Shortly after he became champion apprentice, when he was launching the next stage of his career from Mick Channon’s stables back in 2001, the lads nicknamed Chris Catlin the ‘Cat’. His surname helped but so did the fact that the pale-faced, dark-eyed jockey moves quietly about the place. His unobtrusive style hasn’t changed. You simply couldn’t imagine Chris Catlin doing a Frankie Dettori flying dismount. But two significant things have happened this season to one of the best-liked middle-rank jockeys. Back in May his colleagues applauded him back into the weighing room for riding his 1,000th winner, and the highly particular Sir Mark Prescott has begun regularly putting Catlin, along with Luke Morris, aboard the horses he sends out from Kremlin House, Newmarket, praising him publicly as a real professional. From an ultra-realist who had only two stable jockeys over the previous 40 years, that is a description to cherish.
Catlin’s career hasn’t exactly been studded with Classic success, although he did win a German 2,000 Guineas for Mick Channon on Royal Power. But for true professionals there are other ways of making racing pay. Along with winning the champion apprentice title back in 2001, Catlin took the All Weather title both in 2008 and in 2009. He has four times ridden more than 100 winners in a season but perhaps the best measure of the value trainers put on his services is that he has had more than 1,000 rides in a season seven times. At Goodwood last Saturday as well as being put up by Sir Mark and Mick Channon he had rides for Chris Wall, Saeed bin Suroor and Bernard Llewellyn. He had ridden for 22 different trainers over the fortnight.
Mick Channon says, ‘The thing about him is that he’ll always put your horse in the race with a chance. It’s what every trainer wants.’ He says the Cat is a great character who doesn’t say a lot ‘but when he does tell you about a horse you listen’. My own chat with the modest rider didn’t produce anything to grace a future Dictionary of Quotations but I learned that he admires the Prescott professionalism, is grateful for the chances Mick Channon gave him at a crucial point and that he has no trouble riding as low as 8st 3lb. ‘All the facts you need to know,’ as a dying American newspaper editor told his family while trimming his tombstone inscription simply to his dates of birth and death.
Racing crowds appreciate professionalism and there was plenty on show at Goodwood. Neither George Margarson nor Chris Wall have the biggest yards in Newmarket but give either a decent horse and he will do the business with it. There was real warmth in the applause for George and for his Imperial Guest, ridden by Frankel’s partner Tom Queally, when they won the seven-furlong Heritage Handicap. George has had an unlucky season with horses constantly in the frame but failing to get their heads in front.
Last week he had four seconds, two of them in photo-finishes. He confessed that he had laid out Imperial Guest for this year’s Stewards’ Cup at Glorious Goodwood and was gutted when he was beaten by a nose. ‘We came back today to try and make a point.’ He had thought he would win a Wokingham Stakes with Imperial Guest the previous year, but the horse had not been right, suffering from warts on his face that George took to be a sign of nerves. And how had he cured the warts and got him back to his best? By rubbing them with banana skins. One man’s slip-up, it seems, is another man’s remedy. Imperial Guest’s Goodwood victory should help George to persuade stable patron John Guest that he has done the right thing in spending €190,000 at the Deauville sales the week before on an Elusive City colt whom he insists is the best-looking youngster he has seen since Barathea Guest.
Professionalism was evident, too, when the eight-year-old veteran Premio Loco won the Betfair Celebration Mile in which he faced the hot-shots Chachamaidee, Thistle Bird, Aljamaheer and Trumpet Major. Trainer Chris Wall walked the course and reckoned that the strip of ground against the far rail was the firmest on the track so he instructed jockey George Baker to stick to that rail like a limpet. The trainer of the 20–1 shot also instructed his rider to change the usual tactics and make the pace on the rain-softened ground because it might be hard for Premio Loco to quicken coming from behind. Baker obeyed both commands to the letter and though headed inside the final furlong Premio Loco came again before the line to beat Thistle Bird and Aljamaheer a neck and a head. The horse, who had this year won the Winter Derby at Lingfield and a Group race in Sweden, was winning his seventh Group race and 13th race in all for Baker who hailed him as ‘the ultimate professional’. Trainer and jockey hadn’t done badly either…
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