The turf | 27 September 2018

Mill Reef, who won the Derby, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the Eclipse and the King George by far enough for jockey Geoff Lewis to declare ‘daylight was second’, was one of my first equine heroes. One image has always stuck in my mind. Trainer Ian Balding sent Mill Reef and a companion out on a watered gallop at Lamorlaye for a final pipe-opener before the Arc. Afterwards the trainer walked over the ground and noted that on the firmer patches, while the companion’s hoof prints were clearly visible, there was no trace of where Mill Reef had run. On the softer patches, the other horse had cut in deep and turned over the turf; Mill Reef’s feet had barely left a mark. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘as if a ghost had galloped by.’

Last Saturday, 50 years on from Mill Reef’s birth, Newbury staged the Dubai Duty Free International weekend with the sponsors supporting, for the 18th successive year, the Group Two Mill Reef Stakes in the little horse’s memory. Even Mill Reef, I suspect, would have been leaving a mark on turf softened by two days of gusty rain. It may have dampened proceedings for the crowd but some trainers have for months been unsuccessfully stomping rain dances in their yards praying for ground on which to run their soft-turf specialists. All they needed to do was to call me: I can make it rain anywhere. I took Mrs Oakley to San Diego promising sunshine and it came down in stair rods. I went to Dubai for a World Cup and a shaken Indian cab driver drove off the road as hail thundered on the car roof. When I went desert bird watching in Oman, we were flooded out of our hotel.