The turf | 16 August 2018

Making racing profitable depends on getting information at the right time. In the Stewards’ Cup at Goodwood two Saturdays ago I had a fancy for trainer Clive Cox’s Tis Marvellous and plunged accordingly. He finished 25th of the 25 finishers.

Last Saturday he was racing again at Ascot where I spotted a friend with connections to his stable. ‘Any chance?’ I asked. ‘Good horse but I won’t be having a bet,’ he replied — so neither did I. After the diminutive but determined Hollie Doyle had brought home Tis Marvellous to win the opening race of the Shergar Cup competition at 6–1, Cox explained the sprinter’s contrasting performances: ‘You can take a horse to water but you cannot make them drink.’ In the sweltering heat  at Goodwood Tis Marvellous for some reason wouldn’t take on any fluids. Since then they had got him drinking again. Fair enough, although the Ascot stewards fined the trainer for failing to report earlier that the horse had been dehydrated on its previous run.

Goodwood had been truly glorious. We had seen the blinding speed of Charlie Hills’s Battaash, surely the fastest horse  in Europe. We had seen jump-racing favourite Lil Rockerfeller win the 2m4f Goodwood Handicap by 15 lengths on his first Flat appearance for 1,166 days (he won’t enter starting stalls so has few opportunities). We had seen talented young rider David Egan prove the wisdom of abandoning his apprentice status by winning his first Group race on Pilaster. We had seen the sheer class of Wild Illusion in the Nassau Stakes and the brave and consistent Lightning Spear finally win a Group One contest at the age of seven and on his 16th attempt. That was racing for the aficionados.

At Ascot, the Shergar Cup — long supported by sponsors Dubai Duty Free and staged with great pizzazz by a course once famed for its stiff formality — brings in a rather different looking audience of 30,000 to watch a contest between four teams  of jockeys representing Europe, Great Britain and Ireland, the Rest of the World and ‘The Girls’.