university that the failure rate for marriages in our trade was worse than any other. But Mrs O has stuck with it through a train-wreck life of cancelled dinner parties, curtailed holidays and mortally offended ex-friends with more predictable occupations. My Christmas reading has consoled me that she could have done worse.

The clatter of hooves in the stable yard, the smell of the work riders’ bacon butties drifting in the air. Warmly wrapped trainers and bloodstock agents scratching at their catalogues. Horses breezing in pairs down the Kempton straight in the misty early morning. When CNN sent me out last Friday to see what effect the recession was having on horse-racing I have rarely had such a concatenation of work and pleasure. With some people it is boot sales. Others trot regularly along to Crufts or watch the Antiques Road Show every weekend. In my case, I fear, I am becoming addicted to horse auctions. Which has led to more than a little debate with the normally indulgent Mrs Oakley.

Eat your heart out, Stubbs. Wrong century, Sir Alfred Munnings. After Nicky Henderson’s Jack the Giant had won the Carey Group Handicap Steeplechase at Ascot last Saturday and stood in the winner’s enclosure quietly steaming with that unmistakeable gleam of achievement in his eye, his proud trainer revelled in his commanding physicality. ‘Isn’t he just what you would take if you had to have a model to paint a racehorse?’ he exclaimed. Chasers don’t come much better-looking than the tall six-year-old. Jack the Giant is a perfect example of well-honed strength and athleticism, his big frame coupled with just the sort of boldness in the eye you would expect from a son of the great battler Giant’s Causeway.

‘Look here, Sunshine,’ I remember Eric Morecambe responding to a raised eyebrow from André Previn about the comedian’s musical efforts. ‘I am playing the right notes, just maybe not in the right order.’ My tipping goes like that too. For the previous Flat season I suggested that William Haggas’s Conquest might ‘pop up at a nice price later in the season’. So he did. Unfortunately, Conquest’s 40–1 victory in the Stewards’ Cup and his 16–1 handicap victory happened not in the 2007 season but in the one just ended. After our healthy profit over jumps the Flat Twelve sadly proved more a case of appreciating quality than counting profits.

Last year’s Flat jockeys’ championship was a classic, an intriguing all-out battle to the last week of the season, with Seb Sanders and Jamie Spencer sharing the title. So it was in 1987 when Pat Eddery and Steve Cauthen slugged each other into total exhaustion as Cauthen won 197–195. This year the title has long seemed a foregone conclusion. Put a jockey with the talent of Ryan Moore in combination with Sir Michael Stoute’s 200-plus horsepower and the contest seemed over before it had begun, even with Richard Hughes riding out of his skin. Combine a Kieren Fallon with Sir Michael, let a fired-up Frankie Dettori go after the title with Godolphin’s battalions enjoying a good season and there is little doubt most years about the outcome.

Was that the chairman of Coutts I saw emptying his pockets of wads of twenties round the Ascot betting ring on Saturday? Was that the CEO of HBOS in front of me in the Tote queue investing exclusively on 100–1 shots? Illusions, of course. It must have been the unaccustomed glare of sunshine which greeted us punters on Willmot Dixon Group Day. But in a world in which only sock and mattress salesmen can be turning a profit it scarcely seemed like gambling any more to be going to the races. Who could say that a 7–2 shot like Emma Lavelle’s much-touted Champion Hurdle hopeful Crack Away Jack at Chepstow was not a wiser investment than an Icelandic government bond or a promised 8.5 per cent return on an ISA with the Grab the Bonus and Run Investment Trust?

What a glorious spectacle it was at Doncaster last Saturday. And no, I don’t mean Frankie Dettori launching himself at Sir Michael Stoute like an exuberant four-year-old vaulting into a parent’s arms for a hug, or even the mildly embarrassed trainer, a bonhomous but stiff-backed bear of a man, wiping off the smacker of a kiss that Frankie gave him later. Those were extra relish. No, I mean the triumph of Conduit, trained by M. Stoute and ridden by F. Dettori, in the last and longest of the English Classics, the 1m 6f St Leger. For me, St Leger Day at Doncaster is one of the best days out in racing amid one of the liveliest of sporting crowds. But for some years now the St Leger has been the Cinderella Classic.

The one advantage of missing last Saturday’s race day at Sandown, thanks to being encased at the time in a throbbing MRI scanner at St Thomas’s Hospital, was the chance of going Sunday racing instead at Folkestone. Posh it may not be. Trainer George Margarson and I were probably two of only ten people on the track wearing ties around the tree-shaded paddock. But Folkestone knows how to do family fun. There were rugs on the lawn around the goldfish pond, and those who weren’t simultaneously ferrying three gargantuan burgers back to their companions were queueing for the ice-cream van. Everyone seemed to be there with children. And it was listening to the offspring outside the owners and trainers bar that made me realise where I may have gone wrong in educating mine.

Who would ever have thought that two wheels could prove as exciting as four legs? Watching the triumphs of Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins, Ross Edgar and Rebecca Romero in the Olympic Velodrome I cheered myself hoarse. Frankie Dettori might have difficulty managing a flying dismount from the mechanical steeds on which they scored their successes, and could end up with some anatomically inconvenient splinters if he did. We are, I suspect, some time off the day when Sir Michael Stoute will employ a full-time psychiatrist on the Freemason Lodge staff as Team GB did in the cycling equivalent of the pit lane in Beijing. But what a spectacle they provided, and what a perfect mix the commentary was in blending emotion with technical know-how.

Where there’s a will . . . Observing a short-eared owl beating over the marshes like a huge, predatory moth, an osprey finishing off the fish meal he had snatched a few minutes before from Loch Don, an otter carrying home his supper across a rippling inlet were highlights of a few days on the Isle of Mull this week. But the most illuminating moment was watching a kestrel twisting and diving in aerial combat with a buzzard. The buzzard was three times his size but it was the smaller raptor who performed the aerobatic equivalent of kicking sand in the big fella’s face. Finally the buzzard flapped off with weary wingbeats as if to say, ‘OK, OK, if this patch matters that much to you...

I once bought a house from a chap who insisted that Shakepeare’s entire output had in fact been penned by Francis Bacon. Be that as it may, Bacon did come up with the odd pithy insight, as when he argued, ‘Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age and old men’s nurses.’ Lately, I have been putting Mrs Oakley’s companionship qualities to the test with a trapped sciatic nerve, which has made me about as much fun to live with as John McEnroe at two sets down and serving to save the match.

I heard from a Nato general not long ago the story of two hot air balloonists in the US who got lost. They descended to check their bearings from visible landmarks and found themselves above a massive and curiously shaped building. Seeing a man crossing the car park one balloonist shouted, ‘Where are we?’ ‘In a balloon,’ the man yelled back. At which the other man in the basket stoked up the hot air and took them back up through the clouds. When his companion queried his action, arguing that their informant had been useless, he replied, ‘Oh, no. The information was short, accurate and no bloody use to anyone. That had to be the Pentagon.

OK, so they do a good mint julep at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby. There are impressive wonga-mountains on offer for winners at the Dubai World Cup meeting. Outstanding horses patronise the various US venues of the Breeders’ Cup. But this time let’s hear it for Royal Ascot, the meeting that had everything, including a winner for the Queen, Free Agent, on the final day. The Berkshire course has had its problems over rebuilding. Too many of those who attend are an irrelevance, more interested in fascinators than forelegs, more concerned with tinkling glasses than thundering hooves.

You don’t have to be a brilliant rider to make it as a trainer. As jump jockeys, Paul Nicholls and Philip Hobbs never rose above the middle ranks. Both have since proved to be exceptional at training jumpers. In ten years as a jump jockey Tom Dascombe rode only 96 winners, but as a trainer he is making his mark a lot faster. Unlike Nicholls and Hobbs, though, and despite spending five years with leading jumps trainer Martin Pipe, whom he rates as ‘a genius’, Tom is concentrating on training Flat horses. The explanation lies in simple economics: ‘I started buying all my horses on spec [without having been commissioned to do so by owners]. It can take a time to find them owners.