The turf
Epsom test
Robin Oakley
The vigilantes have not come knocking on my door as yet but I am not spending too much time at the moment in my Epson'', home. Asked to open my home town Derby Festival-week fete I not only tipped three horses which finished out of the frame but rashly warned the local populace off backing French jockeys in the big race; recalling how Geoff Lewis had declared 01 French champion Freddy Head's ride that if he had come any wider round Tattenhalh Corner the gypsies encamped around the course would have been asking for danger money. On High Rise, of course, Olivier Peslier rode a race as good as any we have seen in the Blue Ribend of the turf and while InY selection Cape Verdi may have been the unluckiest in the scrimmaging down the, hill, it was not anything which a horse (1' the class I deemed her to be should not have recovered from. In fairness, it was before the Derby that Frankie Dettori commented: 'The biggest danger is the other jockeys. The Derby can be rough.' Ironically, Shohtoush, the fa Cape Verdi whipped in the 1,000 Guineas (and the first runner the young Irish genius Aidan O'Brien had ever entered in an Epsom Classic), had won the Oaks the day before. But it is doubtful if Cape Verdi would have confirmed her superiority had she been kept to the fillies race. It looks as though a failure to stay, not the course, was the problem.
Lambourn trainer Mick Channon may take a different view. On Five Live with him on Oaks Day we had a lively discus- sion, Mick taking the view that the only sensible thing to do with the unique Epsom course with its stiff climb for four furlongs, pell-mell dash down the hill to Tattenham Corner and gut-bursting rising finish, with a camber which rolls the outside horses in towards the rail is 'to blow the whole place up'. I begged to differ. I reckon it is still the supreme test, and that we would not neces- sarily get the same result and certainly not the same excitement, on a flat, galloping track.
The Epsom executive really have made it once again the best and biggest picnic in the world and it was wonderful to see the crowds back on the hill and to feel the buzz. You would never get that by switch- ing it back to Wednesday when it would be just another corporate entertainers' day for the gravadlax, profiteroles and mobile- phone set.
With us too on Five Live was Willie Car- son, a lovely man who could put the Live into an embalmer's workroom. Down at the rails before the Coronation Cup he told us he had no regrets about quitting the sad- dle, but was still engaged enough to be shouting out instructions to the passing Kieren Fallon and Frankie Dettori. It was some consolation for my Derby perfor- mance that when I suggested before the first that the booking of Mick Kinane for Alan Jarvis's Lady Angharad, backed down from 20-1 to 11-1 for the Vodaphone Woodcote Stakes, might be significant Willie insisted that nothing sired by Tenby was going to win so short a race. The filly won by nearly three lengths. Then when I recommended that listeners should support Silver Patriarch for the Cup Willie told me off the air that they would never go enough of a pace to suit the St Leger winner. `I'll bet my life he won't win.'
He was right about the pace but there was just time enough for John Dunlop's lovely grey to wind himself up and to take Swain, the Carson selection, in his finishing charge. As a compensation Willie tipped me one of Henry Cecil's for Derby night at Newmarket which the stable were confi- dent would win — Royal Anthem. He won all right, but at 4-9 on. Trust a Scot's-born jockey not to give too much away.
It was an exciting Derby. It will not prove, I suspect, to have been a vintage one. After the Lingfield Derby trial, when High Rise beat Sadian without over- - impressing, Luca Cumani appeared in two minds about whether to run him at Epsom at all. When he commented that it had been a fastish time one fellow scribe reminded us that Luca's general attitude is that time is only something to think about if you're doing it behind bars. What we should perhaps have noted was that High Rise was the only unbeaten horse in this year's Derby and that Luca Cumani had given him exactly the same preparation as he gave Kahyasi, his previ- ous Derby winner. When he was allowed to start at 2-1 for the Buttercross Limited Stakes at Pontefract on 21 April, a race worth £1,688 to the winner, that was clearly the value bet of the season.
And to those who backed Cape Verdi, like one lunching companion on Derby Day, on the grounds that 'It's time a jockey as good as Frankie Dettori won his first Derby,' let me counsel them that when the great Sir Gordon Richards took the Derby on Pinza it was on his 28th and final attempt.
Robin Oakley is political editor of the BBC.
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