Robin Oakley

We had been through so much together. Racing not just on the domestic scene but also in Melbourne, Mauritius and Maisons-Lafitte. Together over 15 years we had been bird-watching in Venezuela, Costa Rica and the Gambia, Madagascar and the Isle of Mull. But at Newmarket last Saturday somebody relieved me of my long-cherished Zeiss binoculars. Bombed out perhaps by too many 18-hour days lately in the television job, I either left them on the roof of the car as I retrieved an umbrella from the boot or I put them down when writing out a bet. Either way, somebody chose to help themselves. One should not become attached to inanimate objects but somehow I grieve for those bins as well as nursing a sense of grievance at a dishonest world.

Sadly the racing season both for pure-bred Arabians and even for camels was over when I was in Qatar last weekend. But I did discover that Arab mums, like British trainers, tend to wear rose-tinted spectacles. ‘To an Arab mother,’ the Gulf saying goes, ‘every donkey is a gazelle.’ I do rather like, too, the way angry Arabs don’t tell someone to ‘go and jump in the lake’ but to ‘go and tile the sea’. I can only hope, after the traumas of seconditis that we suffered with our winter Twelve To Follow, that I don’t get too many end-of-season invitations to go aquatic tiling. And hope was resurrected over jumps. Attentive readers might recall that I offered John Quinn’s Leslingtaylor as a substitute for the injured in my Twelve.

There is no cannier, or more careful, man in racing than Sheriff Hutton trainer Mick Easterby, 76 this weekend. If he didn’t exist, Yorkshire would have to hew him out of Wensleydale stone. He says he would like to win the Lottery and spend all his days counting, not spending, the money. He collects farms the way other people collect Toby jugs or first-day covers. The sign on his office wall used to declare, and probably still does: ‘If I can’t take it with me, I don’t want to go’. True or not, the story they tell of the owner who called Mick Easterby and said he’d like to buy a nice four-year-old hurdler takes you to the essence of the man. ‘I’ve got just the ’oss for you’ was the reply.

George Bernard Shaw once asked a female acquaintance on a cruise ship, ‘Will you sleep with me for £10,000?’, and received an affirmative answer. When he followed up by asking her, ‘Would you sleep with me for £10’, the lady took considerable umbrage, demanding furiously, ‘What do you think I am?’ ‘That,’ said the playwright, ‘has already been established. Now we are merely negotiating the price.’ We are all after a price for something. Having been deeply impressed by his prep run on the Polytrack, I have been trying to find a bookmaker willing to offer me an ante post price on Blue Bajan for Lingfield’s Winter Derby.

Newmarket it isn’t. Forget clipped hedges, purring security gates and decorated dovecotes. At Gary Moore’s yard in Woodingdean there isn’t even a name over the stables the other side of the road from the ten-furlong start on Brighton’s racetrack. I’ve seen grander allotment huts than the cluster of wooden and breezeblock stables stretching down the hillside, the rails chewed to a fretwork by equine nibblers. A number of the horses are clad in hand-me-downs, some still bearing the initials of former handlers. Forget the Tidy Britain competition, all the effort goes into the horses who, by contrast, look a picture. It is all about energy, bustle and the sheer happiness of a stable where everybody mucks in. H.E. Bates’s Larkin family would have loved it.

There was at least one game girl on the race train back from Newbury on Saturday. ‘You didn’t smell very good on the sofa this morning,’ the carriage heard her tell a potential swain on her mobile. ‘But if you’re up for a celebration tonight then I am, too.’ On the basis of a flat-mate’s introduction to a temporary lodger, she was clearly willing to take a chance. Many are going to have to take a similar risk with this year’s Cheltenham Gold Cup favourite Kauto Star, who is giving a new definition to the concept of a flawed diamond. The biggest star of the jumping scene remains a question mark on four legs. Kauto Star would smell fine on the sofa. He looks grand and oozes class. He has a magnificent engine.

What makes a successful racehorse trainer? Patience and an eye for detail. Man management and a flair for publicity. But the right genes help, too, and there Nick Gifford, the handler of the first-class hurdling prospect Straw Bear, does have an advantage. Son of the former trainer and ex-champion jockey Josh Gifford and of an international show-jumper mother, Nick didn’t so much learn training skills as absorb them through the pores. There was no need, in his case, to seek experience in other stables, although he did show his independence by running his own point-to-point yard for three years. You soon see why a preparatory career as a jockey wasn’t an option for Nick.

A punting friend at Kempton Park told me about the school class last week who were asked to stand up and talk about  what their fathers did for a living. The sons of bakers and binmen, stockbrokers and scaffolders all happily recounted their parents’ daily routines. But one little lad at the back refused to come forward. Finally, when pressed, he mumbled, ‘My Dad wears fishnet stockings and works as a male pole dancer in a sleazy night club.’ After class the teacher remonstrated, ‘Now come on, Johnny, that wasn’t the truth, was it? I’ve seen your Dad, the clothes he wears, the car he drives. He’d have been really embarrassed, wouldn’t he, to hear you make up something like that.

While you don’t have to be a masochist to be a jump jockey it surely helps. You can expect a fall, on average, every 13 rides and it is the only profession in which you are followed round by an ambulance. Self-flagellation, too, seems to be part of the picture. Former champion jockey Richard Dunwoody detailed in a brutally honest biography how impossible he became to live with thanks to his obsession with winning. Now we have Timmy Murphy’s Riding the Storm (with Donn McClean, Highdown, £18.99), a cathartic confessional of the alcoholism that put the jockey in Wormwood Scrubs after he became hopelessly drunk on a flight back from Japan, assaulting a stewardess and urinating on the fuselage.

When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better In a Cary Grant film in which she effectively played herself, Mae West declared, ‘When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.’ Exotic Dancer, the six-year-old trained by Jonjo O’Neill who runs in the familiar pink silks of Sir Robert Ogden, can be good, and he can be an absolute stinker. Five days before the Paddy Power Gold Cup he ran second of three at lowly Carlisle, beaten by 28 lengths after effectively downing tools when asked for an effort.

Required by the day job to be in St Andrews on Friday night, reporting the latest example of governmental hope over experience in the Northern Ireland power-sharing talks, I was determined still to make it to Champions’ Day at Newmarket. Sir Percy’s first appearance since the Derby, a cracking contest for the Cesarewitch and the prospect of a renewed duel between two outstanding two-year-olds in the shape of Teofilo and Holy Roman Emperor for the Darley Dewhurst Stakes looked like providing the perfect Flat finale before most of us turn our attention to the jumping game. Hence a 2.45 a.m. reveille to drive to Edinburgh and check in 11 boxes of TV equipment at 4.15 for a 6.15 flight.

A vicar at a wedding I was at last week told of a driver who broke down with a lorryload of penguins. He flagged down another lorry and offered its driver £100 to deliver his consignment promptly to the zoo. His own vehicle repaired, he was alarmed when he got to town a few hours later to see 50 penguins marching across a zebra crossing. He berated the other driver. ‘I thought I told you to take them to the zoo,’ he said. ‘I did,’ came the reply, ‘but that was hours ago. There was still money left from your £100, so now I am taking them to the cinema.’ I, too, sometimes have trouble fulfilling my instructions from the saintly Mrs Oakley, who asked me, en route back from Goodwood, to stop at Sainsbury’s for olive oil. ‘What kind?

Listing page content here Watching the woman in front of me in the Ascot Tote queue backing five horses in the same race on Saturday reminded me of Lloyd Bentsen, one of the best US politicians never to become president, who died last week. Asked once if it wasn’t rather unfair running simultaneously for vice-president and for a Senate seat, he said he had modelled his political career on a vet and a taxidermist in his home town. The pair had set up shop next to each other in the main square, erecting a board which ran across the top of both premises, proclaiming: ‘Either way you get your dog back.

We all have our rituals. Swans and ducks migrate, the ones that aren’t riddled with H5N1 anyway. We all have our rituals. Swans and ducks migrate, the ones that aren’t riddled with H5N1 anyway. At an appropriate season, starlets and cameramen cluster in Cannes. Canny financiers ‘sell in May and go away’. And invariably at a weekend around the time of the 2,000 Guineas I retreat to my study with a bottle of good malt, the floppy Raceform weekly formbook and Timeform’s latest chunky little bible, this year the Racehorses of 2005 (£70, post free, from Timeform, 25 Timeform House, Halifax, West Yorkshire HX1 1XF), in an attempt to find a few winners for the Flat racing season, a season which I refuse to take seriously until the time of the first Classic.

‘The unexpected ones are always the sweetest,’ said J.P. McManus ‘The unexpected ones are always the sweetest,’ said J.P. McManus after his Hasty Prince had followed half a dozen duck eggs by running out the 14–1 winner of the first at Sandown last Saturday. Following the extra-marital cavortings of deputy prime minister John Prescott, built more like a manatee than a matinée idol, I’m not sure that Tony Blair would agree with that, but the £12,526 McManus picked up for first prize helped cement his position as champion owner as the jumps season ended. The biggest surprise, though, was Martin Pipe’s announcement on the day Paul Nicholls became champion trainer that he was retiring to hand over to his son David.

It was lunchtime at a Church school and there was a large dish of rosy apples. A nun placed a note on the fruit: ‘Take only one: God is watching.’ Further down the line was a dish of biscuits. ‘Take all you like,’ one child was heard telling another, ‘God is watching the apples.’ That child surely grew up to be a bookie, and at this stage of the Flat season they are cramming the cookies while we punters flounder, trying to discover which yards have got it together despite the cold spring and which three-year-olds have trained on through the winter.

Is there perhaps at the bottom of the Thames, slithering back and forth with the tides, a muddy heap of mobile phones, glowing faintly in the dark, some emitting their last faint trills and so interfering with the radar of errant amphibians? I only wonder because nobody every returns to me the mobiles which, to the despair of Mrs Oakley, I lose at frequent intervals. I use only secondhand untrendy models of no interest to passing youth and I label each one with name, address and telephone number. The last two were abandoned in taxis but never made it to the Lost Property Centre. Presumably it is too much trouble for the cabbies and so they just chuck them in the river. On Saturday, the latest went steaming on in the luggage rack towards East Grinstead as I alighted at Lingfield Park.

Dick Francis spent more than ten years gathering material for his biography of Lester Piggott, a man not famed for his spendthrift ways with cash or words. ‘I know you think Sir Ivor was the best of your nine Derby winners,’ Francis said to him one day. ‘Tell me about him.’ Piggott thought for some five minutes and replied, ‘Nice horse.’ So helpful. The story came to mind when I picked up a racecourse whisper for the Martin Pipe-trained Nice Horse in the last at Sandown on Saturday, but when he drifted from 13–2 to 10–1 it seemed best to leave well alone. Fortunately, I sided with another French-bred import, Nicky Henderson’s Temoin.