International affair
Robin Oakley
OK, so they do a good mint julep at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby. There are impressive wongamountains on offer for winners at the Dubai World Cup meeting. Outstanding horses patronise the various US venues of the Breeders’ Cup. But this time let’s hear it for Royal Ascot, the meeting that had everything, including a winner for the Queen, Free Agent, on the final day.
The Berkshire course has had its problems over rebuilding. Too many of those who attend are an irrelevance, more interested in fascinators than forelegs, more concerned with tinkling glasses than thundering hooves. (Although I will make an exception for the delightful young ladies who asked me to open and share their champagne on the jam-packed sweatbox which is South West Trains’ idea of how to transport the racegoing thousands who come as a surprise to them in Ascot week each year.) But it is a free world and this was an Ascot which crammed every day with more racing stories than we could take in at once. Ascot really has created Britain’s first true centre of international racing with equine combatants from Spain and South Africa, from France and Australia, from Hong Kong, France and Germany. And, of course, from Ireland.
I think it was W.G. Grace of whom a despairing cricket scribe complained that he had exhausted the library of superlatives. So, too, has Aidan O’Brien, a man probably still short of his peak as a trainer whose six winners at Royal Ascot took him past the total of the legendary but unrelated Vincent O’Brien. Aidan, the quietly spoken, modest master of Ballydoyle, has now trained 26 Royal Ascot winners in ten years and the six at this year’s meeting, including four Group Ones, marked an astonishing achievement.
The 19th-century trainer John Porter once declared in a warning to punters, ‘I have known of only three racing certainties, and two of those lost.’ Noting the short ante-post prices of most of O’Brien’s Ascot entries, I started looking for the one to beat his in every race and I have rarely made a sillier racing decision. The glorious three-timer achieved by 11–8 Yeats in the Gold Cup as he fought off a great challenge by Geordieland, the thrilling victory of 4–7 Henrythenavigator over Raven’s Pass in the St James’s Palace Stakes and the pulverising triumph of evens favourite Duke of Marmalade over Phoenix Tower in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes (and, yes, I did back Geordieland, Raven’s Pass and Phoenix Tower) will remain etched on the eyeballs for years to come. Aidan really is the epitome of quiet genius.
Jim Bolger, whom many of us criticised over his hokey-cokey (was he in or was he out?) words about New Approach before he won the Epsom Derby with him, scored two more key victories for Ireland, taking the Albany Stakes with Cuis Ghaire and the Coronation Stakes with Lush Lashes. Both are owned by his wife Jackie and were ridden by his son-in-law Kevin Manning. They keep it in the family at Coolcullen. But I won’t be backing either before I see them in the stalls for their next declared race.
Trainers based in England are finding it ever harder going against the Irish competition, both over jumps and on the Flat. Two of Newmarket’s best and most consistent operators, William Haggas and Michael Bell, kept the home-fires burning in style. So did John Gosden, Richard Hannon, Sir Michael Stoute and Hughie Morrison with Supaseus, a horse who owed him one, having once nearly killed him. But Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin had just a single winner, Campanologist, given a superb ride from the front by Frankie Dettori.
Supaseus was one of three Royal Ascot winners for the quietly effective Steve Drowne, which was a pretty good way of answering the owner who took him off a horse in the Oaks because he didn’t see him as a bigoccasion jockey. Robert Winston, too, will be glad of his victory on South Central. After a year’s suspension that’s what he needed to help push him back into the big time.
It was ridiculous that the precociously talented Ryan Moore had gone 83 Royal Ascot rides without a winner. It seemed to be preying on him. A jockey famous for his economy with words risked becoming rather less conversational than the average speakyour-weight machine. But once he had broken his duck on Colony two more followed on Patkai and Sugar Ray. Perhaps it will unlock his tongue too.
But if this was Aidan O’Brien’s Ascot it was also the Ascot of the smaller trainers. Linda Perratt, whose Big Timer won the Wokingham Handicap for yard owner Gordon Macdowall, trains a string of just 14 at Carluke in Scotland. When Suzy Smith, a jumps trainer based in Sussex, took the marathon Ascot Stakes with Missoula it was her first Flat winner anywhere. And though John Best has 50 in his yard near Maidstone in Kent he is scarcely yet a household name.
Best first caught the public eye when his precocious two-year-old Kingsgate Native won the Group One Nunthorpe Stakes last year. Those wise owls at the Cheveley Park Stud have bought Kingsgate Native for breeding duties, but when he ran only tenth of 13 in the King’s Stand Stakes on the Tuesday there must have been a little head-scratching all round, even if he did run with the choke out, altogether too freely. On Saturday, better settled by Seb Sanders, he proved he was no two-year-old freak, winning the Golden Jubilee at 33–1 over a furlong further. It not only gave his proud trainer, who wants to expand and chase the big boys, double the score for the week of Godolphin. It also made him the only British trainer in the week to land a Group One.
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