The turf
Keeping the faith
Robin Oakley
Putting your faith in four legs is a swift route to the poor-house. I know, and I was disappointed when Nayef turned out in the 2000 Guineas this year not to be the superstar his two-year-old career had indicated he might be. But this is not a fickle column. Regular readers will have noted that I did not abandon hope. Nor did trainer Marcus Tregoning, who had the sense and the patience to put the colt away for a long break. He brought him back for a decent showing in the Gordon Stakes at Goodwood and then won two nice Group 3 races at Haydock and Goodwood.
At Ascot on Sunday Nayef completed his redemption, and a hat-trick, with another good win in the lm 4f Royal Court Theatre Cumberland Lodge Stakes. He is beginning to improve the look of my Ten to Follow even if the odds have been nothing to email one's friends about. I was particularly pleased by Nayef s Ascot success, since I had just assured a large room full of the Royal Court's guests that he could not be beaten. Having been invited to take the theatrical crowd through the card I fear that I would have been marked down swiftly under the heading of Tragedy had I got that race wrong. Or would it have been Farce? Since the lunch party included One Foot in rhe Grave star Richard Wilson there might have been anguished cries, too, of 'I just don't believe it'.
Richard being a Labour party stalwart who has done his fair bit for party fundraising, I am slightly puzzled that he has not been whisked into the House of Lords. He has remained a popular favourite even after his television 'death' in the famous series and so seems eminently qualified to Sit in a House which Jeremy Thorpe once described as the physical proof that there is life after death. When I asked Richard if viewers were still laying flowers at the spot where his TV character was killed off in a road accident he didn't know. The original bouquets, he suspected, came from a nearby pub with an eye to continuing trade.
With a view to my hopes of continuing to trade I might just point out here that Vision of Night, another on the Oakley Ten to Follow, has also won his last two races, at Doncaster and at Baden-Baden even if we cannot get excited about the price at which he did so. I am keeping faith, too, with another Ten to Follow victim, Kyllachy, trained by Henry Candy and owned by the ever-cheery Thurloe Thoroughbreds team. Burdened with my selection and a fair bit of Royal Court money for the Riggs Bank Rated Stakes, Kyllachy was backed down to an unrealistic 3-1 favourite in the soft conditions which he likes, but could manage only a respectable fourth, having never given Kieren Fallon the feeling he was enjoying himself. Kyllachy had run a temperature a few days before his Ascot run. But the the Racing Post declared that no excuses were needed for a sound effort by a horse of still limited experience. Stick with him. We will be rewarded yet.
Having assisted the Royal Court team in choosing the best-turned-out horse for the Cumberland Lodge, I happened to watch Nayefs victory from the owners' and trainers' stand. I was intrigued at the finish of the race to see a small group in front of me dancing jigs and hugging and kissing one another. That being not quite the style of Hamdan al Maktoum and the entourage which normally accompanies Nayef s owner, I was perplexed for a moment, until I realised that in second place behind Nayef was Sagittarius, a horse trained not in a fashionable centre like Chantilly or Newmarket, but in Norway. The ecstatic crowd of huggers were his Scandinavian connections. Norwegian horses come a respectable second in British Group races about as often as Norway wins the Eurovision Song Contest, and they deserved their moment of glory.
In the unsaddling enclosure, as the team thanked jockey Fernando Diaz, I caught up with trainer Rune Haugen and the emotion was explained. Sagittarius, a Sadler's Wells colt, has won two of his last four races, including a good class contest in Germany. But last year, after an infection around the screws then pinning a fractured joint had become infected, the vet had advised the trainer to shoot a horse whom Haugen now describes as 'the best in Norway'. Instead he persevered with him and gave him a tendon operation too. A horse who had his first run at four has now run seven times at five, winning four and coming second in the other three. At Ascot his happy trainer declared, 'That was brilliant.' He believes Sagittarius is improving with every race and is better suited by English courses than by the tight tracks in Norway.
Like most Sadler's Wells progeny, he likes it soft and, says his trainer, will have no trouble getting further than the mile and a half of the Ascot race. 'We'll be back,' says Rune Haugen. Form figures of 11121222 are not to be sneezed at and you will probably get a better price on a Norwegian-trained horse than on most of those in my Ten to Follow, so don't forget the admirably consistent Sagittarius next time he runs over here. Stand well clear after the race, though, if you don't want to be enveloped in a Norwegian bear-hug.
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