The turf | 23 May 2019

Newbury is as fair a test for a racehorse as you can get with its galloping track and a wide-open finishing straight that minimises hard-luck stories. It also gets the little things right: in contrast to the skimpy offerings from places such as Kempton Park, last Saturday’s racecard was a model, containing details in colour of runners at other meetings, a feature with jockey Jason Watson and good historical detail about past winners of the featured Lockinge Stakes. Several bars, like the Wine Cellar in the Hampshire Stand, had become cashless, cutting tedious queues; mobile charging units were available; and a friend staying for the weekend who had left his prepurchased ticket at home in Surrey was treated with total charm, not grim-eyed suspicion, by the Newbury staff who sorted out a replacement.

The Lockinge Stakes, now sponsored by Qatar’s Al Shaqab, has long been one of my favourites, partly because it is a race for four-year-olds and upwards and so has some of jump-racing’s appeal. The contestants have been on the racecourse long enough for us to get to know them. The racecard reminded us that the Lockinge Stakes had been won by such as the Queen’s Pall Mall, Brigadier Gerard, Hawk Wing and Frankel. My own favourite among past winners was the powerful Cheveley Park filly Russian Rhythm, the 1,000 Guineas winner who won the Lockinge in 2004 in what was her last race before being retired to stud. And it was Russian Rhythm’s trainer Sir Michael Stoute, fittingly, who won this year’s thrilling race with Hamdan Al Maktoum’s six-year-old Mustashry, ridden by Jim Crowley, ahead of the popular filly Laurens and Accidental Agent.

If the turnover in Flat horses, so many rushed off to stud or obscurity as mere adolescents after their three-year-old careers, disappoints some, we cannot complain about continuity on the trainer front.