Fashion stakes

An American Treasury official was commenting recently on Tony Blair’s efforts to get one item on the G8 agenda. ‘We said no over dinner,’ he declared. ‘We said no on the ride home. We said no on the front porch, and still he said, “Come to bed.”’ By the time you read this we will know whether Mr Blair’s persistence has paid on an international financing facility for poorer nations. But persistence clearly pays on the racetrack.

As an admirer of Terry Mills’s highly efficient stable, I am always delighted when the no-nonsense Epsom trainer gets his hands on a good one, as he has with the sprinter Resplendent Glory. Seeing Terry before the first at Sandown on Saturday I asked if Resplendent Glory would be able to cope with an unfavourable draw. ‘It’s not the draw he’s up against, it’s the other horses,’ said Terry, aware that he was stepping up Resplendent Glory from handicap company to a Group Three in the Laurent-Perrier Champagne Sprint Stakes. ‘This time we’re in a real race.’

Resplendent Glory showed tremendous speed, kicking clear three furlongs out. Then Lafi, winner of the Wokingham at Royal Ascot last year and clearly returning to his best, came after him. The two were locked together through the last furlong, but in a finish of bobbing heads Resplendent Glory got back up on the line. He is one of those precious horses with guts as well as gears and he never stopped responding to the urgings of jockey Shane Kelly.

As the short-head result of the photo finish was announced, I couldn’t resist punching the air, and looked up to see the beaming trainer doing precisely the same ten yards ahead of me. But his ‘Yeah’ was louder than mine.