The only downside about going racing is irritation born of encountering pig ignorant people who talk through their pockets. Beside me at a Newmarket betting counter on Saturday shortly after Aidan O’Brien had once more dominated the big event of the day, not only winning the Dewhurst Stakes with his Derby prospect Churchill but taking
There are few more compulsive reads in racing than the Kingsley Klarion, the in-house journal of Mark Johnston’s Middleham racing operation, which runs under the slightly ambiguous slogan ‘Always trying’. It is ambiguous not because anyone doubts that every Johnston runner is out on the racecourse striving to be first past the post but because
Say what you like about the St Leger — and I like it a lot — Doncaster’s finale to the British Classics rarely fails to provide a story. In 2012 it was Camelot’s narrow failure to become the first Triple Crown winner of the 2,000 Guineas, the Derby and the Leger since Nijinsky in 1970.
Bookmaking’s image has changed. Alongside the arrival of the betting exchanges, the evolution of the big names like Hills, Coral, Betfred and Ladbrokes into gaming operators rather than old-style bookmakers has seen the decline of the family firms where clients could be sure of the personal touch, total discretion and often half a point or
After 30 years in racing it is a little late in Rab Havlin’s career to suggest that he will suddenly become a star. Havlin doesn’t do ostentatious. He is not a racecourse ‘name’, one of those riders towards whom sports-mad fathers propel their sons to seek a racecard autograph. To adapt Michael Gove’s Conservative leadership
Sometimes the labels people give themselves are more than mere braggadocio. Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali if you must) really was ‘The Greatest’. For me Tina Turner’s exultant ‘Simply the Best’ was never bettered in its genre, and Glorious Goodwood manages year after year to live up to the name it has happily exploited since it
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Theresa May’s arrival at No. 10 is that it has given us back a prime minister who has owned a racehorse. Well, part of one anyway. Theresa the Merciless was once in a syndicate at William Muir’s friendly Lambourn yard which owned a grey called Dome Patrol, the winner
I love Eclipse Day at Sandown, the first occasion in the year when the classy three-year-olds start taking on their elders. Over the years it has given us some great contests and added lustre to the careers of some great horses. In 1986 Dancing Brave confirmed in the Sandown feature how unlucky he had been
Forced to depart Ascot earlier than usual to fulfil a cruise lecture booking on the fjords, I hadn’t reckoned with June in Norway. It turned out to require anoraks and sweaters rather than shorts and suntan oil, although Mrs Oakley and I were better prepared than one lady passenger: having travelled without a scarf, she
How much strength do you need to win a horse race? Do women have enough? And if they don’t should they be given an allowance to help them in one of the few sports where they compete professionally against men? The question came up as I shared a farmer’s platter with champion trainer Paul Nicholls
It’s time to scuttle under a rock if you are a Folkestone or Cornish crab: 7,000 of them will be consumed in Royal Ascot week, along with 2,900 lobsters, 160,000 glasses of Pimm’s, 51,000 bottles of champagne and 30,000 chocolate eclairs. Better get your chopper booking in fast, too: 400 helicopters will descend on to
Queen Victoria disapproved heartily of the racing set and of her son Bertie’s involvement in the sport. But she must have noted a dinner conversation with Bismarck reported to her by Disraeli. The German Chancellor had asked if racing was still encouraged in England. Never more so, said Disraeli, to which Bismarck responded: There will
‘After a few decades of marriage a man ought to be able to recognise his own wife,’ Mrs Oakley observed a little tartly last Saturday when I picked her up post-Goodwood from Reading station after patrolling the concourse for 15 minutes. But if a woman buys herself a beanie to keep out the rain and
It has been a little like scraping from the plate as slowly as possible the last traces of Mrs Oakley’s exquisitely sauced vitello tonnato; like draining reluctantly the last glass of our best Condrieu: this year I never wanted the jumps season to end. Sprinter Sacre came back to his best, Richard Johnson finally won
The difference between praying in church and praying at the racecourse, a gnarled old punter once said, is that at the track you really mean it. At Sandown last Saturday, the last day of the jumping season, all our prayers were answered: you simply could not have asked for a better day. One reason we
With great victories in Flat racing you witness hats-in-the-air exultation. You see the pride of trainers who nurtured the winner to full potential or of jockeys who timed their challenge perfectly. Sometimes you even spot the quieter satisfaction of the owners and breeders who framed the mating that brought it all about. But much of
Everybody has their glory memory from Cheltenham this year. Some celebrate the extraordinary seven victories for the quietly confident Willie Mullins, together with such versatile horses as Douvan and Annie Power. Others will forever remember a misty-eyed Nicky Henderson greeting Sprinter Sacre after his Champion Chase victory enabled the most handsome idol in training to
Writing a Turf column before the Cheltenham Festival, as the Spectator schedule requires, which you are reading only after the four-day jump-racing bacchanal has concluded, was a problem. I could neither revel in the moments of glory some equine fighter pilots will have enjoyed nor reveal hard-luck stories behind others who did not make it.
Richard Johnson, possibly the nicest man to occupy a saddle and certainly the most modest, once said of his Irish rival Ruby Walsh, ‘Ruby never seems to fight horses. It never looks forced with him, he never throws the kitchen sink. But I do — metal ones and porcelain if necessary.’ There weren’t too many
There are now two Kings of the Marlborough Downs. Leading jumps trainer Alan King has long trained top horses at Barbury Castle but since summer 2014, to the confusion of delivery drivers, he has had a new neighbour, the former Newmarket trainer Neil King. The only surprise is that Neil did not come sooner: driving
