by Robin Oakley
Those who had been hoping that the Bosra Sham affair would bring about the downfall of Kieren Fallon as Henry Cecil’s retained jockey must be feeling a little like those lady complainants. After a turbulent ten days, Fallon is now more firmly established at Warren Place than he was before his error in the Eclipse. What is more, Fallon has turned the affair to his benefit. This, remember, is a jockey whose colleagues have borne the bruises to testify to his short fuse, whose disciplinary record once ran a close second to that of Billy the Kid. Instead of cracking under the pressure, Fallon has been a model of restraint, despite his jocking off the Wafic Said horses. He has faced the heat in the hottest of kitchens with the composure of an elder statesman. His answer to the critics was to go out and ride fourteen winners in the next week, six of them at the hotly contested Newmarket July meeting.
After the public criticism from Henry Cecil, that was no mean feat. An owner was telling me at Lingfield on Saturday not to back one of his horses because the jockey was going through a crisis of confidence, the stable’s main owner having refused to put him up on his horses – and that was without a whisper of publicity.
Writing immediately after the Eclipse was run, I never imagined that the Fallon/Bosra Sham affair would become the epic it did. I remain critical of his ride in the Eclipse although I begin to have my doubts how much the stable had worked through the tactical options for the race before it was run. But I had no wish to become part of a pack hounding the jockey and I remain confident that when advising readers of this column last August to back Fallon (then available at 4-1) for the jockeys’ championship I was offering sound advice. He is currently at 5-4 and in terms of the return to a level stake on his mounts he is well clear of the field.
Fallon has shown a champion’s confidence and has come out of it rather better than the brilliant trainer for whom he rides. One senior figure in racing who counts himself a friend of Cecil’s was appalled by his public criticism of his own jockey before he announced he was keeping him on for next season. ‘If you are going to get rid of somebody, you do it. Otherwise you shut up.’ Getting ratty with the media, as Cecil chose to do instead, is never an answer. We are not always convenient to have around but as Enoch Powell once said, ‘Politicians who complain about the media are like ship’s captains who complain about the sea.’ At Henry Cecil’s level that goes for trainers too.
And Fallon did finish that season as champion jockey.
Newmarket
The first training centre to seduce me was Lambourn, partly because it was close enough to Oxford in my student days for me once or twice to savour the sight of racing strings jig-jogging along the skyline and, let’s be honest, to enjoy a pint or two in its pubs, hoping to spot one of my racing heroes. But I was blown away by my first experience of Newmarket Heath.
The anticipation builds as you drive along from Six Mile Bottom, slaloming through the traffic-calming islands (Oh no, officer, only at 39mph), and then pass alongside the huge wedge-cut hedges bordering the training grounds. Coming in from the other end of town you might glimpse a mare or two in the paddocks of some of the 60 studs where the stars of the future are bred.
As you move along the high street past the Jockey Club’s elegantly imposing home, the number of short-legged men in breeches collecting their Racing Post from Tindall’s quickens the appetite. The town where the tradition has always been that one-time racing premises should be kept that way rather than salami-sliced into yet another characterless borough dominated by redeveloped supermarkets, car parks and petrol stations is threaded through with sandy walkways allowing the racing strings to pass in comparative safety from stableyard to Warren Hill or to the Al Bahathri gallops and back again. And though the heath itself was once described as ‘miles and miles of bugger all’, it never looks that way when the training battalions sweep out from Henry Cecil’s Warren Place, from John Gosden’s Clarehaven or from Sir Michael Stoute’s Freemason Lodge to show their paces in front of knotted groups of owners, racing managers and bloodstock agents – not to mention the work-watchers with whom I spent a fascinating morning in August 1997.
In pink Ralph Lauren shirt, monogrammed blue suede riding boots with tassels and blue velvet riding hat, Henry Cecil, astride his wife Natalie’s skewbald hack Poteen, was effectively holding court on Newmarket’s Limekilns to a covey of owners and stud managers, a visiting tour party and assorted correspondents. The trainer of nineteen Classic winners so far, tall, elegant and authoritative, Cecil is the nearest equivalent to a King of Newmarket since Charles II frequented the gallops with his hawking friends. It is, he told me, the oldest piece of cultivated grassland in the world, unploughed since Carolingian days. Newmarket’s precious turf with its peat dressings and well-knotted roots is also one of the largest mown grass areas in the world. (It is even claimed that Boadicea used to practise her chariot manoeuvres on the turf where the occupants of 70-plus stables are now put through their paces.)
I was with two men of remarkable skill, work-watchers and Newmarket correspondents David Milnes and Tony Elves. On duty respectively for the Racing Post and the Sporting Life, they can recognise on sight virtually all the inmates of Newmarket’s racing stables. Both have an encyclopaedic memory for horseflesh and an easy relationship with the rest of Newmarket’s professionals born of long experience.
Down below us on the Long Gallop, first to show were some well-regarded two-year-olds: Star Trech, a half-sister to Lady Carla, with Kieren Fallon up, and Jibe, a full sister to Yashmak. Both were moving nicely, as was the Rainbow Quest filly Tuning. A little later came the stars. Along the Round Gallop, now appearing, now disappearing behind the undulations as sheep grazed beyond came the Oaks winner Reams of Verse, last year’s Derby second Dushyantor, Besiege and the beautiful, buxom Bosra Sham, the low morning sun streaming through her mane like an orange halo as she motored clear of her galloping companions. Both Bosra Sham and Reams of Verse went into the notebooks as ‘impressive’.
Once there used to be twelve work-watchers at Newmarket for the Sporting Life alone. Now David, a quiet, intense former electrician from Selby, and Tony, a more extrovert Sunderlander, are virtually the last of the breed. It may sound like fun earning your living watching the Cecil stars in the early August sunlight: it is less so when you are out in the biting wind at dawn in early February, your fingers too numb to grip the pencil as you watch three lots from each of the leading stables, trying to memorise the characteristics – a white sock here, a blaze there, a style of head carriage which will help you tell apart the 2,000 and more horses being trained at Headquarters.
It is certainly not a restful pursuit. Earlier we had bumped across the grass in Tony’s battered red Escort, having dashed through the town and past the racecourse to the watered gallop (which costs trainers £10 per horse per day, slips posted in a box under the watchful eye of the Jockey Club’s heathmen) to see Luca Cumani’s and Michael Bell’s strings at work. Tom and David even helped the trainers to identify their galloping charges. Before that, on the Polytrack beside the road to Six Mile Bottom we had watched some of David Loder’s multi-horsepower stable, then dashed through town again to the Al-Bahathri track to see more of his plus David Morley’s horses. A quick word with owner Trevor Harris here, with jockeys Willie Ryan and Ray Cochrane there, then bustling back through the high street again as the four-legged reasons for Newmarket’s very existence proudly stalked the sandy horsewalks, their riders, some nursing hangovers, discussing last night’s football or that morning’s page three girl in the Sun.
David and Tony watch for many things – for a horse rated 70 which works upsides with one rated 95, for a horse clearly getting back its sparkle after a spell off the racecourse, for a top jockey brought in to get a feel of a likely prospect while the regular work-rider, temporarily grounded, taps his whip against his riding boots in frustration. ‘Just like with a human athlete,’ says Tony, ‘you can sense when they are doing the work with something
in hand. It’s the ones who don’t do anything at home but only on the racecourse which fox us. But then they usually fox the trainers too.’
Relations with most trainers, I can testify, are good and they won’t watch work on behalf of bookmakers, only for their papers. ‘It certainly wouldn’t do you any favours if you were known to be a bookmakers’ nark. They mostly get their information from staff in the yards,’ says Tony.
So with their privileged information, do they personally make their betting pay? ‘You wouldn’t rely on betting for your income,’ says Tony. ‘There’s a difference between making it pay and making your living from it,’ adds David. Realists both. But Tony did go the first six weeks of the season without a loser. I think I could stand a few cold Februarys for that …
Unlike Lambourn or Middleham, Newmarket has its own racecourse too – in fact a pair of them, the Rowley Mile and the July course. The former, the scene of so many thrilling contests down the years, sets you instantly re-hearing the thunder of hoofbeats past. The more accessible little July course, with its hanging baskets and sausage stalls, trainers in blazers and chinos and the horses in the winners’ enclosure close enough to snatch an ice cream, reminds us all of simple summer joys. It is one of those familiar pleasures, like slipping into a comfortable old pair of suede shoes, eating baked beans on toast after a week of lunching politicians at fashionable restaurants or getting halfway through a Dick Francis and realising that you have read it before but luckily can’t remember the ending anyway. The staff smile with you, nobody looks askance at those who choose not to wear a tie and the fillies in silky pastels are as beguilingly under-covered as those in a risqué Edwardian pencil sketch. Flowers abound beside the parade ring and unsaddling enclosure, and I have never agreed with my late mother, who used to complain of others’ gardens, ‘Marigolds, dear … so common.’
The July course has been ‘modernised’, on the whole without losing its character. But not all the changes are welcome. I can no longer find the board where a man used to chalk up the results from other courses and I was disturbed to find that the old Tote Credit Club building where riff-raff like me consorted had become ‘The Pink Bar’. Indeed, so uncompromisingly pink has it been painted that I wondered about the precise qualifications for entry. I won’t be risking it without a few of my more flamboyant friends.
It was Charles II who staged the first racing under prescribed rules at Newmarket – still, with the Guineas, the home of the first two Classics of the English summer – and he won one of those races himself. The Rowley Mile is named after the favourite hunter he used to exercise there. In those days of course there was no imposing Millennium Grandstand: Charles and his chums had to watch the races from the Bushes, one and a half furlongs out. But truly the horse has always been king here: close your eyes and you can see again battles like the one which enthralled racegoers at the 1971 2,000 Guineas, the only time the two heroes Brigadier Gerard, trained by Dick Hern, and Mill Reef, Ian Balding’s superstar, ever met.
Mill Reef and My Swallow dominated the betting, the latter having beaten the former a head in the Prix Robert Papin. Again the two took each other on down the centre of the course but a furlong out Joe Mercer on Brigadier Gerard, who hadn’t raced since the Dewhurst the previous season, gave his mount a slap and it was all over. He scorched past the pair with a breathtaking burst and was three lengths clear of Mill Reef at the line. Mill Reef was never beaten again, Brigadier Gerard just once in his remaining thirteen races.
This was the course on which Tudor Minstrel left his field for dead in 1947 with his blinding speed and on which Frankel repeated the feat when Tom Queally unleashed his turbo-charger in 2011. Up the same run from the Bushes Petite Etoile and Bosra Sham, two fillies adopted by the whole racing public, won their 1,000 Guineas and Oh So Sharp took the first of her three Classics. Nashwan, Nijinsky, Dancing Brave and Sir Ivor demonstrated their brilliance in the male equivalent.
If I could take only one rerun with me to my desert island, however, it would have to be Persian Punch’s victory in the 2003 Jockey Club Cup. David Elsworth’s hefty warrior was passed two furlongs out by three horses, caught a whip-stroke from another jockey across his nose, and yet then, in a gut-busting effort up the final rise, reeled in all three of them to beat Millenary by a short head on the line. It was what horseracing is all about.
Brighton
Brighton for me is one of the jolliest, most informal of racecourses. Most of my years as a political editor, party conferences were held in the seaside town and often the political circus would happily coincide with a race fixture. This raceday in 1998 was typical of the seaside course’s fare:
Brighton on a Friday isn’t exactly Goodwood or Ascot. Where they are worn, the suits are shinier and sharper, the ties a good deal gaudier. Your binoculars pick up the runners at the seven-furlong pole over the top of a block of council flats in mid-course. But there is a lot to be said too for a track where families can get out a picnic blanket within yards of the parade ring, where pushchairs are welcome and the staff actually ask if you are having a good time. It is too the sort of course where many of the winners seem to be ridden by weatherbeaten work-riders or fresh-faced apprentices while the star jockeys are away at more fashionable tracks. It also gives those with yards full of lower-rated handicappers the chance to snap up a race or two.
Five minutes before the first, having backed Sean Woods’s My Learned Friend I encountered Epsom trainer Roger Ingram, who fancied his five-year-old gelding Random Kindness. I managed a wan smile as Random Kindness led all the way under a canny ride from Tony McGlone, holding off My Learned Friend as Roger, his daughter Rhian in his arms, whooped home his horse with cries of ‘Come on Randy’. An appropriate slogan, I guess, for the spiritual home of the dirty weekend.
Noting that Lambourn handler Brian Meehan had won the second race the previous year I had intended to back his La Tavernetta. But I fell into conversation with ex-trainer Gerry Blum, who had travelled to the course with another handler who fancied his runner. Since Gerry and his sister seemed to be the lucky sort (they had won thirteen races in three seasons with two-year-olds trained by Jack Berry) I switched my bet. Only to see the animal fade out of contention as La Tavernetta broke clear of the field with Rod Simpson’s newcomer Sampower Star and won by a short head.
The ever-colourful Simpson was stretching even Brighton’s informality as the first trainer I have ever seen in the parade ring actually wearing trainers, combined with a colourful sweater and shorts of a bagginess I had only ever glimpsed previously when encountering a khaki-clad Denis Healey on holiday in the Cote Vermeille. When asked if he had mistaken the way to the safari camp, Simpson tartly replied that there were plenty of camels around the parade ring. Whatever he looks like, he can certainly train racehorses.
A touch of class was visible in the next. Walter Swinburn rode the Aga Khan’s Aliabad, but they were beaten by Henry Cecil’s Grimshaw, owned by Prince Fahd Salman and ridden again by the underrated Cecil work-rider Tony McGlone. When someone asked the dismounting McGlone when he had last ridden a double, he grinned and said, ‘Surely it wasn’t that long ago?’ How sad that the Aga, Prince Fahd and Henry Cecil all gave the occasion a miss. If they come to Brighton’s next meeting I will buy them all ice creams.
In the next race I could not decide between the merits of my chum Simon Dow’s Perfect Poppy and Annabel King’s May Queen Megan, so I backed the pair, only for both to fall in the last furlong as Tony Clark’s mount Natalie’s Pet interfered with them. Yes, you are right, it was a Flat race. There are not many people who can back two in a race on the level and have two fallers.
Richard Hannon doesn’t mind where he goes for winners, and he doesn’t often leave the seaside track empty-handed, so I backed his nine-year-old sprinter I Cried For You in the next and restored the bank balance somewhat when Richard Hughes drove him home. The trainer was just telling me that this was I Cried For You�
�s first success when up popped ex-car salesman, ex-seaside crooner and ex-local trainer Charlie Moore, a man who once nobbled a fellow singer who was getting better applause by pulling out his microphone cord. ‘Who owns that one then Richard?’ he cried, ‘Johnny Ray?’ At Brighton you can rely on enough pensioners being around to score with a joke like that. And there was even a happy ending in the last.
Stratford-upon-Avon trainer Annabel King was so upset by May Queen Megan’s fall (both horses were unscathed, although jockey Matt Henry was taken to hospital with a suspected fractured cheekbone) that she could not bear to saddle her last race runner, especially as her previous Flat runner at Nottingham had also extraordinarily been a faller. But the well-named Step on Degas, a bay mare by Superpower out of Vivid Impression, prevailed in a photo finish at 20-1. When the result was announced she came bounding out of the weighing room dragging on a borrowed cigarette and in such voluble form that she was probably still talking hours later. The team said they weren’t going to let her saddle up a horse again. Who says racing people aren’t superstitious? But what is for sure is that you can have just as much fun racing with the minnows as among the big fish.
Jockeyship
Former champion jockey Bob Davies once met a trainer for the first time in the parade ring and asked him, about the horse he was about to ride for him, ‘How does he jump?’ He received the rather disconcerting reply, ‘That’s for you to find out.’ One of the most fascinating elements in racing to me is the chemistry which bonds horse and rider. It is a subject I have often tried to explore when profiling jockeys for my Spectator column or when sharing a platform with the likes of Richard Dunwoody, Ruby Walsh or Mick Fitzgerald for book launches. I have devoured jockey biographies over the decades in search of clues.