The turf | 8 November 2018

Fairy tales can happen. On Sunday the filly God Given won Italy’s only Group One race of the season, the Premio Lydia Tesio, providing Newmarket trainer Luca Cumani with his 50th Group One winner. Just days before he had moved many of his staff to tears by announcing that on 1 December he will retire and sell the Bedford House Stables where he has operated for 43 years, sending out two Derby winners in Kahyasi (1988) and High Rise (1998) and winning a host of big races around the world. Only Sir Mark Prescott and Sir Michael Stoute have run Newmarket yards for longer and there has been no doubting the genuineness of the tributes paid by the whole racing community to the elegant and highly astute English-domiciled Italian.

Sometimes his style has seemed more English than the English. When an owner once complained about a jockey not moving his Cumani-trained horse into a gap to seize a race, Luca famously countered: ‘I think you will find that the gap was travelling rather faster than your horse.’ But my favourite Cumani story is one he used to tell himself of the well-known racing writer who phoned him and failed to get the information he sought. The disgruntled journo then phoned a colleague and opened the conversation without waiting to hear who was on the line: ‘Guess what that lying wop has just told me…’ Unfortunately, he had repeat-dialled the previous number and the voice that replied was that of Cumani himself, saying: ‘Michael, this is that lying wop.’

In some ways, Cumani defies the national stereotype. Having taken on and tutored the 14-year-old Frankie Dettori, he once told an interviewer: ‘I’m emotional, but Frankie does it just right and it goes better with his image.