Robin Oakley

Racing yards all have their own character, some pretty as picture books, some run like military camps. Down a muddy lane in deepest Hampshire Emma Lavelle’s stables are all about cheerful teamwork. At the top of her gallops last week we were reflecting how the great Vincent O’Brien insisted on having the straw in each box perfectly plaited, a bowl of water at the barn door to ensure his boots remained sparkling. At Emma’s Cottage Stables, the rooks were cawing in ivy-clad trees as the trainer stood in puffer jacket and jeans amid the circle of horses clattering on the tarmac, O’Brien might have raised an eyebrow at the cheerful clutter, the easy informality of trainer and staff.

Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin said the other day that he had got on better first time at George Bush’s ranch than he had expected. ‘He must have thought: “What’s going to happen if he invites in a former Intelligence officer?” But Bush himself is the son of a former head of the CIA, so we were a nice little family circle.’ It reminded me of asking Tony Blair after his first meeting with Putin how it had felt doing business with a guy who had made his way in the world not as a democratic politician but as a KGB spook. ‘Well,’ mused the PM, ‘there are some advantages. It was the first of my overseas trips that didn’t leak in advance.

Down in his canal field on a damp November morning, Paul Webber’s horses were working in threes, hooves thudding into the resilient turf. This time it was Gift Voucher, Off Spin and Star Shot. ‘It’s such a lovely sound, horses galloping on good ground;’ declared the trainer, adding, ‘they can look good on the all-weather, but you get a much better idea whether a horse will stay on winter ground working it on grass.’ Paul’s wife Fiona watched on old Flying Instructor, once the stable star and winner of races like the Red Rum Martell Chase at Aintree, now the nearly white hack leading the string. Astride one Thelwell-style pony on a leading rein was five-year-old Hugo.

Seeking to persuade Mrs Oakley to wager a bottle of Ledaig single malt on which of three wet sheep will be first up a windy escarpment tends to be as close as you get to racing when holidaying on the Isle of Mull. But one of the great blessings of the sport is its depth of anecdotage, and the three latest volumes kept me going for the week. The preface to Leigh and Woodhouse’s Racing Lexicon (Faber, £9.99) mentions the racing enthusiasm of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, which reminded me of the bishop who declined an invitation to say grace at the Gimcrack dinner ‘because I don’t really want to remind the Almighty that I am here’. The Lexicon provides a guide to racing jargon and journalism.

One back for Australia, even if it took an Italian trainer and a French jockey to do it for them. Loping round Newmarket’s pre-parade ring on Saturday in the shadow of Brigadier Gerard’s statue, the sun glinting on his massive shoulders, the deep-chested Starcraft looked immense. He stands 17 hands, and the white bandages on his two back legs only emphasised that his feet are the size of soup plates. But then in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes he showed us that he has a stride and an engine to match. Considering that it was the mile championship of Europe, the race itself was a curious event. Philip Robinson took Rakti to the centre of the course.

‘A German joke,’ a former British ambassador once told me, ‘is no laughing matter.’ The Germans take their elections seriously, too. It has been no easy matter, in my day job for CNN, spraying an international audience with initials as I try to explain how the Red–Green coalition of the SPD and Joschka Fischer’s lot are trying to fight off the CDU and its sister party the CSU, who want to govern with the FDP but who, because of the intervention of the PDS plus some SPD rebels in the new Linkspartei, may be forced to govern in a ‘Grand Coalition’ with the aforesaid SPD.... had enough? Sorting out the form for an 18-runner sprint handicap is simple after that.

Racing at Newbury on Stan James Day was more like yachting, once defined as standing in a gale tearing up £20 notes. Nor did it help when the heavens opened that my umbrella was in the stands 200 yards away and that, thanks to a back injury, I could only hobble at the pace of an asthmatic turtle. It just wasn’t my day. On the way from Kennington to Paddington I had been foolish enough to question the sainted Mrs Oakley’s navigational skills and only narrowly escaped being turned to stone in the froideur which followed. I had mistimed my trains and was bound to miss the first race anyway, then First Great Western could not find a driver for the next train. If I had had any sense I would have turned back and spent the day on the sofa.

After last Saturday’s Stewards’ Cup, trainer Dandy Nicholls was bouncing around the unsaddling enclosure like one of those rubber balls one always coveted as a child: small and perfectly formed but hard and indestructible, too. He carries several stones more than he did when he won the most competitive sprint of them all as a jockey on Soba in 1982, but not an ounce of it is soft. Nicholls is a tough Yorkshireman who turns out tough horses, but for a while after the last-stride victory of Gift Horse we saw the softer side of a man in a state of what one can only call dazed elation.

Some sportsmen explode precociously into the headlines — and disappear as quickly. Some, while respected by their peers, have to graft their way through the tack-on paragraphs and body copy before they win recognition. If you had looked up Shane Kelly on the internet a few months ago, you would probably have had to be content with references to a sultry-voiced American soul-singer or an Australian Olympic cyclist. As he swung into the saddle aboard Amanda Perrett’s Pagan Crest for the first at Newmarket on Saturday, I was reflecting that, if you had sought odds at the start of the season on the 26-year-old jockey from Leitrim who shares that name riding 100 winners this season, you would have been generously accommodated.

An American Treasury official was commenting recently on Tony Blair’s efforts to get one item on the G8 agenda. ‘We said no over dinner,’ he declared. ‘We said no on the ride home. We said no on the front porch, and still he said, “Come to bed.”’ By the time you read this we will know whether Mr Blair’s persistence has paid on an international financing facility for poorer nations. But persistence clearly pays on the racetrack. As an admirer of Terry Mills’s highly efficient stable, I am always delighted when the no-nonsense Epsom trainer gets his hands on a good one, as he has with the sprinter Resplendent Glory.

Humphrey Bogart once complained that the trouble with the world was that ‘everybody in it is three drinks behind’. He would have liked the three Irishmen ahead of me on the track to Esher station after Saturday’s Betfred Gold Cup meeting ended the 2004–5 jumping season. ‘Jasus, it was cramped in there, never seen such a crowd,’ declared one, weaving left and cutting off my inside break. ‘“Too many tramps?”, you’re right,’ muttered the next, swerving right to close down the next gap that appeared. ‘There wasn’t a decent woman in sight.

For the Beach Boys it was California Girls who were sans pareil. For Chas and Dave it was the Girls of London Town. But this column is dedicated to the girls of Merseyside. On Grand National Day at Aintree, it was wet and windy. Umbrellas turned inside out, racecards disintegrated to sodden pulp, rain seeped down inside your collar. But everywhere you turned there they were in their wispy little bits of silk and lace, spray-tanned midriffs frequently on view, dressed nine out of ten of them for a summer evening’s dance floor and still loving every minute of it. It was a pity that Carrie Ford, the 33-year-old mother who came out of retirement to ride Forest Gunner, trained by husband Richard, could not give them a first female victory in the race to reward their cheery stoicism.

For me there was never a comedian to match Ireland’s Dave Allen, perched on his stool fastidiously flicking imaginary cigarette ash off his suit, drawing out a story with a sip of whisky and flaying with the laughter he provoked all those who set themselves in authority over us, from mothers superior to prime ministers. My favourite Allen story was the one about the two drunks in a pub who leave at ten-minute intervals, making their way home across a churchyard. The first one falls into a freshly dug grave. He tries a few jumps at the slippery sides, a few shouts for help, then settles down in a corner to sleep off his excess. Soon the second drunk, tripping over a tombstone, lands in the other end of the same grave.

Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, a show-biz historian once pointed out. Only she did it backwards. The feminists do have a point, and while women riders still don’t get a fair deal in British racing, Kempton on Saturday provided yet another reminder of how well women trainers take their opportunities. My hope that Best Mate can prove a Cheltenham hero again this year was restored when I bumped into the ever-amiable Henrietta Knight, who was sat chatting with a friend in the betting hall. Perhaps because she already has three consecutive Gold Cup victories under her belt, she seems more relaxed this year and she assured me that ‘Matey’ is in very good shape despite the snuffles that have affected some other occupants of her West Lockinge yard.

Genes, it seems, can survive a period of hell-raising. ‘I know that name. What else has he got?’ I heard a racegoer inquire of his companion at Kempton on Saturday, after Mark Rimell had trained Crossbow Creek to win the big race of the day, the Totesport Lanzarote Hurdle. The answer is: ‘For the moment, not very much.’ Mark Rimell has only one other older horse in his yard of 13 mostly untried youngsters. But that other horse is Oneway, with whom he had the previous Saturday captured the biggest race on the Sandown card, the Ladbrokescasino.com Handicap Chase, the chaser completing a four-timer in the process.

The Soviets had sent a dog into space before they sent Yuri Gagarin. When the astronaut Gagarin, after his feat, came to London, he was mobbed by admiring crowds, an adulation which, at the height of the Cold War, alarmed some of Harold Macmillan’s ministers. It took the old maestro himself to put things into perspective. ‘Just be thankful,’ he told his Cabinet, ‘that they didn’t send the dog.’ Jump racing, too, needs a sense of perspective. With the finances of British racing, following a European Court ruling, in the hands of m’learned friends and potentially facing meltdown, and with the hunting ban on the way, many are rushing round insisting, ‘We’re all doomed.

It didn’t start well at Lingfield on Saturday. I discovered too late that on my walk across the field from the station I had been dribbling £1 coins, carefully saved for Mrs Oakley’s car-parking fund, through a hole in my pocket. And if the nice Chinese lady who mends my pockets smiles sweetly and says ‘too much money’ the next time I take one in for attention, I swear I’ll wring her neck. She clearly hasn’t got a pension fund with Standard Life. Fortunately, this early in the real jumping season I chose to keep most of my money in my wallet for the rest of the afternoon.