OF HORSES AND HEROES - Brough Scott

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Measuring your life in racehorse shoes may not be as poetic as J. Alfred Prufrock’s coffee spoons in T.S. Eliot’s poem, but I can tell you it has been a hell of a lot more exciting. Racehorses have given me the most wonderful time, taken to me to all sorts of astonishing places, introduced me to the most extraordinary mix of people, and set a splendid, uncomplaining benchmark of behaviour when the human side seems to be disintegrating. Of course they are just dumb animals, but around them glories as well as disasters cling.

So many horses, and so much pleasure so often turning to pain: the bitter-sweet addiction of the racing game has taken me from one century to the next, and is just as good – and just as bad – as it ever was.

To choose a handful of horses to express the bite of this addiction has to be entirely subjective, and I have confined it to horses I knew directly and to pieces I either have written or would like to have written at the time. But there was no question as to with whom we would start. He actually only ever won one race, albeit that in the Isle of Wight point-to-point field where Black was later to star. He was thirteen years old by the time of that success, but he had already played a part in the somewhat wider victory that was World War One. He was bred and reared by my grandfather on the island, and built his courage wading into the breakers from the shore.

In our family he will always be the greatest of them all. He was a horse called Warrior, and his story has been with me from my mother’s knee. My grandfather Jack Seely wrote a book about him, somewhat unoriginally entitled My Horse Warrior, which with its original Alfred Munnings sketches and simple, unfeigned affection is in many ways rather more attractive than his other ‘How I Won the War’ books with resounding titles like Adventure, Forever England and Fear and Be Slain. March 2008 was the anniversary of Warrior’s finest hour. It seemed time to pay tribute. Thanks to the Sunday Telegraph, we did. Previous spread: Red Rum and Tommy Stack winning the 1977 Grand National.

WARRIOR

WARRIOR WAS READY, It was 9.30 on the morning of 30 March, Easter Saturday 1918. He had somehow survived four years of shell and bullet and privation and Passchendale, but now, in the little hamlet of Castel, not ten miles south west of the centre of Amiens, he faced his most dangerous mission of all. He would lead one of the last great cavalry charges in history. Behind him were the 1,000 horses of the Canadian Cavalry which, in the ten days since the German breakthrough against the Fifth army at St Quentin, had trekked an embattled 120-mile anti-clockwise loop south from Peronne to cross the Oise east of Noyon and then work back northwards to try and get round the spearhead of the enemy advance. In Warrior’s saddle, as he had been for most of the ten years since he bred the little bay thoroughbred back home in the isle of Wight, was my grandfather.

Fifty-one-year-old General Jack Seely was no shrinking violet, and legend has it that he later recommended Warrior for the VC with the simple, if somewhat immodest, citation: ‘He went everywhere I went.’ Jack had been elected MP for the Isle of Wight (how could he not be? – his family owned half the island) whilst still serving in the Boer War, but despite rising to be a senior member of the asquith Cabinet, his political career foundered when, on 30 March 1914, he had to resign as Secretary of State for War over the mishandling of the Northern Ireland drama known as The Curragh Crisis.

He and Warrior had first come to France on 11 august of that year. Since February 1915 he had commanded the bunch of ranchers, clerks, expats, Mounties and red Indians which made up the three regiments of the Canadian Cavalry. Jack Seely was a popular general. But not as popular as Warrior. If ever an animal was a symbol of indomitability for weary soldiers to follow, it was this short-legged wide-eyed, star-foreheaded, independent spirited but kindly gelding that in January 1918 had been immortalised as the first of the portraits painted by Alfred Munnings as War artist to the Canadian Cavalry.

Warrior was brave but not stupid, fast but not fragile, tough but not thick. His father Straybit had won the Lightweight race at the Isle of Wight point- to-point in 1909. His mother Cinderella was so affectionate that she used to follow Seely and his family around like a dog. Warrior did too. It was quite a sight behind the trenches. Warrior was a survivor. In September 1914 his groom Jack Thompson had to gallop ten miles across country to escape encirclement by the advancing enemy. In 1915 one shell cut a horse beside him clean in half, and a few days later another destroyed his stable seconds after he had left it.

On 1 July 1916, that fateful first day of The Somme, he and the Canadians were readied to gallop through the gap in the German wire which never came. In 1917 only frantic digging extricated him from the mud in Passchendaele, and only three days before 30 March 1918 a direct hit on the ruined villa in which he was housed left him trapped beneath a shattered beam. Yes, a survivor; but could he survive this? In hindsight it is easy to say that the Germans were overstretched, that the Americans would soon be in action, that the result was inevitable. But that is not what it seemed at the time. Check where Berlin, Paris and Amiens are on the map and remember that the news, from random gallopers and motorcycle messengers, was scarce; and that which came too often spoke of catastrophe. And don’t take my, or especially my grandfather’s word for it. Take witness from the greatest war reporter, not to mention war leader, that ever put pen to paper. ‘Actual defeat seemed to stare the allies in the face,’ he wrote.

Winston Churchill was on his way. as Warrior champed at the bit, ready to cross the river Avre at Castel and gallop up the hill to attack the German positions in Moreuil Wood, Churchill, of as a special envoy from Lloyd George, was being briefed first by Marshall Foch of France and then, later, by General Rawlinson, the commander of the beleaguered Fifth army at his headquarters ten miles south of Amiens. ‘The men are just crawling slowly backwards,’ Rawlinson told Churchill, ‘They are completely worn out.’ it did indeed sound desperate. Finally the general was asked if he would still be in position next day. ‘He made a grimace,’ Churchill records with majestic understatement, ‘the dominant effect of which was not encouraging to my mind.’ it was in this climate that Seely took the decision that was to lose a quarter of his men and half his horses before they finally came back to bivouac in the dark up in the Bois de Senecat, half a mile to the West.

But the advance had been checked, Moreuil Wood had been taken, and it had been taken because enough of the cavalry had been able to brave the bullets and dismount to clear the Germans, with – and this should cure some of us sportswriters of ever misusing the metaphor again – ‘bayonets fixed.’ Cavalry had become redundant in trench warfare. The Germans had disbanded theirs at the end of 1917. Lloyd George had argued for the allies to do the same after the disaster of the 27,500 horse and tank advance on Cambrai, when Seely and Warrior had trotted behind the leading tank only to see it crash through the bridge into the canal at Masnieres.

Horses were desperately easy targets, but a committed group of them could still act as a sort of early day parachute brigade. At full gallop they could shift hundreds of men half a mile in under a couple of minutes. The signal group would lead it – eleven men headed by Corporal King ready to plant the red pennant with the black C on a white star for the Canadians to aim for. With him was Seely’s 35-year-old ADC, the remarkable Prince Antoine d’orleans-Bragance (‘Orleans’ as great grandson of France’s last reigning monarch, Louis-Philippe; ‘Braganza’ because his maternal grandfather was the last Emperor of Brazil.) and where was Seely himself? Not for nothing had he named his horse ‘Warrior.’ The General led the charge. In fact he could not hold Warrior. ‘He was determined to go forward,’ said Seely of his charger after they had crossed the bridge and come up out of the hollow, ‘and with a great leap started off. All sensation of fear had vanished from him as he galloped on at racing speed.

There was of course a hail of bullets from the enemy as we crossed the intervening space and mounted the hill, but Warrior cared for nothing.’ Seely, Prince Antoine, Corporal King and six of the others made it. Five didn’t. The pennant was planted. Squadron after squadron came thundering up the hill, taking terrible casualties but going on to exact many of their own. The chaotic sounds of the hooves and the men and the guns was added to by the roar overhead of the wheeling biplanes of the royal Flying Corps, who dropped 190 bombs and fired 17,000 rounds into the mêlée. ‘One bomb dropped from a negligible height,’ records the German official history excitedly, ‘places the whole staff of the First Battalion “Hors de Combat”. Moreuil Wood is hell.’ Especially for horses.

The worst slaughter was to the east. Moreuil Wood was triangular, a mile long on each side. Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew took his 75 strong C Company of Strathcona’s Horse round the northern tip, only to gallop up out of a hollow and be confronted by two rows of machine guns. The Germans had rumours of a tank attack coming down from Villers Bretonneux. Horses did not have a chance. ‘Sir,’ sobbed Sergeant Watson when he finally crawled back with the news: ‘Sir, the boys is all gone.’ Warrior and Seely were now in the wood and what they were seeing was war at its most bayonet-thrusting horrible. In the thick of it was Fred Harvey, a 6 foot 2 inch rancher from Fort Macleod, Alberta, who had made his debut for Ireland eleven years earlier as a fly half on the wrong end of a 29-0 thrashing by Wales at the arms Park. In March 1917 he had won the VC for singlehandedly charging a machine gun. He never ever wrote a word about it, but at a regimental dinner in Calgary many years later confided ‘I don’t know about 1917, but I think I did a VC’s worth at Moreuil.’

The engagement went on into what became a rainy afternoon, and as the light faded an unlikely looking little motorcade came along the road in the valley. ‘The Bois de Moreuil lay before us,’ wrote Churchill, who was accompanying the French premier Georges Clemenceau at ‘Le Tigre’s’ insistence. ‘The intervening ground was dotted with stragglers, and here and there groups of led horses – presumably Seely’s Brigade – were standing motionless. Shrapnel continued to burst over the plain in twos and threes, and high explosive made black bulges here and there.’ ‘A wounded, riderless horse came in a staggering trot towards us. The poor animal was streaming with blood. “The Tiger”, aged seventy-four, advanced towards it and with great quickness seized its bridle, bringing it to a standstill. The blood accumulated in a pool along the road. The French general expostulated with him and he reluctantly returned to his car. As he did so, he gave me a sidelong glance and said in an undertone – “Quel moment delicieux.”’ it was not as delicious for Seely, Warrior and the other survivors as they held a sad and simple Easter Service next morning.

That afternoon another summons came. Seely and Warrior were to report to six miles north to a village called Gentelles at 2 a.m. to plan an attack in the morning. On the way Warrrior lamed himself in the dark and was put out of action. Next day Seely was badly gassed and both his replacement horses were killed. It was Warrior’s last great escape. He was to live until 1941, when Seely felt that the extra corn rations needed to keep the 33-year old hero going could not be justified in war time. On that Good Friday he wrote: ‘I do not believe, to quote Byron on his dog Boatswain, “that he is denied in Heaven, the soul he had on earth.”’ after that earlier Easter in 1918 Warrior had recovered to join the victory parade in Hyde Park, and three years later won the same race at the isle of Wight point-to-point which his sire Straybit had done in 1909.

You might have guessed the date of that success. It was 30 March. Warrior was an absolute. Discussing him sets the bar at a level which few horses at any discipline will be able to match. it was therefore a piece of quite stunning good fortune that in 1962, the very year I first got fully involved as a steeplechase rider, a horse should burst on to the British jumping scene like no other before or since. In February 2005 the Donmar Warehouse staged an Owen McCafferty reworking of the famous film and teleplay Days of Wine and Roses, with Arkle as the mystic role model to which the doomed Donal aspires.

ARKLE

ARKLE was an icon. Foaled in County Meath in 1957, he became the best steeplechaser that ever was or ever will be. in 26 races over fences he only lost four times, once when he slipped, twice when conceding stones in weight, and one final time when he broke his leg. But he was not just a four-legged paragon. He became a wider metaphor for invincibility, a shaft of certainty in an uncertain world. And, thank you Father, he was Irish. So Irish he even had two bottles of Guinness in his feed every night.

I remember exactly where I was when I first saw him: standing by the last fence at Cheltenham for the Honeybourne Novices’ Chase on Saturday 17 November 1962, Arkle’s first race over fences. I was a nineteen-year-old amateur rider already seriously affected by the racing bug and had no defence against the image in front of me.

We had been warned that the Irish thought this lean, greyhoundy, longeared thing was a bit special, but what happened at the finish just took the breath away. There were decent horses against him, but Arkle just skipped over the fence and sprinted twenty lengths clear as if he was another species altogether. Perhaps he was. it was all the more remarkable because when Arkle had first appeared at Tom Dreaper’s stables, twenty miles east of Dublin, two seasons earlier, he had not been that impressive. ‘His action was so terrible behind,’ recorded his long-time jockey Pat Taaffe, ‘that we thought he would be a slow coach – a slob.’ indeed he did manage only two wins from six races in his opening term over hurdles. But the next winter, over steeplechase fences, Arkle proved to be something else.

As his body matured into its frame, he developed first athleticism and then a presence that I have never seen before or since. By the time he came back to Cheltenham in March 1963 for the equivalent of the royal & Sun alliance Chase, he was kicking all other novices out of the way. But when he returned for the Gold Cup next season, it seemed he might have found his match in the massive 1963 Gold Cup winner Mill House, who had given him five pounds and a beating in the Hennessy at Newbury the previous November. What happened on that cold, clear March day in 1964 became one of the defining moments, both in jumping history and Irish life.

You have to remember that we were hailing Mill House as the greatest English trained steeplechaser since the war, a giant of a horse whose spring-heeled leaps used to bring gasps from the crowd as if they were watching hammer blows from a heavyweight. The Irish were insisting that Arkle had slipped at Newbury, but none of us believed them. Then, as they turned for home at Cheltenham and we waited for Willie Robinson on Mill House to put the upstart in its place, we saw the unthinkable: a horse not just as good as Mill House, but quite emphatically, brutally, his superior. I was a young jockey by then, a 21-year-old undergraduate down from oxford getting ready to ride in the Cathcart two races after the Gold Cup.

In the weighing room we couldn’t believe what our eyes had told us. I remember poor Willie Robinson sitting on the bench just as shattered as if he had been taken out by the young Cassius Clay, who had flattened Sonny Liston a month earlier. Willie had thought Mill House unbeatable. He was wrong. There was a sense of awe around the place whenever Arkle ran. For he didn’t just win, he used to destroy his opponents or attempt seemingly impossible tasks in handicaps. in truth his subsequent Gold Cups were little more than exhibition rounds, the most memorable moment when he completely ignored the fence in front of the stands on the first circuit in 1966. So it was what Arkle did in handicaps – conceding two, sometimes nearly three stone – which has seared itself in the memory. He won the Irish Grand National with 12 stone, two Hennessys, a Whitbread and the Gallaher Gold Cup at Sandown Park with 12st 7lbs, and most remarkably of all finished a close third in the Massey Ferguson at Cheltenham in December 1964 with 12st 10lb, giving 32 pounds to the winner Flying Wild and 26 pounds to the equally talented runner-up Buona Notte.

I can see Arkle now, still fighting back, refusing to be anchored by the extra lead. He couldn’t do it, but he nearly did. By then Arkle had gathered the most extraordinary aura about him. He used to walk round the paddock with his neck very upright and those astonishing long ears scanning the crowd, the emperor of all he surveyed. On the track he was utterly dominant, sometimes just carting Pat Taaffe to the front, often throwing extravagant leaps merely for the hell of it, once or twice landing on the fence rather than over it. We couldn’t take our eyes off him. We used to race back to see him unsaddle. We felt we were treasuring something beyond compare. We were right.

For the Irish he became something much more than a racehorse. He was a symbol, an aspiration, a one-word assertion that all in their world could be right. When in December 1966 he broke his leg and was hospitalised at Kempton after what was to be his final race, there were daily bulletins on the Irish news. When Arkle eventually succumbed to arthritis four years later, there was little short of national mourning. The ‘Celtic Tiger’ of the resurgent Irish economy was still a dream in its basket. We were a long way short of today’s Ireland with the best educated youth in Europe; with so much building that it is English workers who want to emigrate, not the other way round. There was a yearning for something Irish that was indisputably great. They found it in a horse so famous they honoured him as ‘Himself.’ There were books and plays and songs about him. Listen closely and his presence lives on here tonight. The play was a limited success, but Arkle and his legacy only ever grows, as is brilliantly and evocatively chronicled in Sean Magee’s book Arkle: The Life and Legacy of ‘Himself’, published by Highdown in 2005. For horse lovers around at the time, the truly amazing thing is that another phenomenon was emerging, and from the same stable. Flyingbolt did not last, but March 2005 was the anniversary of his emerging prime. It was only right to pay this tribute.

FLYINGBOLT

FLYINGBOLT won what is now called the Arkle Chase forty years ago this Cheltenham. He was the best horse never to win the Gold Cup. More than that, he was probably the second best chaser in the history of the world. And yet almost everyone has forgotten about him. They shouldn’t have done. For Flyingbolt was every bit as much of a freak as Arkle himself. at a time when no contemporary was within two stone of ‘Himself’, Flyingbolt’s exploits had him officially rated as close as 3lbs to Arkle, two years his senior and astonishingly also trained by Tom Dreaper in his forty-box yard near the house at Kilsallaghan, in County Dublin. Flyingbolt was a tall, gangly, rather washy chestnut with a white face, and if he never looked very well that was because he wasn’t. He suffered from brucellosis, a debilitating disease which causes inflammation of the joints and cut his career off in his prime. It is because his owners later decided to soldier on with the old horse in decline – back first with Ken Oliver in Scotland and then with Roddy Armytage in Berkshire – that Flyingbolt leaves only a faded trace in the memory. When he first appeared he came like a comet across the scene. He won his first ten races straight, including a division of Cheltenham’s Gloucester Hurdle – what would now be the Supreme Novices’. Switched to fences, he was even more devastating as a novice chaser, including that effortless win at Cheltenham. Then in the 1965-66 seasons he was nothing less than sensational. Having bolted up conceding lumps of weight in big races over two and a half miles and three; he came to Cheltenham, hacked up in the Champion Chase on the Tuesday and a day later turned out to run third in the Champion Hurdle. To be honest, that race was not the great Pat Taaffe’s finest hour, Flyingbolt getting pushed wide and the super-stylish Johnny Haine pouncing up the inside with Salmon Spray. But a month later the astonishing powers of Flyingbolt in his prime went one step further when this two-mile champion won the three-and-a-quarter-mile Irish National with 12st 7lbs, giving away almost three stone to the second. Sadly that prime didn’t last. Brucellosis closed in. Flyingbolt could only run once in 1966-7 and twice the season after, his final run for Tom Dreaper being a last place in the Mackeson Gold Cup at Cheltenham. Dreaper understandably felt such a pale shadow of the super horse should be retired, but Flyingbolt’s owner insisted on continuing. in 1968 he went to Ken Oliver’s yard in Scotland and for two seasons battled round in big races, his best effort being second in the 1969 King 20 of George at Kempton. His closing victory was in a two-mile chase at Haydock, but in 1970 as an eleven-year-old he moved on to Roddy Armytage’s, where his name still caused wonderment but his performances and his sore old joints were on the downward trail. He was second twice with Stan Mellor aboard. David Nicholson rode him to be third at Cheltenham in the 1971 Cathcart, and then he lasted until the fourteenth fence before crashing out in the Topham at Aintree. He never ran again, and retirement soon faded him from the collective memory. Forty years on since he first blazed over Cheltenham’s fences, 39 since his annus mirabilis, it is time we paid Flyingbolt his due as – and let’s say it carefully – one of the very greatest of them all. Hindsight is a dangerous thing, but to have two such champions as opening benchmarks was an unbelievable piece of good fortune for an impressionable enthusiast like myself. What makes my case almost unfairly lucky is that the same thing happened on the Flat, almost more so. Between 1968 and 1972 there was the chance to get close up to Sir Ivor, Nijinsky, Mill Reef and Brigadier Gerard, four horses who instantly take their places amongst the greatest champions in history. The first two represented the absolute zenith of the partnership between Lester Piggott and Vincent O’Brien, but because of riding commitments I only saw them from afar – although, as related later, I did have an unforgettable drive with Lester to Epsom the day after Nijinsky’s Derby. With Mill reef and Brigadier Gerard it was different. In 1971 I started full time in Flat racing. It was the season they ruled the world. The next year, backed by Mill reef’s owner Paul Mellon, I got together a team to film the impending eclipse stakes showdown between Mill reef and Brigadier Gerard. illness meant that the showdown never happened, but the film did – and the times spent at Ian Balding’s yard at Kingsclere and at Mill reef’s birthplace at Rokeby, Virginia, are amongst the happiest I have ever had in all my time in racing. For that reason alone it is through Mill reef’s ears that I will tell the tale.

MILL REEF

MILL REEF was so small you could put your arm over his withers. He may have measured 15.2 hands, but he was so neatly put together that he seemed even less than that – until he moved. Then there was absolute assurance at every step: at the walk, the trot, the canter and on into the gallop. He was mesmerising. His secret was perfect balance. This meant the flow of his stride was just as effective on firm ground as on soft. He broke track records in both the Eclipse and the arc when the going was fast, and when it came up heavy at York for the Gimcrack and Longchamp for the Ganay he did his own version of ‘Eclipse first, the rest nowhere.’ When he worked with a stablemate on sloppy sand in Chantilly you could hardly find his prints. No other horse was ever like this – certainly not Brigadier Gerard, who on soft ground really struggled to win his own Eclipse and his first Champion Stakes, although on good ground at Newmarket he ran out Mill reef’s clear superior in that famous 1971 Two Thousand Guineas, the only time they were actually to meet. I first saw Mill reef, at his Kingsclere home rather than on the racecourse, in January 1972. He was a little horse in the string with knee boots on for road work. A trainer would not dare risk him amid today’s traffic, for at that moment he would have been the world’s most valuable racing Thoroughbred. After the Guineas defeat he had carried off, consecutively, the Derby, Eclipse, King George and arc de Triomphe. In each race, as he did in every one of his eleven career victories, he increased the distance between himself and the second horse in the final furlong. This was partly due to Geoff Lewis’ natural, pushy, exuberance in the saddle, but it symbolised a wish to run which was central to Mill reef’s being. With the great horses the legends swell, but with Mill reef there is no need to elaborate. The one doubt when he first ran at Salisbury in May 1970 was that he might be as slow out of the stalls as he had been in practice. But he jumped out so fast that he led all the way and trounced the Piggott-ridden favourite. In the Coventry Stakes at ascot he was so impressive that John Oaksey wrote at the time this was the most perfect two-year-old he had ever seen. That’s what we thought of him: a complete, compact, ready-to-run, fast-ground two-year-old. If someone had said then that this was a future arc winner and one of the unquestioned great middle-distance horses of all time, you would have thought they had been too long at the Pimms. He looked like a little guy you had to get on with, and blow the consequences. And when he got short-headed by top two-year-old My Swallow in France after a terrible journey over and was then sent to run in the Gimcrack at York in ground that squelched, outsiders could think that Ian Balding was almost desperate to cash in on the colt’s precocity. in fact Mill reef only ran in the Gimcrack at Paul Mellon’s insistence, and the sight of the supposed ‘fast ground’ flyer floating fifteen lengths clear of his field like a speedboat from a bunch of barges remains one of the most remarkable things ever seen on a British racetrack. But the beauty of the story is that even then there were doubts – and indeed comparisons – to be overcome. Mill reef wasn’t the big story of 1970: Mill Reef first, the rest nowhere: The 1971 Eclipse. That honour was Nijinsky’s. Mill reef’s Gimcrack may have been the most freakish thing of the season, but the most awesome, by some margin, was Nijinsky’s majestic victory over 1969 Derby hero Blakeney and others in the King George at ascot. Nijinsky was such box office because he was the latest and greatest from the O’Brien-Piggott team which only two years before had produced the marvel that was Sir Ivor. What’s more, Mill reef was not even officially the best two-year-old of 1970. That was My Swallow – a fast, free-going chestnut who had gone unbeaten through the year. He represented the super-efficient David Robinson team. My Swallow had beaten Mill reef, albeit in arguably favourable circumstances, and his whole aim was the Two Thousand Guineas. When both horses bolted up in their trial races you had to be made of stone not to think that this was a vintage Classic. And that is before you considered the also unbeaten Middle Park winner Brigadier Gerard, whom Dick Hern was bringing to Newmarket without a previous run that season. Readers should rightly suspect rose-tinted glasses but I relate this through a deliberately harsher lens. Imagine the situation now. Imagine the excitement, almost consternation, when Mill reef and My Swallow locked horns in the lead only for Brigadier Gerard to swoop past and beat the pair pointless. Imagine the impression on an ex-jock, would-be hack just two months after his final hospital trip. When it came to Guineas showdowns, I had seen the benchmark. If you accept that, you then begin to see what a wonder the 1971 Flat racing season was to any observer, let alone a fresh-eyed scuffler like this one. Brigadier Gerard, a full-sized beau ideal of the English Thoroughbred, sailed on unbeaten. After the Guineas he won the St James’s Palace and closed out in the Champion, but in between he took the Sussex Stakes by five lengths, the Goodwood Mile by ten and the Queen Elizabeth ii by a mighty eight, breaking the track record into the bargain. Then and now horses didn’t do that sort of thing. Then and now we were being given an inferiority complex by someone called O’Brien at Ballydoyle. Back in Britain here was one who could rout him. And ‘The Brigadier’ wasn’t even the horse of the season. Unfair though that may seem in view of his clear-cut win at Newmarket, Brigadier Gerard had to bow to Mill reef in public esteem because his little rival went the braver route. Before the Derby there were acres of newsprint debating whether Mill reef’s US pedigree, not to mention speedy precocity, would allow him to stay Epsom’s mile and a half. Yet in race after race – a record-breaking Eclipse followed the Derby, a record breaking arc came after a six-length King George – his white nosebanded head hit the front at the quarter mile pole and that zinging stride took him more and more decisively ahead. Ah yes, that stride. I can see it still. It had a bite as well as a flow about it which brought both leverage and speed. As the arc field swung into the straight there was a moment when Mill reef’s white noseband was lost behind the tightly packed leaders. Only one British-trained horse had ever won the arc and that was back in 1948. Was this one race too far? Then, like a ray of sunshine from the gloom, the little horse was through and winging home three lengths clear of the pursuing Pistol Packer. For Flat racing fans 1971-72 was the ultimate winter of dreams. Both Mill reef and Brigadier Gerard were staying in training, and both sets of connections were committed to a showdown in the Eclipse Stakes at Sandown in July. With the ignorant bravado of youth, and with unbelievable support from Mill reef’s trainer Ian Balding, who had adored the film The Year of Sir Ivor, I re-linked Hugh Mcilvanney and Kit Owens, respectively the writer and director of that epic, got the film rights of the Sandown showdown, persuaded racing lover Albert Finney to do the narration, and then, on Ian’s prompting, rang Paul Mellon to ask if I could pop over and see him in Virginia. ‘When would you next be in America?’ enquired Paul Mellon’s kind and steady voice on the phone. ‘Well, I am probably going to be over in Washington between Tuesday and Friday next week,’ I blagged, despite never before having travelled west of Limerick Junction. ‘Good,’ he said calmly, undeceived by the deception, ‘I could do Wednesday. We will book you into Browns. Come to the Bank at noon and we will go to the farm for lunch.’ Elation at the invitation was soon overtaken by extreme nervousness at the utter inadequacy of my qualifications. I had never made a film in my life. I had only been writing for five minutes. I was just a broken-down jock who liked Mill reef and was a bit of a mate of Ian Balding’s. But ‘nothing ventured’ – and the next Wednesday I stood at the reception of the Mellon bank in Washington and a few minutes later this shy, kind, avuncular figure led me down the steps to the waiting car. ‘We should be back at the farm all right for lunch,’ he said, and since it was 12 noon and his stud at Rokeby, Virginia was some 200 miles away this seemed an unlikely promise. But the road that led to the Mill reef film was wonders all the way. We crossed over the Potomac River in cold and watery sunshine and turned left, the Arlington Cemetery with its Presidents’ graves away to the right. We of then swung left again towards the crowded, midday bedlam of the airport, got out of the car and walked straight through without anyone noticing. There were no heavy duty Pinkertons, no dark-glassed bodyguards, just the well planned discretion of class and old money. And then we climbed into the Lear Jet. No kidding, there was a ‘Blue Period’ Picasso hanging by the window. That was Paul Mellon – wanting the very best but never shouting about it. At Rokeby, the Stubbs painting of Pumpkin, the first picture he ever bought, was in the hall and among the canvasses in the dining room were at least three that every schoolchild knows: a Brueghel skating scene, a Van Gogh sunflower, a Sisley beach. And that was long before we got to The Brick House. It was a three-storey, nineteenth-century, red brick building set in the centre of the stud. Inside was a treasure trove: the world’s greatest collection of English sporting art, topped up with scenes of Longchamp by Degas and, gorgeously, a set of little Degas ballet dancers in bronze and in wax maquette. Through the windows you could see Mill reef’s relatives cantering across the paddock. It screamed for a camera to show others what our eyes had seen. This is what we did. The result, thanks to Hugh and Kit, has more than stood the test of time, even if it is sometimes overindulgent with the surroundings and with lingering looks across the paintings. its climax was not the much vaunted but never fulfilled head-to-head with Brigadier Gerard, although printing schedules of that era meant that a 2,000-word piece I wrote for the Sunday Times colour magazine appeared large and loud in the edition before the Eclipse, even though a virus-ridden Mill reef was already a declared non-runner. Instead the film made a marvellous virtue out of necessity as it lyrically passed from Mill reef at his best to an eerie unconscious shape on the operating table, to a hero in a plaster cast limping towards his recovery at Kingsclere. As an introduction to the top end of Flat racing and of the media, it was an experience beyond compare. Yet of all the memories stretching from that Rokeby lunch to long exasperating editing days in a cutting room in Soho’s Greek Street once enlivened when two sets of firemen battled at the top of their respective ladders to gain entry into a top-floor window of the ‘Cat Shop’ opposite, nothing beats Mill reef’s victory in the Prix Ganay in the spring of 1972. For everything depended on it. Inexperienced or not, I knew perfectly well that plenty of Classic winners, especially those who had been pretty busy at two, did not train on as four-year-olds. If this film was to have any substance, Mill reef had to show on the track what I had promised in conversation. And knowing that converted TV footage of his three-year-old exploits was both 25 sub-standard and expensive, Kit Owens was taking a whole studio’s worth of cameras to Longchamp to pick up every movement of our hero in action. I booked 22 people into the Hotel du Chateau at Chantilly. (It closed soon after. Wonder why?) A large bus came to ferry us to the Bois de Boulogne, where we set up lenses at every corner and I began to pray. We needed sunshine for our pictures and something extraordinary for our story. Anything less and I was struggling. actual defeat and the whole project, the whole act of faith granted by everyone from Paul Mellon to Pip, the muscleman lugging the boxes, would be shattered, and I would have to crawl away to somewhere like New Zealand and try and scrape a living as an exercise boy. It was a showery day but the sun came out. It was not always easy to see, even from high in the stands, but as the field straightened up, even a blind man would have noticed. I was positioned up behind a bearded, hollowcheeked pirate of a cameraman who was the world’s greatest expert on the super-long lens. He was a newly converted, Zen-studying vegetarian who appeared extremely sceptical of all my hype about Mill reef. But now right in his lens, right in my binoculars, were the black and gold Mellon silks, the singing hooves, the zinging stride, the bobbing noseband – and Mill reef not just in front but drawing further and further and further away. It got better and better. Everything now was possible. In an experience I never remember before or since, the hair quite literally stood up on the back of my neck. In front of me the long lens fairly glowed in admiring concentration. ‘F***ing hell,’ the pirate said. Naturally the very personal nature of these recollections also demands a more sceptical analysis when it comes to placing Mill reef and the others in the panoply of champions. For while it’s true that Mill reef was the breakthrough in post-war British winners of the arc – and there have been only five more since – it’s also true that he, and indeed Brigadier Gerard, Sir Ivor and Nijinsky would be found well short of today’s top performers on the clock. Mill reef’s arc record of 2 minutes 28.3 seconds for the mile and a half (2,400 metres) had two full seconds taken out of it by Trempolino in 1987, and ten years later Peintre Celebre lowered it to 2 minutes 24.6, which at five lengths a second means that he would have had 3.7 seconds, or some eighteen lengths, between him and Mill reef at the finishing pole. When analysing this, it’s worth remembering that roger Bannister’s history making sub-4 minute mile in 1954 was clocked at 3 minutes 59.4, which by 1980 Seb Coe had reduced to 3 minutes 47.33, and the record at the time of writing these words in September 2008, set by the immortal Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999, stands at 3 minutes 43.13. That means that El Guerrouj would be hitting the line as gallant old Sir roger was entering the straight, making Mill reef and Peintre Celebre almost close by comparison. But just as no one is suggesting that Bannister was anything but a great athlete trained 26 of in very different times, the least we should say about Mill reef and the other great ones is that they were further ahead of their contemporaries than anything will ever be in today’s more intensively competitive era. This book is but a solo witness, and all I want to log is that while one or two other moments have nearly equalled it – especially when Motivator began to draw clear at Epsom in 2005, as will be described later – nothing for me ever bettered the sensation of Mill reef sluicing up in the Ganay. In our film Hugh Mcilvanney signed off with characteristic brilliance. ‘That Mill reef,’ he had Albert Finney say, ‘he gave us something.’ in the spring of 1973 I was up to my eyeballs trying to finish production of the Mill reef film, which we called Something to Brighten the Morning. Little did I realise that in the jumping game I was about to be a first-hand witness to one of the greatest races ever run. On the eve of that year’s Grand National I fell into step with Tommy stack and Ron Barry, who had both ridden Red Rum, the super-progressive seven- year-old who was all the rage for the big race next day. Indeed, as related below, Tommy had actually trained the horse during the brief spell when, as stable jockey, he had taken over the licence on the death of his employer Bobby Renton. There was no cattiness about it, but neither of them thought – and I recall the phrase – that Red Rum would be ‘man enough’ for Aintree. As an example of the age-old adage that ‘jockeys are the world’s worst tipsters’, this ranks pretty high. Some time back I was asked to describe the most exciting race I had ever seen. There was not a lot of time wasted in making the decision. For Red Rum triumphed but only at the expense of a super-hero called Crisp.

CRISP

RED RUM and Crisp’s battle in 1973 was the greatest and most agonising National of them all. It was the moment when Red Rum began his career as the ultimate Aintree hero, but on the day the first emotion was to mourn the impossibly heroic Crisp in defeat. Crisp was conceding 23 pounds, over a stone and a half, to Red Rum, who himself was to carry top weight to those unmatched two victories and two seconds over the next four years. But forget mathematics, the huge Australian was trying to do it the only way he knew how, to blitz his opponents from the front. That might be fine over two miles, and Crisp was a Champion Chase winner at Cheltenham: but how could he possibly last over Aintree’s four and a half? The die was cast at the third fence. Meeting it on a perfect stride, Crisp soared out and clear, and for the remaining obstacles he and Richard Pitman never saw another horse. What happened for the next seven minutes would all but blow the mind and break the heart. Crisp treated the legendary Aintree fences with a disdain never seen before or since. on and on he sailed, a distant black shape a hundred, two hundred yards clear, the 37 other runners just specks in his wake. He had run them absolutely ragged but, as he came up towards the grandstand he Crisp at second Becher’s. He'd already completed two and a quarter miles. For him that should be race over. Now a whole extra circuit lay ahead. That’s when the enormity of Richard Pitman’s problem began to grip the throat. Richard had been one of my best friends in the weighing room. We had travelled together, sweated together, been stretchered off together. Now he was having the most brilliant ride ever seen at Aintree. But he was a passenger on a champion going at two mile pace. Come the finish, win or lose, he was going to be on a horse emptied of every drop of juice. Tommy Stack was standing beside me. Four years later he would share Red Rum’s epic fifth and final National. Now he was an injured, awe-inspired spectator, but one also riddled with doubts. ‘Jesus,’ he said as we watched Crisp and Richard blazing away towards Becher’s on the second circuit, ‘there’s no way he can keep up that pace for so long.’ But he did, he did – skipping rounds the Canal Turn, pinging Valentine’s, rocking on relentlessly all the way to the Melling road. The pursuers were all so distant that the only thought was to just how bad Crisp must be feeling inside. He must have built up the biggest oxygen debt in racing history. But there was still no outward sign. Perhaps, just this once, the impossible would happen. But then, at the second last, still a good furlong clear, it showed. It wasn’t much of a mistake. Just a moment of awkwardness, but there was no doubting the split second of stagger as exhaustion clutched. Crisp and Richard were still clear and galloping relentlessly towards the last. But you knew the tanks were flashing empty. It was a long haul home. The eyes went back to the pursuers. Leading the pack was a white nosebanded bay trained on the sands at nearby Southport by a second-hand car dealer called ‘Ginger’ McCain. Red Rum had been both trained and ridden by Tommy Stack in an earlier life. on National eve, Tommy had told me that for all Red Rum’s sizzling five-win streak since joining ‘Ginger’, he thought his old partner, whose first visit to Aintree had been dead-heating for a two-year-old seller under Paul Cook the day before the Foinavon National in 1967, would be ‘too clever’ for Liverpool’s demands. On Red Rum, 25-year-old Brian Fletcher already knew different. Red Rum's cunning, his ability to look for landing space whilst still in mid-air, was to make him the most successful Aintree jumper in history. Crisp might be more than distance clear, but Red Rum always saved something. And Brian – implacable, sometimes contrary Brian – he never gave up hope. Over the last and on towards us up that pitiless dog-legged 494-yard run-in, Crisp still had a full hundred yards of advantage. He was still galloping, Richard was still pumping. If they could just keep pushing, the huge black car that was Crisp would roll on over the line. But we knew it was desperate. We shouted for Richard and the voice beside me shouted loudest of all. Jenny Pitman was always a frustrated spectator, and watching her husband’s chance of ultimate glory brought extra, even to her fog-shattering voice. ‘riiiichard! riiiichard!’, she screamed. Was that the tipping edge? Down on the run-in Richard, in extremis, pulled out his whip in his right hand, cracked Crisp hard on the quarters, and in one fatal moment the game was gone. Crisp rolled left away from the whip and – much, much worse – away from the right-handed line of the run-in which skirts the Chair fence. Richard pulled him back on to course but now all pretext of momentum drained away. They got to the final railed 100 yards before the finish, but this was much more rocking horse than racer. It was terrible to watch. Fifty yards out and they were still clear but Red Rum was swooping. The dream had become a nightmare. It died only in the very shadow of the post. It was a race like no other. History made it even grander; with Red Rum and Ginger McCain returning the National to its status as British sport’s number one event. Yet the postscript always has to be the sight of that huge sweat-flecked black Australian staggering, hocks buckling, into the second enclosure in 1973. Red Rum became a legend, but it was Crisp’s immortality in defeat that made this the greatest day of all. Poor Crisp. Australia’s best ever steeplechaser, star of the Champion Chase at Cheltenham, the tall and mighty ‘Black Kangaroo’, just about as good a horse as we will ever see, and yet always to be remembered as the weary giant that Red Rum slew in those final fateful Aintree yards back in 1973. It was both understandable and correct that the first instinct that year was sympathy for Crisp’s heroics in defeat. Indeed if that had been Red Rum’s only national, he and ginger McCain would have been a good ‘rags to riches’ story and little more. But the world now knows that this was only the beginning of the most famous and unrepeatable chapter in the Aintree story. The mere facts of what he did are extraordinary enough. romping home under twelve stone in 1974, running gallant top-weighted seconds to the gold Cup winner L’escargot in 1975 and then to the massive rag Trade in 1976 before signing off with that record third victory in 1977: simply listing them seems fairly unbelievable, but what made the story unique not just in this sport but in life itself was exactly where all this came from. In July 2008 I was covering the Open golf at Birkdale, a place known to the general public as a slightly genteel suburb of Southport whose seaside links have witnessed glory deeds as the world’s greatest golfers battle for the claret jug. The thousands who had flocked to see Padraig Harrington finally break Greg Norman’s attempt to roll back the years would have long forgotten, or never known, that Birkdale was also the home of Red Rum. It still seemed scarcely credible. Did he really come out of those scruffy back streets and go through the town and the traffic to use the sands for gallops? Was ginger McCain really an Aintree-obsessed second-hand car salesman who had once driven the Southport zoo keeper to London with a large lion in the back seat? (It scratched the seats a bit.) Was Red Rum really in the yard behind the flat behind the showroom? Thirty years on, my feet bent again down the Aughton road. McCain’s Car Sales is still there. The vehicles are better – a gleaming white Mercedes (‘only 23,000 miles’) stood on the forecourt – but the yard at the back was a weed overgrown symbol of disuse. Some time, presumably, planning permission will be granted and even this trace will disappear. Maybe somebody will put up a blue plaque, as they do to proclaim that ‘great Men Lived here.’ But we just have to hang on to the memories, and I hope you will come back with me to something I wrote in November 1975. For it was probably the greatest of all the early riding mornings I have ever had.

RED RUM

IT WAS like suddenly finding yourself in bed with a film star. Would she be as fantastic as you imagined? And would you match up to her the way you had in your dreams? The salty rain-swept emptiness of Southport sands at 8.15 last Wednesday morning was a pretty odd place for an assignation with a star, but in racing terms the rest of the comparison was accurate. For I was riding Red Rum. Red Rum? Yes, the Red Rum, winner of the 1973 and 1974 Grand Nationals, all in all the most charismatic National Hunt horse since Arkle. Yet here he was cantering beneath me, and about a hundred miles of sand ahead for us. The first feel of Red Rum is a little disappointing. He seems a shade narrow and lightweight, much more ex-Flat racehorse than big strong ’chaser. But then ex-Flat racehorse is exactly what he is, having started out eight seasons ago with a selling-race dead heat at that same Liverpool track he has since taken by storm. It was old pros’ weather on Wednesday morning. Solid Lancashire rain only eased to a threatening drizzle as we left the little yard at the back of McCain’s Car Sales, out onto the Aughton road and through the streets of the Birkdale part of Southport until we finally came to the beach with its warning notice: ‘Drivers beware of soft sand.’ You can’t imagine a style of exercising racehorses further removed from the traditional Indian-file-up-the-lane-to-the-Downs style. Horses walking in a cluster, Red Rum in front, with his lad Billy Ellison beside us on the big, white-faced Glenkiln, past the pet centre and the Chinese fish and chip shop, over the level crossing and the main road. It certainly works for Red Rum. And in trying to explain it, I remembered another time when, hoisted on well lubricated words from the night before, I accompanied another champion in training. That was with boxer Chris Finnegan, running round the early morning streets of Clerkenwell. When I eventually gasped back to his door, he told me that he enjoyed the bustle and greeting of the town, and I don’t think it all fanciful to say that this equine hero feels the same. So we were safely onto the beach, and after the briefest of instructions were cantering in pairs southwards along ‘the gallop’, a newly harrowed stretch of sand between seaweed and waves. At first, the impression of ex-Flat horse remained. ‘I’m not sure that I would feel that confident going to Becher’s on this’ was the way I put it to myself. But then, as the sands swept by, there came a feeling of relentless power about the stride. We seemed to have been cantering for about five miles, and although I hadn’t ridden for a few months, I thought I was showing plenty of the old magic. (‘What magic?’ asked an unkind friend with an all-too-clear memory of my brief career in the saddle.) ‘Do we pull up now?’ I called across to Billy Ellison. ‘Oh no,’ came the reply, ‘we’ve got a long way to go yet.’ Suddenly there was a threat of disaster. Alone with a film star, I was going to ruin everything by being sick. Then of all things, on this beach a hundred miles from nowhere there was a hoot on a car horn, and right beside us was Ginger McCain. ‘He means us to go a bit quicker,’ shouted Billy. This wasn’t going to be funny, for you know that as you release the brake a little the load becomes greater. Far from a beaten-up ex-Flat horse, the length and power of Red Rum’s stride made me feel that he might win next year’s National pulling a cart, let alone an unfit and panicky journalist. One more notch and we would have gone. But then an angel in the unlikely form of Billy Ellison saved us. ‘Whoa up! That’s it!’ he called. Red Rum eased, knowing where he was all the time, and in a couple of minutes we were across the sand and into the sea. Yes, into the sea! all McCain’s horses go into the sea, and Red Rum, who had previously suffered from the usually incurable foot disease of pedalostitis, owes much of his dramatic improvement to his regular exercise in sea and on sand. ‘He hates trotting on the road, you know,’ said Billy. ‘When he works he likes to get another horse ahead of him so that he can sort of get it in his sights and then come and do it at the finish. Watch him going home. He always likes to buck opposite the convent.’ He did, and plenty more, and having spent one and a half fantasy-come-true hours on Red Rum’s back, it is my pleasure to report that his spirit is burning strong. The openness of ginger and Beryl McCain cannot be overestimated. They were rightly proud of ‘red’ and all that they had done. Everyone was welcome. I even rode him again for iTN, and started the report with the slightly obvious but enjoyable-to-deliver line, ‘This must be the ultimate case of “sitting on a story”.’ at a time when the grand national was trying to recover from appalling mismanagement, what they did for the future of – don’t anyone question it – the ‘World’s greatest race’ was a service beyond price. As were the extraordinary qualities of the animal around which all this revolved. Red Rum lived on to October 1995 and is now, appropriately, buried next to the Aintree winning post. Over the years he became the ultimate in celebrity quadrupeds, opening everything from county shows to betting shops, almost as familiar with the red carpet as the stable yard and, in ginger’s immortal words, ‘never once disgracing himself.’ There has never been anything like him, and I don’t think we can better the final three words of the report I wrote on that un-foolish first day of April when Tommy stack brought Red Rum home to final glory in 1977. We pick the story up as the 15-2 favourite Andy Pandy leads the field towards Becher’s Brook on the second circuit. This is a staccato story dictated in a hurry from a house outside the racecourse, as in those days Aintree didn’t ‘do’ telephones. Yet it takes us there … Then Becher’s once again justified its reputation, taking out first the leader, then Nereo, Brown admiral and Sandwilan. Who else to take the lead now but Red Rum himself? But immediately a hideous repetition of the Foinavon fiasco loomed as he was hampered by the loose horses at the 23rd. He was too wily for that, and even though pestered by another loose horse at the Canal Turn he gave Tommy Stack a corner of which James Hunt [then Formula 1 world champion] would have been proud, and suddenly with only six fences left to jump Red Rum was in charge, and a great cry went up as everyone scanned back for dangers. For a dizzy quarter mile he seemed to be going better than his few pursuers. But then as they came to the third last it was obvious that Churchtown Boy, who had won the Topham Trophy over the same fences only on Thursday, was going with deadly ease. His rider Martin Blackshaw told me afterwards: ‘I was really motoring at the time but then I never really jumped the last three.’ Up in front Tommy Stack had looked round once, but when he heard the crash of Churchtown Boy hitting the second last he was certain that his only dangers were the loose horses or some terrible repeat of the Devon Loch disaster on the run-in. From the stands it didn’t look so easy, and it was almost too hard to bear as Red Rum safely jumped the last and stormed up the run-in to his place back between the police horses and forever into steeple chasing history. It was only afterwards that Tommy Stack’s complete professionalism began to break. He had us all close to tears as he paid tribute to this incredible four-legged hero. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘he really loves it out there; he looks at each fence as he jumps it, and then looks for the next. On another course he doesn’t really bother, but here he knows that he is the king.’ For Ginger McCain, to whom so many people have been free with their ‘retire Red Rum’ advice, we can’t give anything more than complete praise and gratitude for turning out the winner in such marvellous condition. As the overjoyed trainer ran out to greet Red Rum, he gripped me breathlessly by the arm and just muttered those three words which were echoed fifteen minutes later when the broad blue-tattooed arms of head lad Taffy Williams were scraping the sweat from Red Rum’s gleaming but not heaving flanks. Those words were said with a sigh and a wondering shake of the head. They were, quite simply: ‘What a horse!’ any journalist covering any territory needs significant players to help launch a career. It is no false modesty to say that the gods were generous to me. The blazing duo of Mill reef and Brigadier Gerard were followed by the long-running Red Rum saga, and in between, in 1975, the flaxen mane and tail of Grundy streaked like a Derby winning comet across the summer. I wrote reams about him, his trainer Peter Walwyn, his jockey Pat Eddery, work rider Mattie McCormack and head lad ray Laing. How he had established himself as a star when winning the Dewhurst in 1974. How his future looked compromised when he had the front of his head kicked in by an unruly stable companion next spring. How in the Two Thousand guineas he still managed to be second to the Henry Cecil-trained Bolkonski, ridden by Gianfranco Dettori, Frankie’s father. How he then carried all before him before blowing out in the Benson and Hedges gold Cup – now the international – at York and having an unprosperous stud career which ended in Japan. But all that does not matter compared with the one heady day at ascot in July. Like the piece about riding out at Southport on Red Rum, this has been included in a previous collection. But I make no apology. At the time every instinct told me I was witness to something exceptional. Let’s take the writing from the time.

GRUNDY and BUSTINO

GRUNDY’S half-length defeat of Bustino in the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes at ascot was much more than a seal to his greatness. It was the hardest, most implacable, most moving Flat race that I have ever seen. Bustino’s tactics were predictable, but his courage and strength were almost unfathomable. Led by his two pacemakers, first Highest and then Kinglet, Bustino was never further back than fourth and went to the front four furlongs out. The pace was so strong that the field was stretched at this stage and Grundy had already been pushed up close to last year’s St Leger winner, and Lester Piggott on Dahlia was also moving through to be a danger. Sweeping into the straight, Bustino and Joe Mercer set for home with a furious determination, and very soon it was obvious that only Grundy, still two lengths adrift, could prevent them taking the £81,910 first prize. Going to the two-furlong post it was also obvious that it would be no twinkle-toed, flaxen-tailed acceleration that would take Grundy past the outstretched leader, but only grit, power and sheer slogging guts. Behind them Dahlia was running her best race of the season, but the only question that mattered to the huge crowd was whether the Derby winner could close and beat his year-older opponent. With the whips out, they came to the final furlong just about level, and from high in the stand one had the 34 of feel that the older horse’s slogging stamina might be too much. But then well inside the final furlong it was Bustino who began to weaken, rolling away from the fence as tired horses do and actually, for a moment, touching Grundy. it wasn’t much, but it was the chink in the armour and, with Pat Eddery pressing Grundy like a man possessed, the bonny chestnut battled home to the line amid a crescendo of sound topped, of course, by trainer Peter Walwyn’s frantically bellowed, ‘Come on my son!’ Dahlia ran on to be five lengths away third, with the two other French challengers, on My Way and Card King, fourth and fifth. All these covered themselves in glory, but they were only supporting cast compared with the two stars. The mile and a half was covered in a quite astonishing time. Grundy finally clocked 2 minutes 26.98 seconds, which is no less than 2.46 seconds within the course record and 3.45 seconds faster than Dahlia’s 2 minutes 30.43 seconds in 1973, which is the fastest electrically-recorded time for this race. Grundy’s winnings now pass Mill reef’s previous record total of £312,122. Coming down in the lift to the unsaddling enclosure, trainer Walwyn mopped his brow and said simply, ‘They can’t take it away from him now.’ as he loped past the crush of well-wishers, he understandably didn’t want to be drawn on future plans. ‘Who cares about the future after that?’ he said. Grundy’s Milanese owner, Dr Carlo Vittadini, looked similarly blissful and merely said that he favoured his colt bowing out in the Champion Stakes in October. Dr Vittadini added: ‘This was a bigger thrill than when Grundy won the Derby or the Irish Derby. He was meeting the best horses in Europe and did it splendidly. There has been common talk that my colt had not beaten much in the Classics, but he’s proved that wrong today.’ Among the crush in the unsaddling enclosure, no pair looked more pleased than Sir Desmond Plummer, chairman of the Levy Board, and Douglas Gray, retiring director of the National Stud, who, of course, were party to Grundy’s purchase by the National Stud at a value of only £1million. The word ‘only’ is used advisedly, as Grundy would now be conservatively assessed at £2½ million. Walwyn and Eddery pocketed their exotic trophies from the De Beers Corporation, who put up £44,000 towards this race, and trainer and jockey continued their incredible form by winning the next race with Inchmarlo. This completed the most unbelievable fairy story of a day for Walwyn, for he had also taken the first race with Hard Day, ridden by no less a ‘cavaliere’ than Dr Vittadini’s lovely daughter, Franca. As the horses were led away to be washed down after the big race, the buzz was as much of wonderment as of congratulation. Wonder at the way Grundy’s record-breaking speed was so flawlessly complemented by his own and his rider’s determination. And, perhaps almost equally, at the magnificence of Bustino in defeat. 35 When Joe Mercer humped his saddle and weight cloth towards the scales, he said to me: ‘it was fantastic. It is the greatest race he has ever run.’ Like his two pacemakers, Bustino is owned by Lady Beaverbrook, whose racing manager Sir Gordon Richards was rapt in admiration for the big bay colt. ‘It was as good a race as I have ever seen,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t make any excuses because Grundy is a great horse, but our fellow had to go on half a mile out and, if we had only had something else to tow him just that little bit further, it might have been even closer. But he has broken the track record at Epsom and now they have broken it here, so everyone can see he is a great horse. He will just have one more race, and then the arc de Triomphe.’ after that Bustino will retire to the royal Stud at the same time as Grundy takes up his new duties at Newmarket. They are both the most tremendous assets for British bloodstock, bred as they are completely without the often considered essential trans-Atlantic influence. British racing has many problems, but the riding and the courage and the ability shown by the two heroes in yesterday’s race will be something that it can be proud of for as long as man and horse combine. History agrees that it was the most implacable race of all. Bustino was never able to race again and, although Grundy seemed to have recovered his health and enthusiasm at home, when he did run in the Benson and Hedges at York three weeks later, all his flaxen sparkle was missing, and we never saw him afterwards on a racetrack. A very hard race does that to a horse. For it is very rare that a combination of the pace of the gallop, the continuing possibility of victory and, above all, the courage of the horse combine into your equine partner giving you absolutely everything. When they do, you know it, and first instincts are best. In November 1968 I rode a tough, lean, light-coloured chestnut called Oberon in the big Mackeson Hurdle at what is now Cheltenham’s Open Meeting. From the third last he was always in the firing line, never quite going to win but absolutely refusing to give up. I drove him all the way and all the way he answered me. When he walked back I could feel him utterly spent and on unsaddling said that he would need a long rest to get over it. He ran three weeks later. He didn’t do any good. Seven years later as Grundy walked back into the ascot winner’s enclosure, I recognized that wobble of exhaustion. He too had given his all. It is about courage. My grandfather, for all his ‘How I won the war’ hosannas, was never lacking in that area. He said with perceptive authority that in his experience even the bravest man has only a certain reservoir of courage and one day, if you over face him, it will dry up. It is the same with horses, and the fact is that plenty of them do not actually have the stomach for the fight. Most people access horse racing by TV or at best 36 of from the stands and the paddock. Consequently most people miss how hard and tough it is up close. Half a ton of horseflesh is straining heart and lung and sinew, and in jump racing is throwing itself over an obstacle every furlong or so. That’s why the horses that jockeys remember most fondly are those that come up for more. That’s why all of us, and so many watchers, will never forget the greatest hurdling era of them all.

HURDLERS – THE GOLDEN AGE

HURDLING is sometimes seen as a lesser sport for failed Flat racers, or for horses without the guts to jump fences. I won’t buy that, having been brought up with early TV memories of Sir Ken putting his head down in 1952 and battling through to win the first of his three Champion Hurdles and then being around for what was unquestionably the Golden age of the hurdling game. It ran from 1968 to 1981 and consisted of Persian War’s three consecutive Champion Hurdles and then two each for Bula, Comedy of Errors, Night Nurse, Monksfield and Sea Pigeon, with only the ill-fated Lanzarote in between. To ride a good hurdler is a thrilling thing. Meeting an obstacle right may not be as important, but the strategy of a race is. It certainly was in the most satisfying victory of what I will laughingly describe as my whole career. This was on the high-class Flat horse but two-run novice hurdler Persian Empire in the ultra-competitive handicap that was the 1968 imperial Cup. We were sure we had the pace to win provided he relaxed and hurdled properly. I was only two days back from a broken right arm which was still in a plastic cast. I anchored Persian Empire out the back, and as he cut through the field in the Sandown straight the feeling of mounting, slide-the-knife-home satisfaction lives with me still. We all have our moments. Four days later I was not far off an even better one. in what was to be the first of Persian War’s three Champion Hurdles, I was hurtling down the outside on the 25-1 shot Black Justice, only for his ungainly jumping to let him down, and then only a fantastic effort got him back up again to snatch third place near the line. It was the race of his life. But he had nearly fallen at the first and was very awkward at least three others. What would have happened if he had really jumped? Strangely enough, Persian War was not in the accepted sense a good jumper, any more, for that matter, than he was a classy horse on the Flat. I say that as one of his greatest admirers for he, like Persian Empire, was trained by Colin Davies at Chepstow, and when he went over to run in the French Champion Hurdle I rode him every day in Chantilly. He was big enough but there was absolutely no swagger about him. He was just a kind, tough, honest soul who would run his heart out for you. He did not have any spring-heeled jumping technique. He just set off at a gallop that would hurt and rumbled across the hurdles as fast as he could. He had power and my – what guts. His training had something of the ‘shaggy dog’ story about it. Colin and Jimmy Uttley, his long-term jockey, were convinced that Persian War needed masses of work, and as the old horse stood the routine the accepted wisdom assumed that this was necessary. I was never persuaded of this, and since Colin and Jimmy won three Champion Hurdles with the horse the jury is likely to give them first hearing. Maybe, but what I had to do with Persian War five days before La Grande Course des Haies still amazes. Giving more than a stone to two decent French handicappers, we went a good gallop for a full mile and three quarters round the outside of Les Aigles. Persian War was off the bridle after seven furlongs, and under instruction I pushed and shoved him relentlessly – and all the way he strived and answered. at the end he nearly had the other two in trouble, but local trainer Henry Van der Poele shook his head in that Gallic way which says, ‘Ils sont fous, les Anglais.’ in La Grande Course, Persian War ran a blinder to be third, up there all the way, only to be outspeeded in the straight. But to this day I believe it was despite rather than because of that final gallop. There have been plenty swifter horses than Persian War and many better jumpers, but I never sat on a braver one. Looking back at the equine stars that followed him brings a warm glow to the memory. First Bula, the almost donkey-eared brown gelding whose first run was in a race I rode in at Lingfield, where Stan Mellor was issued with the unpromising instructions, ‘Hunt him round, we think he’s probably useless.’ Stan did as instructed until they reached the straight, when the penny suddenly dropped and Bula sprinted up at 25-1. Bula, so laid back in everything else, then became so quick into and out of a hurdle that Fred Winter had him ridden out the back to make sure he didn’t switch off too soon. For stable jockey Paul Kelleway these were tactics which needed no second telling. Poor old Bula got set more and more impossible tasks, sometimes practically half a furlong behind turning down the hill at Cheltenham, and as likely as not still getting there. Another case of ‘despite of’ rather than ‘because of’? Comedy of Errors was the biggest and most handsome of this list of heroes. He was a huge black horse on whom Bill Smith looked almost like ‘a pea on a drum’ when Comedy won his first Champion in 1973, and the big guy might have won three in a row if Richard Pitman had not taken Fred Winter’s attacking plan for Lanzarote to his own extreme. ‘We had a pacemaker called 38 of Calzado which was supposed to go like hell and tow me to the top of the hill,’ remembers Richard. ‘But he led to the first and then gave up. I thought I had better push on myself. I think we stole it really but I suppose I would have been butchered if we had got beat.’ Lanzarote was black like Comedy of Errors, had a kind white-starred face, and suffered from corns, poor dear. He had been so backward on the Flat that his only win in eleven attempts was in a modest heat at Edinburgh. Yet by the time he finally matured as a hurdler he had real pace and class about him, although his jumping technique could lead to some frightful howlers. Monksfield (left) and Sea Pigeon at the last flight of the 1979 Champion Hurdle. When put to fences in the 1976-77 seasons he showed such promise that he ran in the Gold Cup, only to take a fatal fall coming down the hill. Beforehand John Francome had called him ‘the best horse I have ridden.’ There were tears aplenty in Lambourn. Night Nurse was the best jumper of the lot, but also the ugliest. He was a tall, upright sort of horse with a long plain face and big ears out the side. He was ridden brilliantly by the redoubtable, huntsman-like drive of Paddy Broderick, whose best friends, of whom I was one, would never accuse of being remotely stylish. As a Flat horse just about the best thing about Night Nurse was his mother’s name. She was by above Suspicion out of a mare called Panacea, and she was called Florence Nightingale. But when it came to hurdles Night Nurse had wings on his heels. ‘He was,’ remembers Paddy, ‘the best actual jumper I ever sat on.’ Night Nurse did what you always want a hurdler to do: he gained ground and breath in the air. It meant that Paddy could really attack the obstacles, and the pair of them in full flight became as uplifting for those who backed them as it was daunting for those against them on the track. One of those backers was Barney Curley. In 1976 Paddy and I flew over to stay with him before Night Nurse’s assault on the Irish Sweeps Hurdle, on which, presumably, Barney was investing heavily. Horse and rider took the locals apart, and to this day on seeing me Paddy always echoes Barney’s watchword for that weekend, ‘Let there be no panic.’ The beauty of this hurdling period was the way the continuing series of battles saw the torch of the championship handed on from one to the other, and the contests between Night Nurse, Monksfield and Night Nurse’s stable companion Sea Pigeon have never been bettered in their sphere. in 1977 Night Nurse and Monksfield even ran a dead heat in the race before red 39 rum’s third Grand National, and then in 1978 little Monksfield and Mick Kinane’s father Tommy nailed ‘Brod’ and the champion to take the crown with Sea Pigeon finally taking second. in 1979 Sea Pigeon and Jonjo O'Neill came to the last apparently cruising, only to get outbattled by Monksfield, who was this time ridden by Richard Hughes’s father Dessie. It was not until 1980 that Sea Pigeon finally clicked and left Monksfield trailing in his wake. of all these Sea Pigeon was much the best as a Flat horse – the idea of Persian War or Night Nurse finishing seventh in the Derby, let alone winning two Chester Cups and the Ebor as Sea Pigeon did, is only in their dreams, even if the thought of ‘Brod’ rowing away like a policeman on the Knavesmire is a grand one. But over hurdles Sea Pigeon needed to switch off properly, and he never looked more impressive than when John Francome applied his fabled safebreaker’s nerve to proceedings in the 1981 Champion and Sea Pigeon coasted up the run-in to pick off poor Philip Blacker and Pollardstown as if he had won the wretched Derby, not finished seventh in it behind Morston in his Classic year of 1973. What an achievement it was for Peter Easterby and his team to keep two such very different horses on the go – and fittingly both of them are now buried at Great Habton, Night Nurse dying in 1998 and Sea Pigeon two years later. But of all of the great ones of that golden hurdling era, none could beat the story that was Monksfield. In his whole being and those of his connections, he symbolised the little guy with the biggest heart. Monksfield was not much bigger than Mill reef, and was also never castrated, although his subsequent stallion life was not as blue-blooded in the female department as the star of Britain’s National Stud. This meant that Monksfield, with his bright bay coat, sharp white star on the forehead and absurdly swinging foreleg at the trot and canter had an extra perkiness about him. Mind you, so did his trainer. Des McDonogh (father, in the dynastic way of things, of Irish Flat race ace Declan McDonogh) was in his early thirties then. He had bought Monksfield for just 720 guineas. He had himself built the little colt’s box up at his small, white-washed yard twenty miles south of the border at Moynalty, County Meath, notwithstanding the minor difficulty that at the time of construction he was himself encased in plaster. With those heavy-lidded eyes and quick fox’s face, Dessie had always been original. He had once played the lead in Charley’s aunt. For four consecutive years he sent out Monksfield to tread the Cheltenham stage. Each time you could not believe that this tiny little entire with that quite ridiculous dishing foreleg could handle the mighty Night Nurses and Sea Pigeons when the whips were up and the money was down. But again and again, the engine, the athleticism and, yes, the courage of the little horse won through. Look once more at the photo of him and Dessie Hughes jumping the 40 of last in the 1979 Champion Hurdle and you will see the winning fire blazing out of Monksfield’s eye. Sea Pigeon might be faster and classier, an aristocrat of the breed. But ‘Monkey’ wanted to get it on. As they faced the hill and that huge Cheltenham crowd roared, there was only going to be one winner. It was indeed the Golden age of Hurdling, so much so that no look back is complete without Dramatist and Birds Nest, two horses who never actually won the Champion Hurdle but were for long part of the mix. Birds Nest was three times winner of the Fighting Fifth Hurdle for Bob Turnell and Andy Turnell. Dramatist won six hurdles for Bill Smith and the Queen Mother’s trainer Fulke Walwyn and took Night Nurse out in a controversial Christmas Hurdle at Kempton Park when the renowned front running champion was harried for the lead by a Dramatist stable companion. When I criticised this in print, the royal trainer came up to me in the winner’s enclosure a week later and started to belabour me so vigorously that the 2008 furore over Ballydoyle’s pacemaker in the Juddmonte international seems pale by comparison. In these days I could probably have sued old Fulke for assault. Back then plenty of people thought it merely my comeuppance. When that hurdling golden age began, guy Harwood was a bright and energetic thirty-year-old garage owner’s son just five years into a training career which had begun with me riding jumping winners for him at Fontwell, Windsor and Leicester. Within weeks of sea Pigeon landing the 1981 Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham, guy had won his first classic by saddling To-agori-Mou to win the Two Thousand guineas at Newmarket and was a Flat race trainer to match any in the land. The transformation was complete.

DANCING BRAVE and the HARWOOD EXPERIMENT

WHAT Guy Harwood did at Pulborough in West Sussex was Britain’s most innovative individual racing creation of the twentieth century. Taking an ordinary dairy farm within three miles of where his father Wally had established the original garage business back in 1931, Guy developed the most modern racehorse training set-up that the world had then ever seen. Back in 1970 people had hardly heard of artificial gallops. Guy had a whole series of them with white rails everywhere, a computerised office system, labour-saving American barns, a private laboratory, a hands on vet and above all else a business mentality. 41 That was used as a term of disparagement by his rivals, but the key to his success was that he set out to build up a training operation which would make sense in the way a business should. He would take the final decision but he would bring in experts, and their combined skills would make up an unbeatable management team. No one, before or since, has ever done it like Guy. He already knew a fair bit himself. With his striped colours featuring a flamboyant black ‘H’, he had made himself a highly effective point-to-point jockey, and he linked a questioning intelligence with a direct, winner’s mentality. Giving me complicated instructions to win a ‘horse and cart’ chase Dancing Brave’s finest hour: the 1986 Arc. Round Fontwell was never going to be enough. But to get where he wanted to go he needed help. And he had the brains to find it. The gifted yearling judge James Delahooke was drafted in to select the talent; calm and experienced head lad Tommy Townsend came over to supervise the horse care; jump jockey brother-in- law Geoff Lawson oversaw all riding matters; the strong, wise and able Greville Starkey teamed up as stable jockey; and to it all was added the clinical knowledge and informed, pragmatic analysis of top veterinarian Brian Eagles. When Guy Harwood spoke it was as a mixture of vet and business man. For us in the media accustomed to trainers saying either nothing or such favourite banalities as ‘He’s a nice horse but will need the race,’ Guy was an unbelievable breath of fresh air. He may have been a bit brusque at times, but he told you things based on fact – and never more so than in the build up to To-agori-Mou’s Two Thousand Guineas in 1981. ‘The biggest myth,’ he said in the February of that year attacking a misconception that is still prevalent today, ‘is that a three-year-old is going to be bigger and heavier than it was as a two-year-old. That’s nonsense. If you 42 of find his best racing weight, you will discover that as a three-year-old it is almost exactly the same. If he is much heavier he is unfit. If he is lighter, he is sick. After all,’ Guy concluded with a metaphor from the family business, ‘he is the same car.’ on that day To-agori-Mou pulled the scale at 1,160 pounds, some 70 pounds over his Dewhurst Stakes-winning weight. When he reappeared, and got beaten, in the Craven Stakes on 14 April, he was 1,105 pounds. On 2 May he won the Two Thousand Guineas – his weight was the exact Dewhurst figure of 1,090 pounds. QED. Harwood was always something of a man in a hurry and you had a feeling that he would not hang around too long, a sense heightened by the news that Harwoods Motors got a Land rover franchise in 1979, Rolls-Royce-Bentley in 1981 and Jaguar-Daimler in 1984. What was needed before the team split up or he moved on – which inevitably would amount to one and the same thing – was a really great horse to crown the enterprise. In 1986, with Dancing Brave, they got it. Dancing Brave was not a particularly eye-taking individual: medium Height, darkish bay and a touch of white on his muzzle. Nothing wrong with him anywhere, but he didn’t have much of the swagger you like to find in champions. But oh, could he run! He won both his races as a two-year-old, but they were minor affairs compared with what was to come. The warning was out when he took the Craven Stakes, but it was in the Guineas that we all first saw his truly magnificent finishing kick. The problem for Dancing Brave, and in particular for his then jockey Greville Starkey, was that next time out in the Derby the whole world marvelled at his finish – but only so late that he failed to catch Shahrastani despite clocking the fastest closing fractions in Epsom’s history. Greville had to carry the can but as a rider I can sympathise with his dilemma. Before the race the one doubt about Dancing Brave was whether such brilliant speed would last out the mile and a half journey. So the plan was to drop the colt in at the back of the field and try and switch him off. On a flat course like Newbury there would have been no problem. But in 1986 Epsom’s contours stitched him up like a kipper, and by the time Greville Starkey finally got Dancing Brave out on an even keel Walter Swinburn and Shahrastani had flown. It’s worth remembering that Shahrastani was no flukey one-race wonder. He followed up by taking the Irish Derby by eight lengths, and was favourite in front of Dancing Brave when they met again in the King George at ascot, despite Dancing Brave having won the Eclipse Stakes impressively enough in the interim. But Dancing Brave had a greater gift of acceleration than any horse in memory. With Pat Eddery on board he sluiced past Shahrastani in the King George, only to falter a little once he had hit the front. The lesson was not lost on Eddery, whose assets – and he was then at the very height of his powers – included a quite unbelievable ability to stay cool and play late. There is a wonderful story of Pat coming into the paddock at Longchamp before the arc, touching his hat to owner Prince Khalid Abdullah and looking casually at the other horses in an abstract sort of manner. After a while Guy, who knew better than to try and tie Pat down with any ‘orders’, can’t stand the frustration. ‘So what are you going to do, Pat?’, he asks. ‘Oh,’ says the jockey vaguely, ‘I think I’ll hold him up a bit.’ and he did. At the end of the season the international Classifications gave Dancing Brave a rating of 141, the highest ever recorded. It came from what he did at Longchamp to a whole half dozen of champions who all spread out to battle in front of him in the final straight. along the rail there was the German superstar Acatenango, next to him the ace French filly Triptych, then the aga Khan’s top class pair Shardari and Darara with his Shahrastani coming wide and the French Derby winner Bering coming widest of all … it was in every sense the challenge of both the horse and the jockey’s lifetime. Pat Eddery did many, many miraculous and daring things in his thirty years in the saddle, but nothing among all those thousands of winners was a match to this. It doesn’t matter how many times you watch the video, it is still a wonder. Here’s what it felt like early the following week. As with all masterpieces, the more you study the better it looks. Pat Eddery and Dancing Brave’s victory on Sunday was more than a triumph. It was the most brilliant final trump that racing has ever seen. To understand fully last week’s excitement you must win back to the 800metre mark and remember that the unique thrill of top class Flat racing is that a jockey only has one shot. If he moves too soon he gets run out of it; too late and he never collects. Eight hundred metres out in this arc there were still plenty of pilots with power beneath them. Eddery had Dancing Brave back eleventh of the fifteen runners. He could see Shardari, Darara, Shahrastani and Bering all poised to sprint. He had to be ready. With the fastest ever arc finish about to start, did Pat move out to cover Bering’s kick? On a horse whose only defeat was when he got impossibly out of position at Epsom, did Eddery close up for the winning burst? Did he hell! He put Dancing Brave back inside and let the race develop. If he lost, the Seine wouldn’t be deep enough. For a moment you couldn’t believe your eyes. He was giving the others a start and, spread eight-wide across the track, they flattened quite furiously for the line. These were crack horses and now Dancing Brave had to move across behind them before even beginning his effort. By any ordinary criterion he had got the cards wrong. But this was no normal beast, no ordinary man. and, as with all greatness, what was seen next will never be forgot. For about a dozen strides horse and rider went almost desperately to work with little effect on the gap. Then suddenly those sinewy legs bit deep into the Longchamp turf and propelled this gleaming bay wonder towards the others with a momentum which made victory certain long before he knifed past at the death. He had played last. But he got it right. The trick, the game, the glory was taken. To do this had needed that astonishing, casual, match-winning cool that makes Eddery one of the greatest instinctive jockeys ever foaled. It also needed a horse with a most extraordinary switch-on of speed, and no praise can be too high for the way that Guy Harwood and his team had brought their colt through seven pressurised big-race months to reach this highest peak on Sunday. Their training centre down at Pulborough in Sussex has long been a byword for the most modern methods of Thoroughbred assessment – everything from video cameras to muscle biopsy – so it’s fitting that Longchamp was able to give statistical proof of the visual wonder of Dancing Brave’s finish. The Paris clock showed that the record overall time of 2 minutes 27.7 seconds for the Prix de l’arc de Triomphe’s 2,400 metres – a mile and a half – included a closing quarter of 22.8 seconds, from the moment that Shardari passed the 400-metre mark in front to when Dancing Brave crossed the line. As Dancing Brave had at least five lengths to make up in that last section and you allow 0.1 seconds a length, this means that he finished as fast as Europe’s top sprinter Double Schwartz in the 1,000-metre (five furlongs) Prix de l’abbaye an hour before the arc. The acute pressure in the straight is further shown by the rare fact that this closing quarter was the fastest stage of the race. Even more exceptional for a mile-and-a-half event, the last 200 metres were as swift as any 11.40 on the board, little change out of 11 seconds for Dancing Brave. Compare this with Sagace’s last quarter of 11.90 and 12.10 in 1985 or Mill reef’s of 12.10 and 12.40 in 1971 and you appreciate that nobody’s done it quicker. Even by Eddery’s standards this was a finish to treasure, and for a moment on Sunday he let slip such phrases as, ‘He was terrific, electrifying. When I asked him he really jumped.’ But at ascot on Friday Pat was back to his usual unexaggerating self. ‘I switched to the inside coming into the straight to avoid taking off from the bend,’ he said, as if discussing some job in the office. ‘Then I deliberately gave them first run because I didn’t want to get there too soon. When you come off the bridle it takes a stride or two for him to quicken, but when he does it’s very fast, and I don’t think any of the others thought a horse could do what Dancing Brave did to Bering.’ it all sounds a bit like yesterday’s marketing plan, not the race of the century. But then that’s part of the secret. The memory goes back to just before the start on Sunday. The horses are being loaded, the jockeys frowning in concentration. All except Eddery. He’s awake and alert all right, but the way he pats his horse and steps into the stall is devoid of tension. He looks like a commuter wanting a good position on the train so that he can play cards on the journey. Give him the pack. On this form he could deal with the Devil. That was in every respect Dancing Brave’s finest hour. An ambitious trip to Santa Anita for the Breeders’ Cup got fouled by dehydration from a moderate journey and by desperately hot weather. A stud career which produced crack horses like arc second White Muzzle and Derby winner Commander in Chief was hampered by a rare disease in his second winter, and he, like Grundy, ended up in Japan. Guy Harwood went back, very successfully, to the family business. The training team had begun to break up and nothing was ever going to equal Dancing Brave, although daughter Amanda Perrett and her husband Mark are now putting new life into the Pulborough operation. For us in 1986 there was not far to look for excitement to replace Dancing Brave, for on Boxing Day at Kempton Park that year, less than three months after the arc, we realised that we were into the age of Desert Orchid. In fact Dessie had been around for three full seasons and we already admired his boldness, but were not quite sure of his ability or of how long he could last. By the time he bowed out, five Boxing Days later, he was a legend across the land. He died, aged 27 and shaggy, snowy white, in November 2006. It was obituary time.

DESERT ORCHID

HE WAS the warrior we took to our hearts. Desert orchid was not just good but brave, not just brave but front-running bold, not just bold but fearless and sometimes flawed. He was the grey attacker who put his neck on the line. And the whole world loved him for it. It was utterly typical of him that he should go out on his shield. That he began and ended his seventy-race, 34-victory, ten-season career with a sickening somersault at Kempton. That the final crash came in his sixth consecutive King George Vi Chase, and when he got up and galloped riderless past the stands the whole crowd stood and cheered him just as they had roared home his record four victories in the race. With Desert orchid you knew exactly what you were going to get. The tapes would go up and he would charge off to the first as if Prince Rupert had recruited him to the cavalry. In an increasingly evasive and spin-doctoring world there was something wonderfully rewarding in this increasingly white horse that set caution to the winds, and unlike Prince Rupert’s one-charge- wonders kept returning to the fray. Our relationship with him was all the stronger for its taking time to grow. Sure he won six in a row and ended up running in the Champion Hurdle in his first full season. Trainer David Elsworth seemed game to run him in everything, as did the splendidly batty Burridge family. Solicitor Jimmy Burridge had bred Dessie from his headstrong hunter mare Flower Child, while his son Richard was a tall, fit-looking chap who had won a hurdling blue at Cambridge and was a film scriptwriter in real life. They were not quite the Distressed Gentlefolks’ association, but they had to borrow a horsebox to take Dessie to Elsworth’s, and it took them two days and much kicking to get him there. They had never expected anything and were having the time of their lives: Richard used to sneak off and jump the fences himself. But after four seasons we thought they had a good horse but not a great one, a character but not a king. Time for comparisons. As the nine-year-old Best Mate aims to emulate the wonderful third Cheltenham Gold Cup which Arkle achieved at the same age, he brings to the party a record of twelve wins and six seconds from eighteen starts. at this stage Desert orchid had won eighteen races from 44 starts, had won and been beaten in the King George, had earlier been good enough to run in two Champion Hurdles, had also fallen in three other hurdle races, had been pulled up twice, and had once been ignominiously and unsuccessfully tried in blinkers. Best Mate was the blue-blood, Desert orchid the hustler. It was on that foundation that the fairytale took flight. Desert orchid may have got beaten again in the Champion Chase at Cheltenham, but many people still thought him best as a two miler – and then he won over three miles at Liverpool, followed by a sensational all-the-way, ears-pricked victory in the Whitbread over three miles five furlongs. Being in that happily chaotic Sandown winners’ circle with David Elsworth, stable girl Janice Coyle and every offshoot of the Burridge clan was one of the happiest experiences of my television life. But it had only just begun. The next season he won everything. The Tingle Creek and the Victor Chandler over two miles, the King George and the Gainsborough over three miles, and then – wonder of wonders – the Gold Cup itself over three and a quarter in conditions so rough that all faint hearts advised withdrawal. But Desert Orchid in his pomp – with Simon Sherwood in the 1988 Whitbread Gold Cup. being Dessie, he always gravitated to the eye of the storm, and after becoming front-page news at Cheltenham he practically brought the nation to a halt by then having his first ever steeple chasing fall at Liverpool. By now Dessiemania was a full scale epidemic, and it had a good two seasons to run. He won seven more races, including two more King Georges, and got beat in two Gold Cups – and it wasn’t just his colour that was easy to recognize. Everyone had got an inkling of why this was a phenomenon on the hoof. They could see that Dessie did not just want to lead: he loved to rumble. This was no ‘Catch me if you can and if you do I will concede’ front runner. This was a horse that would race you until you quit. The memories blur together but two clear images remain : the ‘punch-in- the-stomach’ certainty of Dessie’s jumping as he destroyed his rivals round Kempton in the 1990 racing Post Chase, and the absolute ‘I-will-not-be- denied’ set of his head and neck as he saw off Nick The Brief and a 2st 7lb weight disadvantage in what was to be his last ever victory a year later at Sandown. The legend had invaded the ether and was humanizing into the land of the cuddly toy. One day at Kempton a ‘goochie goo’ infant in a pram was stationed next to the paddock. As assorted bay and brown brutes filed past, the child gurgled, ‘Horsey, horsey.’ When a grey finally arrived, the burble changed to ‘Dessie, Dessie.’ Up close the real thing was never so sweet. Before that closing King George in 1991, David Elsworth had us all down to Whitsbury. With the extraordinary, intuitive, untutored eloquence which has more recently adorned the Persian Punch celebrations, he talked to us about how the strain of getting the now twelve-year-old hero to racing peak was beginning to get both to him and the horse, of how Dessie ‘had to take his coat off at Sandown’, of how the end was near. Dessie himself put up with the hacks and camera crews with plenty of his old swagger right up until exercise was finally over and Janice put his food in the manger. An eager lensman moved forward to get the cosy picture of ‘Dessie’s breakfast’, and the old fighter’s patience snapped. The white face came up, the ears laid back and the guy was sent panicking through the door. in six decades with Thoroughbreds I have never seen a horse so clearly express the sentiment, ‘Eff off.’ in the search for wider interest, we are apt to drag up all sorts of soft and inappropriate analogies for famous quadrupeds. With Desert orchid there is no such difficulty. He was the warrior who would not weaken, the horse who led the charge under the banner ‘Fear and Be Slain’. That’s why we loved and admired him more than any other. That’s why his name will live forever on. Horses that excite – that’s the biggest thrill a racehorse can give. That was Desert Orchid’s greatest asset. There was that touch of madness about him. That he was prepared to gallop and attack where no normal horse would go. In a very different way it applied to the dazzling sprinter Lochsong too – well, certainly the madness bit. Perhaps that was a cheap shot, but anyone at trainer Ian Balding’s Kingsclere yard will tell you she fitted the phrase trotted out when horses are a bit nuts – of being ‘not entirely straightforward’. The redeeming thing about her behaviour is that as it deteriorated her performances seemed to get better. She was apparently not too bad when in 1991 she finally made it onto a racecourse as a back-end three-year-old, and winning a race with what seemed an unsound filly before sending her back to owner Jeff smith’s stud was at that stage the height of Ian’s ambition. But two seasons later he recorded that ‘she had become progressively more of a prima donna, and I thought in a fourth year in training she might become impossible to deal with.’ she stayed in training and she was indeed difficult – but it helped that she had become the best sprinter in the country. Whatever her foibles, chief among them were either refusing to go anywhere or then going at a million miles an hour. She took a crash course in popularity in 1992 by landing each of those three impossible-to-win cavalry-charge handicaps the stewards’ Cup, the Portland Handicap and the Ayr gold Cup. That made her something of a punter’s darling, but the next season she became the purists’ too when sizzling home in four races – culminating in the Nunthorpe at York and the Prix de l’abbaye at Longchamp – to be crowned Cartier Horse of the Year. By 1994, when Ian Balding had thought she might have been best not running at all, she was even faster, even more dangerously explosive, and therefore more exciting than ever. At both Newmarket and York she blew up in the parade, and the sight of her and Frankie Dettori setting off down the Knavesmire at York brought a whole new and dangerous meaning to the phrase ‘cantering to the start’. Thankfully no harm was done and she signed off (in Europe at least – the Breeders’ Cup proved definitely one sprint too far) with another blazing all-the-way victory in the abbaye. In that summer of 1994 she was at ascot for the King’s stand stakes. There was no parade, and she and Frankie got to the start with his arms and her energy still intact. I was down there too. I wanted to see her speed in close-up. I will never forget it.

LOCHSONG

TEN STRIDES, four seconds, 40 mph. They should re-write Shakespeare. They should say, ‘Like a Lochsong from the traps.’ She was first to arrive at the start. She had gone past the stands quick enough, but by now she was as calm as a hack. Frankie Dettori had his goggles pulled down but his smile switched up. A stalls handler checked her girth and Frankie jumped down and let her neck strap out a couple of holes. Lightning starters need a longer safety belt. David Jones, the Kingsclere farrier, walked over to check her racing plates. He wore a straw hat but had a heavy responsibility. The filly picked up each foot as easily as if it were evening stables. ‘Linford without the lunchbox,’ Frankie has called her. But remember Mr Christie’s forbidding mask of concentration. There’s no doubt which is the more natural runner. The first of her rivals was still a furlong away. Starter Simon Morant and assistant Peter Haynes came across and, for a few seconds, there was a little admiring gaggle of professionals united in their admiration of this Queen of Speed. Anyone who has come into racing was once hooked by the thrill of what the Thoroughbred can do at the gallop. Stand next to Lochsong and you are seeing the ultimate. She’s not the typical massive-shouldered sprinter. She stands ready now. A sensible size compared to the horse mountain that is Blyton Lad. The little sweating midget that is imperial Bailiwick. But you can see the power in those patterned hind quarters. Most of all you can see the look. They call it ‘the look of eagles’. But with the alertness of the head and the cock of the ears, this is much more gazelle. This is a deer ready to run. They are loading now. Lochsong got a bit steamed up in the stalls last time out at Sandown and Morant has wisely ruled that she should box up last. Still no sweat on that long bay neck. No jig-jog nerves in the oiled hooves in the grass. She walks in. The handler ducks under the gates and runs left. Frankie’s face is expressionless behind the goggles. The head still but not tense under the helmet. The sprint is going to come from beneath him. ‘Jockeys!’, shouts Morant Lochsong wins the King’s Stand Stakes. As the gates slam open. It’s a sort of ‘God speed’, and from stall 4 the speed is God-given. It’s not the brutal power you get with some sprinters. Not the forceful jockey-horse reaction you find with others. Frankie leans forward, the reins loose, the fingers in the neck strap. Beneath him she runs, the long limbs bounding her out and racing in an instant. Within seconds she is a receding speck in the distance, her rivals toiling in her wake. Lay up the treasures. See Lochsong while you can. There were just three more chances for British race goers to see Lochsong in action, and at both Newmarket and York, as previously related, she blew her chance by bolting to the start. In between she bolted up in Goodwood’s King George stakes and closed her European career by being walked to the start at Longchamp before rocketing back five lengths clear of her field in the Prix de l’abbaye. Finally American race fans saw what Lochsong could do over at Churchill Downs for the Breeders’ Cup. unfortunately their sighting was in a runaway morning workout which amazed local ‘clockers’ and so burnt out Lochsong’s reserves that in the race itself she had to be pulled up ... That Prix de l’abbaye success took Lochsong’s total of victories to fifteen. Eighteen months later we were in thrall to a horse who was in the midst of scoring sixteen in succession. Cigar was no ordinary moke.

CIGAR

THERE is a way horses look – a way they arch the neck and flare the nostril which says they are ready to go out onto the track and run the others ragged. I have never seen a horse look stronger than Cigar did that first moonlit desert night at the inaugural Dubai World Cup of 1996. He must have known how much was hanging on him. Which was a lot. As a horse he had the world’s biggest reputation to defend. He was on an extraordinary thirteen-race winning streak. He had blazed through 1995, winning ten races from ten, culminating in that astonishing Breeders’ Cup Classic in rain-soaked, dirt-sloppy Belmont Park when he hit the wire in a record 1 minute 59.58 seconds for the ten furlongs to the famous Bill Durkan commentary hailing ‘the unconquerable, invincible, unbeatable Cigar!’ But there was another reputation at stake, and with due respect to the finest colt on the planet it was a shade more important. It was that of Sheikh Mohammed. It had been exactly a year before that he had the idea. Three or four of us were sitting late into the night discussing the Jockeys’ Challenge competition that had been run earlier in the day at Nad al Sheba. Great riders had been flown in from all over the world. Live TV coverage had been obtained. But somehow it was still not having the impact that Sheikh Mohammed and his vision of an emerging, better-than-the-best Dubai would want. ‘We must have a big race,’ he said. ‘What is the richest race in the world?’, he asked me. I explained that it was the Japan Cup, which at that time was worth over £1 million sterling to the winner, almost two million in all. At that time (although it is only twelve years ago as I write) this was an impossibly large sum for even Sheikh Mohammed to top. I should have known better. ‘We must do it,’ he said. As Cigar stalked the paddock on 27 March 1996, the winner’s prize was not a million in sterling, but a million and a half. The money was the easy bit. For there were the stables to build, the date to fix, the quarantine arrangements to make, and above all the horses to attract. In the last dozen years Sheikh Mohammed has so transformed Dubai that it may be hard for some to realize that it was a comparative backwater back then – and most certainly a backwater on the racing map. So we all went to work. As a member of the organising committee I can honestly say that it was a wonderfully exciting time, but the further we went the more obvious it became that we needed more than a big event and invited crowds. If we were going to welcome everyone to the world’s richest horse race we needed the world’s best horse to give it credibility. And with top European contenders unlikely because of the sand rather than turf surface, that increasingly looked as if it was going to be the big powerful bay that owner Allen Paulson named after an aviation beacon, not a tobacco smoke. We thought we needed Cigar to book his ticket. After the 1995 Breeders’ Cup Classic, we were certain. It rained so hard that day at Belmont that any turf course in Europe would have abandoned before lunchtime. The dirt course was deemed to be that silly sounding but brutally testing state of ‘sloppy’. That actually means that the top surface becomes a little more than a purée, and the hooves go straight through to the hard surface beneath. The Breeders’ Cup Classic field clocked the half mile in 48.3 seconds on their way to that sub two-minute mile and a quarter. Cigar’s legs must have been made of iron, but most others aren’t. it has been nothing short of an international disgrace that it took the carnage of similar going at the Monmouth Park Breeders’ Cup in 2007 for American racing to realise that if they did not put their house in order and put down welfare-acceptable surfaces, the law would do it for them – and pariah them in the process. But back in 1995 Cigar was awesome, and Belmont Park was the first time I had seen him up close. He was a magnificent man of a horse: powerful and masculine without being heavy and sturdy. He was very composed as an individual in the morning; brutally, arm tugging forceful in the afternoons. The moment the gates clanged open in the Classic, Jerry Bailey had a double handful of horse on the rein. Cigar had the stride, the power and the will to win. He was completing his ten from ten for the season. He was a certainty for the Horse of the Year. He was box office on the hoof. We had to have him in Dubai. Quite what inducements were held out to Allen Paulson was not actually my business. But whatever they were, they were worth it. For when we heard that Cigar was coming and that Soul of The Matter, the Burt Bacharach owned fourth in the 1995 Classic, was coming with him, we knew that our race would demand attention – provided it was all right on the night. There is a great moment in all sport when the support teams peel away and the actual participants are on their own. You see it clearest in Formula one, when one moment the pit lane is a crowded market and the next there are just 22 cars with engines revving. You see it in the boxing ring, on the cycle track and of course you see it on the racecourse when the trainer and the owner and the lad and the starter have all had their say and the goggles are finally pulled down, the stalls are loaded and the game is on. In sports psychology they talk of being energised by the adrenalin of challenge, not weakened by the nervousness of pressure. Cigar was adrenalized that night. So much depended on Cigar. Sheikh Mohammed had given such lavish hospitality that Sir Clement Freud rather unwisely dubbed it ‘the Mother of all Freebies’. The then Crown Prince of Dubai had given us carte blanche to bus in as many helpers as trucks would allow, but given the lack of time and of experience there were still some pretty ragged edges as we desperately tried to make this an event to match its billing. It didn’t help when the supposedly highly trained, white-dish-dashed security cordon melted into the background at the first sign of trouble. Cigar had won us over in the mornings as he and his exercise rider stood at right angles to the track next to trainer Bill Mott, every inch lord of all he surveyed. But now he had to run. And run he did. The floodlights were not so good in those days, but Jerry Bailey was never going to hide him away and do anything fancy. Turning into the straight, the caller was shouting his name. Two furlongs from home he was in front and in command. But then as they hit the final pole Gary Stevens launched Soul of The Matter, and it was going to hurt. For a few desperate seconds it looked as if it would even be defeat. We could brazen it out that we had still seen a great contest but the world would mutter that Dubai was a difficult place to come to. We needed a champion to display his crown. Jerry Bailey clamped down behind the mane with increasing urgency and switched his whip from the right hand to the left. ‘I saw the other horse coming and range up alongside us ,’ Jerry said with lucid admiration afterwards. ‘He looked me in the eye, looked Cigar in the eye, and Cigar would not have it. He inched out and ahead again and I truly believe that if they went round one more time the other horse was never going to get by him.’ The winning streak had stretched to fourteen to match that of the legendary Man o’ War. The headlines could rightly dub Cigar ‘Champion of the World’. But those were just statistics and titles. That night in Dubai a horse had done something for us. By his presence and power and indomitable courage he had put a nation on the map. Since then Dubai has multiplied a thousand fold in every direction. But few things will better that night when the gleam shone in Cigar’s eye and the first World Cup was run. The Cigar show still had a little way to run. rested and refreshed back in America, he stretched ‘The streak’ to fifteen at Suffolk Downs in June 1996 and then equalled Citation’s 1948-50 run of sixteen consecutive victories by winning the Arlington Citation Challenge in Chicago eleven days later. Hopes of setting a new mark were stymied next time out when the aptly named Dare and go outran him in the Pacific Classic. There was one more victory to come, but after finishing third in the Breeders’ Cup Classic the racing chapter was closed with nineteen victories, almost $10 million in prize money – a record for an American-trained horse beaten only when Curlin won the Jockey Club gold Cup in September 2008 – and certainly a lot more in fame. all sorts of fancy numbers were put on his stud value, but in an ironic twist of fate the horse who was so richly successful on the track turned out to be a stallion who could only ‘fire blanks’ in the breeding shed. Stud owners and insurance men rent their raiment, but for the general public there was the happy outcome that Cigar was despatched to the Kentucky Horse Park, where retirement is undemanding but visitors can pay homage. When the Breeders’ Cup was at Churchill Downs in 2006 I hooked off to see him, taking interstate 64 out of Louisville and steaming east for some sixty miles until the domed roofs and the big white railing paddocks of the Horse Park appeared on the left. It was a crisp autumn day. Cigar had a palatial box deeply bedded with straw and his own paddock with an inscription outside detailing his achievements. He was picking away at the grass. There would never be any problem ladies in his life. He seemed content. Was there a message there? a salutary experience two months after Cigar’s Dubai World Cup has taught me to be a bit careful with the quips about the ‘sultan’s life at stud’. Commenting on the then five-year-old Double Trigger before he ran in the Henry ii stakes at Sandown Park, I had wondered aloud on Channel 4 whether, after all his previous year’s excitements of winning the ascot gold Cup and the Goodwood and Doncaster Cups to land the ‘stairs’ Triple Crown’ he might now be beginning to ‘think a bit.’ included was a bit of innuendo that he might now be getting keener on the boudoir than the racecourse battle. Of course, Double Trigger proceeded to make a complete fool of me by coming home miles clear of his nearest pursuer, and a few days later the Racing Post letters column contained a missive from Middle ham purportedly signed by the horse himself, making a convincing case that my comments were way out of order. After all, Double Trigger ‘wrote’, he’d had flu the previous autumn, and the trip to Australia for the 1995 Melbourne Cup had taken a lot out of him. ‘I hope I answered your question that I “might just be coming to the end of the line” by winning by seven lengths on Monday,’ said the letter before concluding: ‘still, no hard feelings. Come up and ride me at Middleham some time and perhaps I can show you if I’ve got my mind on other things.’ This was not a challenge I could duck.

DOUBLE TRIGGER

TO BE quite honest I don’t think he was that keen to see me. ‘Hello big fella,’ I said, offering a fatuous pat as Andrew Murphy made the Gold Cup winner ready. The white-blazed head we think we know and love moved with short and instant menace. An awesome set of teeth flashed in the early morning light in his box. Double Trigger does not take fools – or being called a fool – too gladly. It is patronising as well as silly to ascribe human characteristics to horses one has only watched on the screen or on the other side of the paddock rail. They have their own quirks, their own habits, be they straightforward or difficult. But essentially they are horses. They don’t read the papers or listen to idiot commentators like this one querying their enthusiasm on TV … or do they? Having accepted the unbelievable honour of a ride on Double Trigger, it was now time to come to terms with what he is really like as an individual. He is not huge, but is much bigger than he looks on the telly. He is 16.2 hands (5ft 6in) at the shoulder. He draws 475kg (1,0471b, over 9cwt) of hardened muscle on the weighbridge. His once bright chestnut coat is now almost strawberry roan in colour. His mane and tail have a dark and tawny look far removed from the flaxen locks of his juvenile days. His demeanour tells you that he is not a pet. He is a five-year-old entire and proud of it. That acknowledged, it was a relief to be legged into the saddle. I felt a lot safer there. He registered no protest as this new burden was heaved upon him; never felt like taking the unmissable opportunity of two quick bucks which would deposit me in the Johnston equine pool but ten yards from his own box door; never bothered with any skittish wrangling as thirty head of second lot sorted themselves out in the narrow, stone-flagged central yard. He padded round like an old pro but not like any smiling ears-pricked patsy. This was a training chore. He kept his ears half back and a suspicious eye on the ancient body loaded up behind him. The strength of his neck is what strikes you. It is of medium length but thickens to a middle-sized tree trunk in the centre. You look down on it and for the first time fully realise what you are sitting on. This is one of the very best horses to have ever looked through a bridle. one of only six in history to have in one season carried off the ascot, Goodwood and Doncaster Cups, the Stayers’ Triple Crown. You run a jolly, placatory hand against that magnificent white-flecked neck. Some horses will flick their ears or toss their head at such blandishments. This one does not take easy pats from strangers. The string files down out of the Kingsley House yard and begins to wind right towards Middleham’s Market Cross. Straight opposite the Kingsley House gates is Warwick House, from where Neville Crump sent out three Grand National winners and where now Mark Johnston stables his seventy strong two-year-old team. The likes of ascot runners Hula Prince and Future Prospect join up as sage old Bobby Elliott on Two Thousand Guineas runner-up Bijou d’inde now leads our little cavalry platoon up through this wondrous old medieval town with the great ruined walls of the castle to the left of us. Double Trigger is making his own history, but where he is trained goes back long before the Thoroughbred was even thought of. Most of us have some vague idea about Middleham being the northern capital of Britain in the Middle ages, of Richard iii spending his childhood and after 1471 some of his power-hungry years at this castle. But what about Mary of Middleham? Back in the thirteenth century she first made the town ‘The Windsor of the north’ and ruled as a widow, her husband dying after what is described as ‘punitive castration’ performed by the husband of one of his lady friends. it was castration that Double Trigger seemed headed for just three stroppy summers ago when, with no apparent talent on the gallops, he was so prone to walking around on his hind legs that one morning Bobby Elliott was moved to look at the nearly palomino-marked two-year-old and utter the now immortal condemnation: ‘The only place for him is Chipperfield’s Circus.’ Now sixteen races, ten victories and £350,000 into Trigger’s career, no one around him can forget that first incredible day at redcar when ‘the dunce’ suddenly got the message, swept through the field and won by ten lengths in record time. ‘We couldn’t believe it,’ says jockey Jason Weaver, a sharp sky-blue wind-cheatered figure in the string behind us: ‘He was just useless at home. Still doesn’t do much on the gallops, but he knows just what he is about.’ These words give me a somewhat premature flush of confidence on Trigger’s back. We are now trotting between high greystone walls towards the moors in the distance. Trigger has given a couple of canters on the spot but is now jogging along behind Bijou d’inde with the grudging acceptance of a soccer player in the warm-up routine. I stand up in my stirrups and look back at the horses and riders clattering up in the posse. All’s well with the world. Or is it? For as the countryside now opens out ahead, Bobby forks right and hacks Bijou d’inde away up the collar of Low Moor between the white markers. Double Trigger follows him and suddenly I am far too acutely aware that with privilege comes responsibility. Just how much of a ‘dosser’ is Double Trigger on the gallops? However simple he may be for those who know him, the fact remains that the horse beneath me has picked up the bit and I can feel the power. The moor seems to climb endlessly up ahead. What if Trigger decides to enact his revenge and really test these ageing and unrehearsed jockey reflexes? A small trickle of panic enters my upper arm. Anyone who has ever ridden knows the rules. Confidence is the key, and the lighter your hold on the reins the better. But it can be easier said than done. A couple of furlongs gone and Trigger is still taking a tug, Bobby and Bijou is only a couple of lengths in front, the moor still climbs on and on. Don’t panic – you used to do this for a living. Ah yes, but that was a long time ago: what if cramp begins to set in? Somehow it didn’t. Bobby pulls up and we walk off down to the right. A ridiculous sense of relief floods over me. ‘That was great,’ I exclaim heartily, like Hancock after the first prick in the Blood Donor sketch: ‘Shall I ease his girths a hole?’ The reply puts a chill through the blood. ‘Oh no,’ says Bobby, looking across from the great bulk of Bijou d’inde: ‘We are going over to the High Moor now.’ out to our left the High Moor beckons a thousand feet up in the sunshine. With Welton Fell to the south and Wensleydale green and timeless to the north, it is the most perfect of prospects. But at this end of the reins it could be tempting fate. No matter that Double Trigger seems a bit more content with life, his ears at last pricked forward. The truth must be faced that I was in quite a funk coming up that long canter. Should I call over Mark Johnston and run up the white flag? Pride won’t allow it. Remember what that comes before! But by some miracle we did it. Deirdre Johnston on the liver chestnut Mattawan leads us at a good canter down towards Penhill Farm. You can feel Double Trigger’s strength surging up through his shoulders, but the pace is just quick enough for the brakes not to fail. It’s the most dazzling of mornings in one of the remotest parts of the kingdom, so you blink in bemusement as a small man in an elderly Rolls-Royce drives slowly by. No time to ponder, there’s to be another canter, a rein-stretching couple of furlongs back homewards and then a right-handed sweep up the High Moor collar. We are going a bit quicker now, and you can begin to gather what Double Trigger is about. He crooks his head a touch left in a mannerism we know as spectators, but his gallop is straight ahead. The stride is not extravagant, yet has a real relentless flow about it. With that tawny mane in your eyes you can sense that he could keep going long after the others wilt. The trainer’s car looms on the horizon. Double Trigger drops his bridle. He’s given me quite comeuppance enough. In fact I have been doubly forgiven. For we then returned for a final couple of spins up the seven furlongs of Low Moor all-weather. Twice again I feel the rolling, tireless power of the best stayer and the best Flat racehorse I am ever likely to sit upon. Double Trigger was unimpressed by my wonderment. He wouldn’t have blown a candle out. In November 1975 I had the unique and extremely alarming honour of riding Red Rum bucking and kicking through the streets of Southport and then at an ever increasing gallop along the beach towards Liverpool. It was something I never expected to be matched in my experience. Twenty years on it has been, and more. Good luck Trigger. You are a real man, my son. Unfazed by carting me round for a morning, Double Trigger then ran a close second in the 1996 gold Cup at ascot and won the Doncaster Cup, too much rejoicing. He soldiered on, winning the Goodwood Cup in 1997 and closing out gloriously by taking both the Goodwood Cup and Doncaster Cup in 1998. Mark Johnston saddled over 100 winners in 1996 and took more than £1 million pounds in prize money that season – a feat which he, uniquely, has achieved every year since 1994. Anyone wondering why the default position for a Johnston horse is up with the leaders, prepared to make it hurt, should get themselves to Middleham. As I discovered on Double Trigger, Mark’s horses don’t get galloped hard, but the sheer basic graft of their routine means that they have reservoirs of fitness very few can equal. Johnston’s figures do not lie. Nor do the figures with which the rise of the Japanese as a force in world racing can be plotted. Throughout the 1980s I travelled to Tokyo each November to help organize the Japan Cup as part of the international racing Bureau team. in structural and organizational terms the Japanese were so far ahead of us it was ridiculous – I remember talking to the TV camera with over 100,000 people in the immaculate grandstand behind me – but could not produce top horses. It soon became clear that this was the subplot to putting on the Cup itself. It was more than just a prestigious international race, their only one. It was a chance to test their own horses and trainers against the world. For the first few years they found themselves embarrassingly wanting, and if you went around their palatially appointed training centres you could soon see the reasons. However well organized it was, they were treating horses as numbers and not machines. For years they had been sending eager would-be trainers abroad with clipboards and cameras, but when they returned the old guard pooh-poohed them. When I wanted to have a horse moved across the box at the Miho centre, the lad did not click it over with his voice but got a pitch fork to prod it. When I spent an afternoon at the track I discovered that no horses were gelded, every horse wore a hood, and none wore blinkers. I told the authorities that it was not my opinion but the rest of the world’s that they were in danger of being a laughing stock. We even made a video of a lad grooming and stroking a horse like a friend, not a tiger. The penny was dropping, but it needed a new guard of trainers to take things forward. Kasuo Fujisawa was one of these, and in July 1998 he brought the big chestnut Taiki shuttle on the long road from Tokyo to Chantilly, with the Prix Jacques le Marois, one of the defining one-mile races of the season, as his principal target.

TAIKI SHUTTLE

THE HORSE as a symbol has been around since man first started scratching on the sides of caves. Today we have a new one. He’s big, he’s handsome, he has the whole of Japan behind him, and if Taiki Shuttle wins this afternoon at Deauville, the racing world will shy on its orbit. But the lessons, as so often with horses, may not be quite the ones we think. The received wisdom is that this, for the Japanese, is payback time. The yen may be crashing but, after years of developing the richest racing nation on earth, they have at last got some runners who can crack it on the international scene. After eighteen renewals of the Japan Cup in Tokyo have logged a mere four home-bred successes, they are finally receiving dividends on a worldwide investment which has seen five of the last seven Derby winners shipped off east. After thirty years of overseas failure, the Japanese belatedly tasted Group 1 triumph abroad when seeking the Pearl won the Prix Maurice de Gheest at Deauville last Sunday. Now Taiki Shuttle, winner of nine of ten races for a cool 490 million yen (more than £12 million) and rated 10lb that filly’s superior, can repeat the trick. But a central part of this so-called wisdom is bosh. Seeking The Pearl and Taiki Shuttle are about as Japanese as President Clinton’s dog. Both were bred in America, and after nursery days in Kentucky, Taiki Shuttle did all his early schooling at his owner’s farm near The Curragh in Ireland, only finally coming under champion trainer Kasuo Fujisawa’s care at Miho training centre, near Tokyo, at the end of his two-year-old season. Fears of this week’s Normandy excitements heralding a Japanese-reared superbreed would seem to be somewhat overstated. But the impact of the challenge should not be. Over the years there have been two upsetting themes about continued Japanese failure overseas. One has been the fear that their traditionally flawed methods of horse care would never change, the other that their devoted set of travelling cheerleaders deserve something better. Never more so than when some 100 media and fans followed every move of the big, plain and rather bizarrely over-exercised mare called Hokuta Vega in preparation for the 1997 Dubai World Cup. after her fatal accident in the race, the sight of the Japanese press sobbing openly contrasted with the much stiffer upper lip British reaction when top steeplechaser one Man suffered a similar fate at Aintree that April. Being with Taiki Shuttle as he wound up his preparation on the immaculately tended tracks at Lamorlaye was to feel reassurance. Fujisawa was a popular figure when he worked a five-year stay at Newmarket, and his utterances have the simple common sense which is so often the hallmark of champion horsemen. Taiki Farms, started by businessman Yoshiki Akazawa, is an operation whose internationalism has prevented it being tied down by the rigidity of Japanese regulations and whose system of bringing in groups of investors makes Taiki Shuttle, with his 100 shares, the most successful syndicate horse on the globe. As for travelling support, this is already running at near fever pitch. Before 7.30 a.m. on Friday there were already twenty Japanese media groupies following their hero onto Lamorlaye’s exercise grounds. ‘it’s so exciting,’ said journalist Naoko Takahashi: ‘You should have been here when he galloped on Wednesday – with all the TV crews there were more than fifty of us around.’ Even cosmopolitan Deauville was shaken when Seeking the Pearl broke the oriental duck last Sunday. an extra press room was laid on, the victory made the front pages of all the sports sections back in Tokyo, and the 100odd Japanese media contingent are already dubbing Taiki Shuttle’s bid for the Prix du Haras de Fresnay-Le-Buffard Jacques Le Marois, as ‘World Cup revenge’, following their own team’s ill-fated visit to the football finals. Dismiss this as sentiment at your peril. Much has been made of the squillions of yen gambled and invested in Japanese racing. But it’s the investment in people and passions that is also now drawing dividends which no other racing territory can match. Ten years back the government-run Japanese racing association launched a series of multi-million yen promotions. anyone who studied the 168,000 – yes, 168,000 – crowd for the Japanese Derby in June will have noticed a dramatic drop in age range and increase in feminine percentage compared with a decade ago. Where else is a champion jockey like Yutaka Take, fittingly in Seeking the Pearl’s saddle last Sunday, right up there among the rock stars? It’s almost arrivederci Frankie Dettori. But the stunner is the concentration on the horses. Where else would there be best-selling sports ware featuring as a logo just the outline of the long white blaze which adorns the face of top stallion Sunday Silence? Taiki Shuttle has got a handsome chestnut head with a fetching leaf-shaped blaze on the forehead. If he wins today it will be pin-up time. At 48, jockey Yukio okabe is a bit old for the kids but he is also the senior member of the team, whose words and actions are clearly aimed at putting the horses first. Like trainer Fujisawa, he is openly critical of the Japanese unions’ insistence on Mondays being a free day for all stable lads, despite the crucial demands of post-race care after Sunday’s race meetings. ‘We have to think of the animals,’ he said: ‘This is a nonsense.’ Last year Fujisawa saddled 58 winners for some 1.8 billion yen (£7.7 million), but still bridles at being restricted, like all trainers, to just twenty boxes at the Miho centre. ‘I’d like more but we have to put up with it,’ he said on Friday. ‘Just as we do with the need to keep people informed, do the interviews. It’s to attract the public.’ in that way Japan splendidly leads the world. Every horse is publicly weighed before every race (and Taiki Shuttle draws a massive 510 kilos on the scale). Every horse has a sectional time printed after every run. Every horse has to pass not just a stalls test but a one-furlong early pace test. When British authorities talk about extra betting revenue and ‘self help’, they ought to think of these customer services as well as prize money. Mind you, such aids do not guarantee enlightenment. Before his debut race last season Taiki Shuttle went through the early pace test. Did the future champion sprinter and champion miler, the fastest thing Japan has had in a decade, pass with flying colours? Did he heck. Big, sleepy and apparently uncoordinated, it took him three tries to make the cut. ‘I didn’t want to press him,’ said Fujisawa in a kindly manner: ‘You don’t need to force these things.’ Well, not as the trainer once did himself. During his Newmarket stay a titled owner came to watch morning work. Just as he passed, Fujisawa was summarily bucked off. Stung by this insult to Japanese pride, the normally genial future hero grabbed his horse by the head, wrestled it to the ground and sat on it. East and West, kindness is best. Taiki shuttle duly won the Jacques Le Marois impressively and then took his unbeaten sequence to seven (and his winnings to the Yen equivalent of over £2 million) when running out a five-length winner of Japan’s Mile Championship in Kyoto in November. The Japanese have built splendidly on Taiki shuttle, and in Deep impact have actually bred and reared one of the best horses of recent times. But if they could extend their culture to Flat racing, taking it as far as fox hunting would be another matter. For Britain it has been very different. Fox hunting has been part of our culture for centuries, and as times change our legislators and a large slab of public opinion have turned against it. Be that as it may, it is a matter of historical fact that hunting, whether it be fox, hare or deer, has been at the root of jump racing from the beginning. They didn’t call it national Hunt racing for nothing. My own view, having hunted regularly in my early days, is that a lot of the disapproval stems from the arrogance of the past – as in one instance I remember, of a red-faced MFH riding up to some luckless passer-by and shouting in plummy tones, ‘Where’s my bloody fox?’ But however great the sins of the fathers, class envy are no platform on which to build the law of the land. And if you doubt that this is at the core of things, how come every anti-hunting reference is invariably to ‘The Foxhunting Bill’? in my experience, what happens to a hare when the beagles finally catch up with it is just as savage, if no less swift, as what happens to a fox at the kill. Yet no one talks about the ‘anti-Beagling Bill’ because beaglers by and large wear scruffy clothes and trainers, or are old men who stand in the middle and watch the hunt develop around them. Unlike the pink coat and top hat brigade, they give you no easy visual targets. Of course there is also a perfectly earnest wish at the bottom of this: to stop humans harming animals. But the idea that banning hunting with hounds stops foxes or hares or deer suffering at the hands of man is palpably ridiculous, as there has to be culling by other means. If animal protection were at the true root of the legislation I could support it. But the overwhelming impression remains that opponents dislike the hunters more than hunting itself. And banning things just because you don’t like the people who do them has no place in a free society. Which leads us to a pink-coated and velvet-hatted day with the Meynell Hunt in December 1999. Actually I was in a black coat and a black helmet but the man we had come to ride alongside was in full fig. Charles Dixey was making few concessions to political correctness, but he was riding his own horse Castle Mane, whose unbeaten exploits in point-to-points and hunter chases had put him in the betting for the Cheltenham gold Cup itself in 2000. This was training as it used to be. I am glad I was there while it lasted.

CASTLE MANE

THERE is preparation, special preparation, and then there is the way Charles Dixey is readying Castle Mane for the Gold Cup at Cheltenham. He is going back to where it all began. Last Saturday I climbed aboard a gigantic former show jumper called Bertie and went along to watch. While See More Business and Florida Pearl have been with their trainers since July and won their comeback races last month, the still unbeaten Castle Mane only returns to Caroline Bailey’s stable tomorrow morning. In the meantime, his 55-year-old owner has been at the reins himself. And how. Last Saturday morning 1998 Gold Cup hero See More Business, like other top contenders, would have been out for a routine training session as organized and supervised as you would expect for elite athletes on two legs or four. Castle Mane may yet graduate to that elite but, when Dixey retired from 35 years as a City insurance broker a couple of years back, the aim for the light-framed chestnut he had bought in Leicestershire was to hunt, and maybe win a point-to-point. And last Saturday, just as yesterday and every other Saturday since October, a-hunting he would go. Put aside, just for a moment, any feelings you have about fox hunting, and appreciate what Castle Mane was in for when the Meynell Hounds met at the little country village of Snelston, about ten miles west of Derby. For with Dixey, a slightly over-the-top and unreconstructed figure in scarlet coat and grey hunting cap, Castle Mane’s ‘qualifying’ is not the seven token appearances undertaken by many of the 3,500 horses that run in point-to-points each season. There are big fences in that part of Derbyshire. If the fox breaks cover, the only way you keep up is by jumping them. Mr Dixey talks a good hunt. Now he would have to ride it. From the 18.2 hands (6ft 2in at the shoulder) elevation of Bertie’s enormous back, Castle Mane is not that impressive a sight. He is barely 16 hands, and with his neck set quite low in front of him has none of the upright swagger or glossy muscle texture that one likes to associate with the champion racehorse. No doubt that’s why he only cost Charles Dixey a paltry £8,500 two years ago. That was before he won his first four point-to-points and then hit the headlines last March with a runaway win at the Cheltenham Festival. Considering some buyers have since been offering the thick end of half a million, the horse now trotting down the lane on this most gorgeous of winter mornings is one of the bargains of the century. The business advice is to take the money. The racing wisdom with a horse of this potential is to send it to a Martin Pipe or a Paul Nicholls and see how it measures against the best. But as our fifty-horse cavalcade clopped past Snelston Church and out onto the bank which overlooked the river Dove, with all the glory of the Peak District awaiting beyond the northern horizon, the feeling of being in a time warp was all-pervading. The first steeplechases were between fox hunters who challenged each other to race across this sort of grass and hedgerow countryside – quite literally from steeple to steeple. Down below us the pack search fruitlessly for the rural predator who, if put to the vote, would almost certainly prefer this to the gun, gas or poison as a means of selective culling. Ahead of us a four-foot wooden rail blocks a muddy and slippery path. Castle Mane waits impatiently for his turn and then skips gaily over. Charles Dixey, the winner of half a dozen point-to-points in his youth but by his own ever-talkative admission not the greatest rider since John Francome, drops his whip. There is not much scent so the hounds only run in bursts, and the foxes get exercised, not killed. As we gather on the first hill you notice that the Prince of Wales has joined in alongside huntsman Johnny Greenall. It says a bit for the Prince and the other riders that nobody takes much notice, and after a few minutes we all clatter off along another road to the next covert. Quite soon you discover why. At last there is some activity up front. Suddenly we are in rolling green countryside, with a patchwork of big black fences beckoning ahead. It would not matter if it was the Prince of Wales, Prince Naseem or The artist Formerly Known as Prince out there. What we need is impetus and elevation. At the second fence Castle Mane does not get enough. Landing too deep in the ditch on the landing side he knuckles up, Dixey goes overboard and the most expensive horse in the hunting field is galloping loose towards the eastern skyline. When this happens on the schooling grounds, professional racehorse trainers go into rages of cardiac-threatening nature. Here the wise old figure of Phil Arthers, at whose stables Castle Mane boards for his hunting term, hacks easily over and reunites horse with breathless rider who then gallantly gallops on. It is not the ideal way to prepare for Cheltenham’s greatest prize, neither for that matter is having the horse at Dixey’s own home and doing his eight-week pre-season road work from out of the field. and while Charles is still adamant that this season’s Gold Cup remains a target, this does not square with his avowed intent of sticking with the very real talents of amateur jockey Ben Pollock and trainer Caroline Bailey, whose point-to- point status does not permit her to run horses in open competition. But Dixey only has one life and in it he will never have another horse like Castle Mane. When he says that riding him is ‘a thrill like no other’, who are we to disagree? The Castle Mane glory trail was halted abruptly early in the spring of 2000 when what was later diagnosed as a muscle enzyme problem saw him a weary and defeated horse at both Haydock and Newbury. But by May his health was back, and he showed all his old dash to win at Cheltenham and again a month later at Stratford. Dreams were on for bigger things, but they were not to be. Only a week after his Stratford success, Castle Mane broke his neck galloping free in his paddock. Horses are not made to somersault, out in the field or on the track, but it can always happen. When it does it hurts those closest most. It’s a brutal truth with which to close the millennium, and not one that could be avoided in the next. That final century of the millennium was the one in which the world saw the end of the horse as the foremost form of transport known to man. It was also the one which saw the popularity and prosperity of horse racing rise to unequalled heights in Britain, Europe, America, Australia, Hong Kong and Japan. But as we move away from the horse, the interest in the game is also on the wane. The challenge of the new century is to see if they can live on.