The turf | 19 July 2018

For Coleridge, ‘…the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us’. Not in racing it isn’t. However sharp the instincts of bright young apprentices on the way up, however exciting the pace shown by a novice horse on the home gallops, there is simply no substitute for racecourse experience. Odd, then, that English trainers have mostly been slow to make use of one of the world’s most battle-hardened front-line jockeys, who has chosen this season to base himself in Britain.

Gérald Mossé, whose strong Gallic features and courteous charm would never have him taken for anything but a Frenchman, now has a home in Newmarket and on the July course earlier this month he rode a double to catch any racing man’s eye. On Ed Walker’s Royal Intervention he showed perfect judgment of pace, leading all the way to take the Listed Betway Empress Fillies’ Stakes by four lengths. In the very next race, Mossé was told by trainer David Elsworth to come late: he brought his free-running mount Sir Dancealot to the front only in the final 100 yards to grab the leader and win the Group Three Criterion Stakes. Two copybook races.

Mossé, who first started in France with François Boutin and Patrick-Louis Biancone, was for eight years first-choice jockey for the Aga Khan and has ridden 65 Group One winners. He won the Arc on Saumarez and partnered the electric Arazi when he was Europe’s champion. He then spent a long spell in Hong Kong, racing’s fieriest crucible of competition, where his 2,300 winners are the all-time record. ‘Riding there improved me. You do a lot by instinct but there things happen so quickly that it really teaches you and sharpens your reactions.