Horse racing

It wasn’t so much a Derby victory this year as an act of grand larceny. Aidan O’Brien isn’t just a master racehorse trainer. He is a master of psychology too. On Serpentine, a son of his first Derby winner Galileo, he put up a capable but little-known jockey who hadn’t had a winner for 260 days assuring him that his mount would last two furlongs more than the Derby distance. Emmet McNamara duly pushed Serpentine into a massive lead and the other jockeys assumed they would blow up well before the finish, just as two front runners had done earlier in the Oaks. By the time the others realised that

Horse racing, it turns out, wasn’t the first sport back in post-lockdown action: that distinction went to pigeon racing when some 4,400 birds took to the air and raced from Kettering to Barnsley. Nor did the first Classic, the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket, provide the hoped-for tonic headlines about a new super-horse to succeed the great Frankel. Pinatubo, a scintillating winner of all his six races as a juvenile and the highest-rated two-year-old since 1994, ran a perfectly respectable race to finish third, but the high hopes that the hot favourite was going to prove to be something truly special were dashed. It seems that the bigger, rangier types caught

There is racing elsewhere in the world. It restarted in France on Monday, la course de chevaux being classed in that fine country as an agricultural activity. My friend the form guru, who combs back six races in search of clues, has even cast his net to include somewhere called Morphettville in Australia where last week he succeeded in backing a 65-1 winner. When, over the phone, he sensed my raised eyebrow at a horse with truly believable form being allowed to start at such odds, he explained that the animal had won two previous races: ‘The horse wasn’t to know they were lower-class events. He still got the same

Sport may well be ‘the great triviality’ as Timeform founder Phil Bull once put it, and racing as trivial as any. But many thousands of jobs depend on it. To get an idea of the impact the pandemic is having on the 550 licensed training yards in Britain, I called up my friend Simon Dow at his Epsom yard. Back at Clear Height stables, where he has had his greatest successes with horses such as Young Ern and Chief’s Song, Simon has around 30 horses. Typically, the first thoughts of this articulate workaholic were with those living in the London tower blocks visible on clear days from the Epsom gallops.

Asked, after his Imperial Aura’s impressive win in the Northern Trust Novices’ Handicap Chase at the Cheltenham Festival, if he had been worried about one particular challenger in the race, Kim Bailey wryly replied: ‘Of course I was worried. I’m a racehorse trainer.’ Trainers now have a lot more to worry about. When we finally resume racing — and few expect it to be after the six weeks originally announced — how many of the 14,000 racehorses in training as the suspension was announced will be coming back? How many owners whose businesses have suffered from Covid-19 will see paying bills for forage, farriers and vets’ attentions as a priority

Every time the Cheltenham Festival looms, I recall a remarkable experience. It was already 25 years since Dawn Run’s recovery from a seemingly impossible position to win the Gold Cup of 1986, becoming the only horse ever to add victory in our greatest steeplechase to a triumph in the Champion Hurdle, when, for my Festival history, I interviewed her jockey. Jonjo O’Neill took me through every stride of the race as if it had been the day before: ‘We were flying down the hill and I could hear them coming behind us. I thought we’d gone a right gallop and couldn’t believe they were so close to us. We jumped

Few jumpers have a better record at Ascot than the Paul Nicholls-trained Cyrname. He triumphed in the Betfair Chase at the Berkshire course in February 2019 by 17 lengths with three Grade One winners behind him. It was at Ascot in November, in an enthralling duel, that he ended the mighty Altior’s record of 19 successive victories over jumps and Cyrname was a short-priced favourite last Saturday to take a second Betfair Chase with only three horses daring to join the highest-rated chaser in Britain. But it was not to be. On rain-soaked turf, soon officially changed from soft to heavy, Cyrname was never going with quite his usual zest.

Newmarket’s wisest trainer, Sir Mark Prescott, once noted: ‘The greyhound is propelled through the pain barrier by its desire to sink its teeth into the tantalising white bunny tail ahead of it. Humans are driven through it by the desire for riches and stardom. But what’s in it for the racehorse?’ His words came to mind after Beat The Bank, owned by King Power Racing, the operation founded by the late Leicester City chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, and trained by Andrew Balding, won the Group 2 Summer Mile at Ascot on Saturday for a second year. It was a ninth victory in 18 races for one of the most popular horses

When Hayley Turner was made, she wasn’t just given a competitive spirit, a sensitive pair of hands and excellent balance. Somebody screwed her head on the right way too. Profiled by the Racing Post after becoming the first woman to ride a Royal Ascot winner for 32 years on Thanks Be, she was embarrassed to take the limelight away from trainer Charlie Fellowes, who was also recording his first Royal Ascot success, and swift to urge her interviewer not to go down the feminist-icon route: ‘Maybe it’s going to help the girls in the future, give them another goal, but that’s it, full stop. There’s no need to keep going

Boris Johnson, Remainers might like to be reminded, does sometimes change his mind under pressure. Some years ago, as editor of The Spectator, he dropped the then weekly Turf column, as he told me, ‘to provide more room for politics at the front of the magazine’. Fortunately for me, so many readers protested at its absence that he reinstated it, although on a fortnightly basis. That is why sometimes, given the necessary interval between copy submission and publication, there cannot be coverage that might be expected, as with Royal Ascot this week. At next year’s meeting, one thing will have changed: the newest event on the Royal Ascot card, the

There is a danger that memories of the 2019 Epsom Derby will be swamped by statistics. By training his seventh Derby winner in Anthony Van Dyck, the self-effacing Aidan O’Brien equalled the totals set by Robert Robson, John Porter and Fred Darling between 1793 and 1941. The first of Aidan’s Derby successes, Galileo in 2001, has sired four of the winners since then. No fewer than seven of the 13 runners in this year’s scurry over Surrey for the Blue Riband of the Turf came from Aidan’s Ballydoyle team and five of them were in the first six past the post. John Magnier, the driving force of the Coolmore team,

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

So the Silver Fox has called it a day. We will never see Ruby Walsh, the man whom even Sir Anthony McCoy modestly calls the best jump jockey ever, riding competitively again. Though sad for his countless fans in Britain, it is entirely understandable that Ruby chose to announce his retirement at his beloved Punchestown last week after riding Kemboy to victory in the Gold Cup. But the racing authorities here must find an appropriate way of celebrating his stellar career. Ruby wasn’t as physically resilient as A.P. and had to cope with some dreadful injuries along the way, but there has never been a more intelligent rider over obstacles.

There are people I know who regard racing as a cold-hearted business that exploits animals and achieves little besides putting money into bookmakers’ pockets. Sadly for them they will never ever see the passion, subtlety or teamwork that goes into persuading fragile, sensitive or complicated horses to produce their best; the almost parental pride that trainers can’t help but show when an objective is achieved by one of the specially talented ones in their care. We witnessed it in the winning enclosure a few times this past winter when Warren Greatrex’s zestful, bold-jumping mare La Bague Au Roi was winning her races. And it was obvious, too, at Kempton on