Robin Oakley

I should have listened to George Duffield. Sandown Park’s Eclipse Stakes, the first time the Classic generation of three-year-olds take on their elders, is one of my favourite races and the then 53-year-old rider’s triumph on Giant’s Causeway in 2000, beating Kalanisi by a head after Pat Eddery had driven him into the lead 200 yards from the finish, was the duel I will never forget. Duffield was Sir Mark Prescott’s stable jockey and soon after that race the Newmarket maestro took a call from Aidan O’Brien, Giant’s Causeway’s trainer. ‘Whatever you do Sir Mark,’ said the quiet Irish voice, ‘make sure you breed from him before you let him go!

We all wanted Frankie to have a last Royal Ascot hurrah. In the end he got four, including a ninth Gold Cup to list on the Dettori honours board, a ride in carriage four of the Royal Procession and a cheeky kiss for the Queen. Ascot has always done for him what the Hollies crowd at Edgbaston have done for Stuart Broad, revved up by his flailing arms as he pounds into the wicket. But let us not grieve: a truly thrilling Ascot provided plenty more evidence of quality in the saddle. John Gosden wryly noted of Mostahdaf: ‘He’s going to enjoy being a stallion’ ‘Riding is about reaction,’ said Ruby Walsh after Shaquille won the Commonwealth Cup for co-trainers Julie Camacho and Steve Brown in the hands of Oisin Murphy.

You can take a jockey who has ridden there out of Hong Kong; it’s a lot harder, I reflected, after a chat at Newbury with Neil Callan, taking Hong Kong out of the jockey. Even though this is his second season back on home territory after spending ten years in that racing pressure cooker, Neil still watches every one of the 18 races a week at Sha Tin and Happy Valley and remains grateful for what Hong Kong did for him. He went out there as a good jockey – you don’t get invited to take up a Hong Kong contract unless you are in the top echelons elsewhere – and he came back a better one. Back in the UK, Neil Callan, the champion apprentice in 1999, had been in the top five for some years.

Everybody in racing is looking for an edge. With 7-4 the field, the punter is looking for a 2-1. The racecourse executive wonders which pop group will add 4,000 to the gate if booked for after-racing entertainment. The jockey on a confirmed front runner plans to slip the field out of the stalls. Trainers all seek an extra ingredient to help win them races consistently. At Sarsen Farm, a state-of-the-art new yard in Upper Lambourn built on the site of what was once a decrepit farmhouse then a Jockey Club tractor depot, Daniel and Claire Kubler are hoping that what a famous if ungrammatical advertisement for white goods used to call ‘the appliance of science’ is going to do the trick for them.

Usually in May I am still casting an enviously nostalgic eye backwards to Aintree and Cheltenham, reluctant yet to pack away my stouter shoes and rainproof Barbour. This year it is different: I have rarely looked forward more to the Flat. It all began with two glorious races for the Guineas. Rock-star wrinklies make farewell tours an annual event, but this really is to be Frankie Dettori’s last year in the saddle and in this year’s 2000 his victory on Chaldean was a perfect reminder of his skills. Andrew Balding, scoring his second training success in the race in four years with the first horse sent to him by Juddmonte, was characteristically happy to deflect the glory Frankie’s way, saying: ‘What a brilliant ride.

John Trotwood Moore, one-time State Librarian of Tennessee, was a racist and defender of the Ku Klux Klan. But in the saying for which he is best remembered he did get one thing right: ‘Wherever man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilisation we will find the hoofprint of the horse alongside it.’ I was reminded of his words because of those used by trainer Christian Williams after his Kitty’s Light had won a famous victory in last Saturday’s bet365 Gold Cup at Sandown Park. Christian is not only an outstanding trainer of staying chasers, he is also the father of a little girl called Betsy who was recently diagnosed with leukaemia.

When jockey Derek Fox came over from Ireland to join the Scottish stable run by Lucinda Russell and her partner, Peter Scudamore, the long-time champion rider, he was teaching himself to read via texts on his phone. Now he discusses books with Scu. Cleverness comes in different shapes and it was a supremely intelligent ride Fox gave Corach Rambler to win this year’s Grand National, just as he did winning two Ultima Chases at Cheltenham on the same horse. The same close-knit team won the National six years before with One For Arthur but this time Fox’s participation was in doubt until just hours before the race when, after completing a series of press-ups, he finally declared himself recovered from a shoulder injury.

Mrs Oakley not being a turfista, she rarely joins me on a racecourse expedition. But before we had a dog there used to be one exception. When I was headed for Stratford-upon-Avon we would make a weekend of it. Mrs Oakley would take in a matinee at the Royal Shakespeare Company, I would go racing and we would regroup for dinner. If I had enjoyed a successful day we would upgrade the dinner and the bottle which accompanied it. Had she been with me last Saturday it would have been a very good bottle. Cheltenham it isn’t, but the Stratford track, not far from Anne Hathaway’s cottage, is what the bard might have called a comely little wench of a racecourse.

Aficionados came to this year’s Cheltenham Festival hoping to celebrate in Champion Hurdle contestant Constitution Hill a super-horse, a horse being spoken of after only five races as a potential Arkle. We left exhilarated by the exploits of three. Looking at Constitution Hill in a field of grazers, you would not pick him out as an obvious star. As his owner Michael Buckley told me two days after his triumph in the Champion Hurdle: ‘He wouldn’t win a trot in the indoor school.’ He just eats, sleeps and wins races. Says trainer Nicky Henderson: ‘We worry about him but he doesn’t worry about anything.’ As for the future, ‘You could jump a fence, you could go three miles… He has had six races now and barely come off the bridle.

The London Times of 10 March 1922 drily recorded: ‘It is very seldom that Irish racing and hunting people make a determined attack on an English meeting without paying at least their expenses. One gathers that they did more than that yesterday.’ The Times was chronicling Connemara Black’s triumph in the Foxhunters’ Challenge Cup – a victory greeted as Ireland’s first at Cheltenham. Things have moved on since then and at last year’s Cheltenham Festival Irish-trained horses won 18 of the 28 races, not quite as spectacular as their feat of winning 23 in 2021 but still a phenomenon that had England’s racing fraternity scratching around feverishly for excuses.

You don’t bounce so easily at 40 and last Thursday, after 25 years, it was one fall too many. Without fanfare or fuss, a fit Tom Scudamore quit the saddle. There will be days when he will miss the adrenaline-charge of driving a horse to victory in the shadow of the post, the thrill of making up a horse’s mind in the right split second before a jump, the quiet satisfaction of having clicked and pushed a crusty old handicapper for three miles to gain a young trainer an unexpected victory. So when we met on the parade-ring steps at Ascot on Saturday my dilemma was: congratulations or commiserations?  Two minutes before, Thomas Mor, from the David Pipe yard where Tom has spent his working life, had won the Bracknell Handicap Hurdle.

Trainer Olly Murphy was trying hard at Sandown Park last Saturday not to get carried away after his Chasing Fire had extended his unbeaten career to five with a convincing win in the Virgin Bet Novices’ Hurdle. ‘He’s good but I don’t know how good,’ he declared. ‘Could he win a Supreme? I’ve had a second and third but never the winner. I’ve only been training for five years and haven’t had a champion, but I hope this one can be good.’ Particularly delighted that the gelding had won in the familiar blue colours of Diana and Grahame Whateley, the stable’s biggest backers, Olly noted that you have to throw a lot of money at it to achieve success in racing. As he put it: ‘You get to kiss an awful lot of frogs before you find a Prince Charming.

I can always tell when Mrs Oakley has walked our flatcoat retriever. On our next outing Damson nudges my pocket every 200 yards having been encouraged to consider completion of that distance sufficient accomplishment to be rewarded with a treat (although, truth be told, it is Mrs O. who deserves the treat for three-mile dog walks just two months after breaking her hip). Rewards were much harder-earned at Lingfield Park’s Winter Million meeting last Saturday on the all-weather polytrack surface. To my shame I had travelled there grudgingly: plan A had been to watch the mighty Energumene at Ascot, plan B to see if Bristol De Mai could do it one last time at Haydock, but both meetings were frosted off and so I settled for what I thought would be second-rate racing on the all-weather.

Like most people in racing I began 2023 down in the dumps, moaning about insufficient prize money, small fields and declining crowds. Gloom only intensified with racing’s administrators, the British Horseracing Authority, yet again forced into a humiliating U-turn on new rules it had proposed governing jockeys’ use of the whip, doing so just days before the bedding-in period for their implementation began. Lions unled by donkeys once more. In my despondency I had forgotten the actual magic of going racing but it took only a few hours at Sandown on Veterans’ Chase Day to rekindle the sheer joy of the sport and its rich tapestry of characters who will in the end ensure its survival.

In racing’s record books 2022 will be remembered especially for Alpinista’s Arc de Triomphe and Baaeed’s all-round brilliance. But it was the year, too, in which we lost the sport’s most popular owner, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, and the greatest ever jockey, Lester Piggott. His figures still astound. Lester won 30 British Classics including an unrivalled nine Derbies. His 116 winners at Royal Ascot included 11 in the Gold Cup and in all he won 4,493 Flat races. Nobody but Lester could have beaten Rheingold in the Derby as he did on Roberto. But what I will always remember was his victory in the 1990 Breeders’ Cup Mile.

After an autumn of no shows and poor attendances that was more like it. A decent crowd at Sandown Park on Betfair Tingle Creek Day had plenty to cheer about including a definitive victory in the feature race by Alan King’s Edwardstone, which stamped him as the best two-miler around, and a dazzling round of jumping from Jonbon in the Henry VIII Chase which saw him cut to 7-4 for the Arkle at Cheltenham next March. ‘I’m absolutely stealing a living when I go out on him,’ said Jonbon’s jockey Aidan Coleman. ‘He’s push-button.

The government may for the moment have disbanded its circular firing squad, but racing has never shown a greater ability for self-harm. For once last Saturday I was not on a racecourse. Unfortunately, Mrs Oakley had had a late-night mishap with an Ugg boot and after a midnight ambulance, a night in A&E and her hip-replacement operation, my presence was needed elsewhere. Jump jockeys are only too familiar with A&E wards and limb-setting operations, but on our first acquaintance we marvelled not only at the skill and care of the NHS teams but especially at their patience with an astonishingly high proportion of abusive and aggressive patients with dementia. As one trauma ward doctor put it to me: ‘Hospitals are not a place for rest.

When things went wrong in his days running the Daily Mirror, the scoundrel Robert Maxwell used to shout: ‘Which effing idiot thought of doing that?’ Told once by a bolder-than-average subordinate that what proved to have been a disaster had been his own idea, he responded: ‘In that case what effing idiot let me do it?’ Thanks partly to generous layers who pay up to six places in Heritage handicaps, it has been a prosperous punting season for me but at Newbury last Saturday it was bookmakers 7 – Oakley nil and I have nobody to blame but myself. Every year I counsel myself to hold back as the autumn rains start changing the going and making a nonsense of form figures achieved on good to firm.

For a Radio Four programme she was hosting Clare Balding once had the idea that it would be fun to apply the techniques of horse breeding to the political world. Strolling around the parade ring at Newbury we duly recorded an item imagining gene mixing between the will to win of a Margaret Thatcher and the indestructibility of a Denis Healey, the feistiness of Barbara Castle with the sinuous positioning of a Tony Blair. Some of those in the couplings suggested even continued speaking to me afterwards.