Interconnect

Winning in style

Winning in style

Normally in racing you place the successful horse’s connections in the winner’s enclosure. After Motivator won this year’s Vodafone Derby at Epsom, it was a case of finding the winner’s enclosure amid the connections, the 230 members of the Royal Ascot Racing Club.

I have not seen the Flat racing crowd in a happier mood for a decade. Forget the crisis in racing’s finances, the long-hovering cloud of still unresolved corruption allegations, the potential penury of the British Horseracing Board. When a horse wins a race as majestically and as stylishly as Motivator won this year’s Derby, it lifts us all out of the rut.

Motivator came into the race unbeaten, having won a Newmarket maiden last August, the Racing Post trophy at Doncaster and then the Dante Stakes at York this season. He was the winter favourite for the Derby. But before the race people were still willing to crab him. All his victories were on soft ground, it was pointed out, so would he be able to handle firmer ground at Epsom? Being by Montjeu, Motivator was of a nervous disposition, said the critics, and likely to be upset by the long drawn-out preliminaries at Epsom on Derby Day. And would he anyway last the Derby distance?

They were criticisms, I suspect, which would have been quickly brushed aside if Motivator had come from Coolmore or Godolphin or Sir Michael Stoute’s Freemason Lodge. But Motivator’s handler Michael Bell, a serious and well-respected trainer but not one, yet, with extensive patronage from the squillionaires, had never before had a Derby favourite in his yard.

That certainly did not worry Michael. In his straightforward way he continued telling us that he had a horse that was something special, a worthy favourite for the big race.

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