Robin Oakley

Before this year’s Shergar Cup meeting all I had seen of Australian flat jockey Mark Zahra was a memorably painful picture of him at Flemington racecourse on Melbourne Cup day some years ago, his red and white colours almost obliterated beneath the half-tonne bulk of War Story, an accident in which he could well have suffered far worse injuries than the broken leg and wrist he sustained. After his five Ascot rides last Saturday British racegoers knew a lot more about him.

It is stupid to become attached to inanimate objects but when modern technology finally forced me to ditch the Olivetti Lettera 32 mobile typewriter which had taken me round the world as a correspondent I truly felt the pangs of parting. In the same way I have been resisting Mrs Oakley’s insistence, repeated with increasing vehemence over recent months: ‘It really is time we changed the car.’ Alas the ten-year-old BMW 320, a veteran of racecourse car parks nationwide and innumerable trips to the council dump as we restored a crumbling house, is now on its way out.

Newmarket’s wisest trainer, Sir Mark Prescott, once noted: ‘The greyhound is propelled through the pain barrier by its desire to sink its teeth into the tantalising white bunny tail ahead of it. Humans are driven through it by the desire for riches and stardom. But what’s in it for the racehorse?’ His words came to mind after Beat The Bank, owned by King Power Racing, the operation founded by the late Leicester City chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, and trained by Andrew Balding, won the Group 2 Summer Mile at Ascot on Saturday for a second year. It was a ninth victory in 18 races for one of the most popular horses in his leading yard, but tragically his last.

When Hayley Turner was made, she wasn’t just given a competitive spirit, a sensitive pair of hands and excellent balance. Somebody screwed her head on the right way too. Profiled by the Racing Post after becoming the first woman to ride a Royal Ascot winner for 32 years on Thanks Be, she was embarrassed to take the limelight away from trainer Charlie Fellowes, who was also recording his first Royal Ascot success, and swift to urge her interviewer not to go down the feminist-icon route: ‘Maybe it’s going to help the girls in the future, give them another goal, but that’s it, full stop. There’s no need to keep going on about it.’ She’s right.

Boris Johnson, Remainers might like to be reminded, does sometimes change his mind under pressure. Some years ago, as editor of The Spectator, he dropped the then weekly Turf column, as he told me, ‘to provide more room for politics at the front of the magazine’. Fortunately for me, so many readers protested at its absence that he reinstated it, although on a fortnightly basis. That is why sometimes, given the necessary interval between copy submission and publication, there cannot be coverage that might be expected, as with Royal Ascot this week.

There is a danger that memories of the 2019 Epsom Derby will be swamped by statistics. By training his seventh Derby winner in Anthony Van Dyck, the self-effacing Aidan O’Brien equalled the totals set by Robert Robson, John Porter and Fred Darling between 1793 and 1941. The first of Aidan’s Derby successes, Galileo in 2001, has sired four of the winners since then. No fewer than seven of the 13 runners in this year’s scurry over Surrey for the Blue Riband of the Turf came from Aidan’s Ballydoyle team and five of them were in the first six past the post. John Magnier, the driving force of the Coolmore team, has now had a share in the ownership of ten Derby winners, nine of them trained at Ballydoyle. But in a sense all that is for the anoraks.

Newbury is as fair a test for a racehorse as you can get with its galloping track and a wide-open finishing straight that minimises hard-luck stories. It also gets the little things right: in contrast to the skimpy offerings from places such as Kempton Park, last Saturday’s racecard was a model, containing details in colour of runners at other meetings, a feature with jockey Jason Watson and good historical detail about past winners of the featured Lockinge Stakes.

So the Silver Fox has called it a day. We will never see Ruby Walsh, the man whom even Sir Anthony McCoy modestly calls the best jump jockey ever, riding competitively again. Though sad for his countless fans in Britain, it is entirely understandable that Ruby chose to announce his retirement at his beloved Punchestown last week after riding Kemboy to victory in the Gold Cup. But the racing authorities here must find an appropriate way of celebrating his stellar career. Ruby wasn’t as physically resilient as A.P. and had to cope with some dreadful injuries along the way, but there has never been a more intelligent rider over obstacles.

There are people I know who regard racing as a cold-hearted business that exploits animals and achieves little besides putting money into bookmakers’ pockets. Sadly for them they will never ever see the passion, subtlety or teamwork that goes into persuading fragile, sensitive or complicated horses to produce their best; the almost parental pride that trainers can’t help but show when an objective is achieved by one of the specially talented ones in their care. We witnessed it in the winning enclosure a few times this past winter when Warren Greatrex’s zestful, bold-jumping mare La Bague Au Roi was winning her races.

If you’ve never been to a Grand National and are approaching an age when it is appropriate to list ten things to do before you die, then put Aintree near the top of your list. The Cheltenham Festival provides a glorious championships to test the best in our sport but the Grand National, the People’s Race, remains a very special experience. On the wall of the Legends Bar at the home of the National a cluster of plaques commemorates those who have been inducted into Aintree’s Hall of Fame and last Saturday a short ceremony marked the inclusion alongside horses like Red Rum, jockeys like AP McCoy and trainers like Vincent O’Brien of a disc celebrating the late, great sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney.

As jockeys, trainers, punters and media folk gathered at Newbury on Saturday to say farewell to Noel Fehily, the ultimate professional who fittingly rode Get In The Queue to victory in his final race before retirement, I couldn’t help contrasting his departure with the picture of her Cabinet allies and those lovely forgiving folk in the ERG jostling simultaneously to force Theresa May out of No. 10, with a crowbar if necessary. Racing does its farewells decently whereas political careers almost invariably end in tears. Mrs May once had a share in Dome Patrol, a winner trained by Willie Muir, and she could do worse than seek solace in the racing world when she finally emerges from her Brexit morass.

Encountering a generous-hearted bookmaker is normally as rare an occurrence as finding a picture of the Duchess of Sussex without her hand on the Markle pregnancy bump. All credit, then, to Coral and Betfair and one or two others for their behaviour last Saturday. After a thrillingly close finish to the EBF Matchbook VIP Novices’ handicap hurdle at Sandown Park, the topweight One For Rosie, ridden by Sam Twiston-Davies, was declared the winner over the public-address system. Since I had backed him at 12–1, a certain amount of undignified jumping up and down ensued over which my racing companion was remarkably forbearing.

Owner Phil Simmonds from Rochdale was 17 when he first went racing, joining a friend’s stag party at Haydock Park. For years he dreamed of owning a racehorse and finally took the plunge. He bought a bumper horse called Burns Cross and placed it with Neil Mulholland, whose response appealed to him when he wrote to three trainers. A software developer, he doesn’t pretend, like some owners do, to know everything about the sport, acknowledging: ‘I love racing but I realise you can’t solve it with a computer programme.’ Last year Phil was driving to Chester races when Neil phoned. It was the kind of call every trainer hates having to make and which every owner dreads receiving.

The pre-war Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb apparently had a pre-marriage agreement. It wasn’t like today’s Hollywood prenups, designed to protect the assets of high earners when lascivious eyes roll on elsewhere. They simply agreed that Sidney would make the big decisions and Beatrice the small ones. Beatrice, however, had it sorted: she was to pronounce which was a big decision and which a small one. Lately the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) has been getting a lot of small decisions wrong. First it issued a ruling that in future all racehorses should be shod on their hind feet as well as their forefeet.

Last Saturday morning, Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google, was on the radio explaining his algorithm for happiness, apparently a publishing sensation. Happiness, it seems, is equal to or greater than the events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be. That was a tricky proposition for the 20,000 of us on the way to Cheltenham Festival’s trials day likely to have a few bets and facing a fiendishly difficult racecard. Trials day is the final opportunity for trainers to test out their best prospects for a desperately prized win at the Festival in March. Could this one stay an extra four furlongs? Can that one cope with Cheltenham’s idiosyncratic undulations?

‘Deer-stalking would be a very fine sport,’ W.S. Gilbert once observed, ‘if the deer had guns too.’ We who love jump racing have to acknowledge that there are plenty of folk out there who feel that horses, too, are helpless victims with no alternative but to hurl themselves at obstacles to profit heartless owners, trainers and riders. Trying to change the minds of such critics is probably akin to urging Jacob Rees-Mogg to stand a round for the EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker, but I just wish that some of racing’s critics could have been in the winners’ enclosure at Kempton last Saturday.

I don’t know who coined the old racing saying ‘The only person who remembers who came second is the guy who came second’ but he was wrong. What draws us aficionados to racetracks on blazing summer afternoons when we would be better off in a swimming pool, or on soggy winter days when sensible folk are curled up in front of the fire watching a DVD, is the prospect of a memorable race, an eyeball-to-eyeball clash of skills and determination between two finely honed athletes with the final outcome in doubt until the very last moment. Racing in 2018 gave us plenty to celebrate. Needing only one winner at Royal Ascot to pass Sir Henry Cecil’s record of 76 winners there, Sir Michael Stoute produced four.