We are blessed these days with a rare stream of jockey talent including the likes of William Buick, Ryan Moore, Tom Marquand and Rossa Ryan. Well clear of the pack though in the chase for the jockeys championship is former champion Oisin Murphy, and five minutes in the winners’ enclosure rather than on the track left me convinced at Newbury last Saturday that if I still had shares in a horse, Oisin would be the one I’d want riding it – and not just because of the two trebles he notched up last week.
Successful trainer Hugo Palmer wasn’t in evidence but surrounded by a gaggle of owners after the 4.10 Novice Stakes, Oisin truly earned his £162.79 rider’s fee by giving them a state-of-the-art debrief. Time was when some jockeys would accept a pat on the back, mutter ‘Nice ’orse’ and head off to the weighing room.
A horse who could win as he did at Newbury without being 100 per cent fit is a horse to follow
Not Oisin. He gave the assembled company a detailed breakdown of how the race had been run, noted he might have been on the wrong side of the track, expounded on why The Waco Kid was truly reminiscent of his sire Mehmas, discussed how much ten furlongs on firm ground suited his mount and concluded by suggesting they might want to put up a weight-claiming apprentice on the horse’s next outing to counter the penalty from his Newbury victory. You simply could not imagine a jockey providing better value.
The Newbury card featured the Weatherbys Super Sprint, a brilliant concept which has now been running for 33 years offering the winner £129,000 and decent prize money down to tenth place.
The handicap weights are based not on previous track performance but on the price paid for the horse below £65,000 as a yearling or two-year-old at public auction. Each horse running carries 1lb less for every £5,000 band under that total with the idea being to give good-value horses the chance of a big pay day.
The scheme works particularly well when a young trainer with a smaller yard collects the top prize and this year’s race went to the elegant grey Caburn trained at Newmarket by Jack Jones, a former pupil of Paul Nicholls, in just his second year with a licence and who bought the 12-1 winner for 24,000 guineas.
Future stars like Lyric Fantasy and Tiggy Wiggy have won the race in the past and he is now talking of taking him to races like the Gimcrack.
The racecard had suggested Caburn could find the five furlong minimum distance too short having needed every yard to win his only previous race over six furlongs. But his delighted trainer insisted: ‘He was always going to come here. If he got out-paced, which looked at halfway as if it was going to happen, then we could always go back to six furlongs next time. To do that on his second start shows a fair amount of ability.’
Something ventured, quite a lot gained. Nonetheless, Caburn won’t be running at five again. Jack Jones started in 2022 with three horses. He now has 35 and can start setting his sights above 0-50 races at Lingfield and Wolverhampton.
There are so many facets to training. Much is about sourcing the right horses and coping with the ups and downs. George Scott had his first Royal Ascot winner this year with Isle of Jura for Bahrain’s Sheikh Nasser and his Victorious Racing. Last week he had to announce the horse had met with a setback and will miss the rest of the season.
But on the lookout for horses to run in Bahrain’s International for the same owner, George Scott secured Phantom Flight, formerly trained by James Horton who has had to recalibrate after owner John Dance ran into difficulties with the Financial Conduct Authority.
The horse arrived in great condition but was gelded to improve his homework and at Newbury he beat last year’s winner Al Aasy in the Listed opener. He will now be aimed at the big one in Bahrain. ‘One and a quarter miles on fast ground in a £1 million race: he ticks all the boxes,’ said his happy trainer.
Karl Burke too was a Royal Ascot winner with his sprinter Inisherin but he was ‘gutted’ that he could not run his other speedster, the long-striding Elite Status, in the Commonwealth Cup sprint because he kept knocking a joint. ‘He wasn’t quite tracking properly – the back leg comes through and touches the front.’
Back home, Elite Status spends much of the time bandaged up to stop him injuring himself but he is growing out of the problem and back at Newbury, where he had scored before, he was a truly impressive winner of the Group Three Hackwood Stakes over six furlongs.
What was worth noting was that Karl declared: ‘When he won here before, he blew his head off and he’s had a good heave again after this, a nice healthy blow.’
A horse who could win as he did at Newbury without being 100 per cent fit is a horse to follow.
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