by Robin Oakley
When he first arrived in the yard Rhapsody had been somewhat coltish, his mind rather less on the job of getting fit than on mounting anything from passing lasses to the visiting postman. But whether it had been his working regime or whether he had heard the rumours of an imminent trip to the vets to deprive him of his wedding tackle, Rhaps has turned into the perfect gent. At Kempton’s Irish night he was not distracted in the slightest by the barbecue smoke, the strong whiff of Guinness on the breeze nor the ghetto-blasting rumpus of the energetic Irish band.
But what about the serious part of his evening? He went down comfortably to the start, entered the stalls without a fuss and set out more or less with the others under the coaxing hands of Nicky Adams, John Reid having initially decided he couldn’t make it from York to Kempton in time – only to turn up riding the favourite in Rhapsody’s race. All we cared about was that he returned safely from this first experience – it is surprising how protective you become. After the first furlong it looked as though that would be all there was to care about, with Rhapsody’s yellow jacket, striped sleeves and blue epaulets showing clearly last of the 24 runners.
But as the charge up the centre of the Kempton track went on he began to realise why he was at the races. After two furlongs he began picking off the stragglers and, with his owners on collective tiptoe (no mean feat in some cases) suddenly he was steaming through the pack, having engaged another gear, to do all his best work at the business end of the race.
‘Never near enough to challenge,’ said the next day’s Sporting Life, which had taken an unaccountable interest merely in the first eight home. But for fifteen proud owners and the delighted trainer a ninth place that could have been improved upon had his jockey been harder on him was the ideal introduction. ‘Just what I would have hoped for, but you never know until you get them on a racecourse,’ said Andy Turnell as Rhapsody, the treacly horse sweat rolling off his neck on the clammy evening, paraded comfortably before us with the air of a child who’d come home a plucky fourth in the egg-and-spoon race on Parents Day. He gave every sign of having enjoyed it too and when I spoke to Andy the next day it turned out that Rhapsody had dived into his dinner that night with relish and tucked away his breakfast with no bother. ‘I couldn’t be happier with his attitude.’ So far, so good.
I won’t take you through every race that Rhapsody ran. Life as a working journalist ensured that I did not see them all myself. He worked well, giving visiting jockeys a good feel. Still on the leggy side as a three-year-old, he looked good and was starting to fill out his big frame. Indeed there was a danger he might fill it out too well.
As an owner you need to learn how to translate the language of trainer-speak. ‘He needs time’ generally means ‘He’s as slow as a carthorse but please keep paying the bills until he confirms it on the racecourse next spring’. ‘He won’t want too far’ means that he struggles to get five furlongs even in a horsebox. ‘He’s a bit of a lad’ means that no human can enter his box without an armed escort and he has already killed the stable cat and maimed two lads.
Trainer Andy Turnell was and is no flanneller but when he noted that Rhaps was ‘a good doer’ that turned out to mean that he munched his way through his meals and then started on his bedding, even if it was crunched-up newspapers. So after mealtimes he was muzzled.
When Andy told us however that Rhaps ‘does things slowly’ that was not trainer speak for ‘Actually he’s a dud’. What he meant was that Rhaps was a long-striding animal who took time to wind up. His orders to jockey Nicky Carlisle in the Brighton parade ring in June 1998 were ‘Pop him out and keep hold of him as long as you can’. The professional Carlisle, no doubt an indulgent parent too, replied, ‘You mean get him organised as soon as possible but give him time to find himself?’ He did precisely that and Rhaps lobbed along at the back, taking some time to find himself and rather longer to find the others in the race. Being the big fellow that he is, he did not handle the downhill track too well but once they reached the rising ground a couple of reminders from N. Carlisle saw him doing his best work at the end of the seven furlongs. ‘I’d rather see them slow to start and running on than the other way around,’ said our trainer, who does a very good encouraging smile but was having to make a lot of use of it, especially since he won the race that day with Academy at 33-1 and hadn’t told us that he fancied that one a bit.
Jockeys with a view to future rides can be diplomats too and Nicky Carlisle was accentuating the positive as he dismounted: ‘He’s got a lovely long stride.’ He agreed that Rhaps hadn’t really been able to go the pace early on and that he had struggled down the hill but he said he was confident he would stay at least a mile and a quarter. We should certainly win a race with him, he declared, if we didn’t aim too high.
Before the Brighton contest the Racing Post had summed up Rhaps’s career so far as ‘unfancied and soundly beaten in three maidens at 6–7f’. Afterwards the only comment was ‘always behind’. But we had been given enough (it doesn’t take much) to go on hoping.
The optimist sees the doughnut, the pessimist sees the hole, and plenty of the Eternal Optimists, who included the TV business editor Jeff Randall, were there at Lingfield in August when our pride and joy padded around the parade ring with six duck eggs in front of his name on the racecard. I had learned the previous week how to make twenty bitter enemies in half an hour: I had to pick the prize-winner from 21 entrants in a children’s fancy dress parade at a village fête, with all their mothers present. The racecard compiler at Lingfield rapidly assumed a similar status in our group when we read his verdict on Rhapsody in Blue: ‘Unplaced in all six starts. Well beaten when 11th of 13 on previous start over 1m 4f at Windsor. He races from 8lbs out of the handicap today. Ignore.’
The Eternal Optimists sniffed at such careless cruelty and looked for comfort amid the threatening drizzle. Doesn’t he look well? Hadn’t Andy had two winners in his last nine runners at the track? Hadn’t our jockey Darren Williams ridden the winner of the race the year before … and wasn’t there a subtle difference this time? Previously racecards had listed Rhapsody as B h Magical Strike (USA)–Palace Blue (IRE). Now he was just a little lighter after a visit to the vet had turned him into B g Magical Strike–Palace Blue. The prospect of a glorious career at stud to follow his racing days might have disappeared but surely now he was going to concentrate harder on the job and rather less on any filly within sniffing distance.
Rhaps strode purposefully around the parade ring, his coat gleaming in its usual tribute to the Turnell stable team. Despite those six noughts on his record and the 50-1 available against him on the Tote, it was the loose-limbed walk of an athlete, not the self-conscious slouch of a no-hoper. True, the Lingfield hill might not suit him, but off his low handicap mark you had to take chances where you could find them. He looked ready to take on all comers. ‘Try and put him in the race before it starts,’ said Andy to the jockey. ‘Don’t hurt him, but be firm with him.’ We headed off to take some of that 50-1.
Rhaps stood quietly before the start, broke well and went up on the outside of the field to take fourth or fifth. He looked comfortable, well able to take the pace and Darren Williams looked to be able to ride the race as instructed. Then, suddenly, calamity struck. One moment he was on the heels of the leaders ready to accelerate as they hit the rising ground, the next he was slipping back through the field like a Tour de France cyclist with a puncture: sixth, ninth … thirteenth … With all hope gone, Darren Williams didn’t punish him and they trailed in last of all but for a horse which had lost its rider on the turn.
Like relatives at the bedside we gathered for the verdict as Rhapsody, blowing gently but entirely sound and showing no sign of distress, was unsaddled. There was no trainer-speak from Andy, no assertions that ‘he needed the race’ or that he ‘has been held up in his preparation’. He didn’t even offer Rhaps’s recent loss of his cojones as an excuse, although I am sure it would have affec
ted my performance. He was as mystified as the rest of us. ‘He stopped as if he had been shot,’ said his young rider. ‘It was as if the lights went out or he’d run out of petrol.’ With hindsight that probably was a fair description because it seems that Rhapsody was one of those horses who would suddenly and inexplicably ‘swallow his tongue’.
Anyway, that was it for the Flat and Rhapsody’s next experience on the racecourse was over hurdles at Worcester in October. You don’t go to Worcester, I noted at the time, for champagne and caviar, more for the sustaining curry and chips available in the main betting hall. Indeed one was lucky to arrive at Worcester at all given the lack of signage around that lovely city’s tortuous one-way system. At least the course itself was in sympathetic hands: clerk of the course Hugo Bevan could remember once turning into the straight on a chaser that was moving slower than the swans on the adjacent river.
Rhapsody having failed to secure a single place in his seven outings on the Flat, some of my fourteen owner colleagues had a different timescale for eternity: only five of the Eternal Optimists turned up for his National Hunt debut.
Once again the handsome Rhapsody looked a picture with his fine head, athletic carriage and easy temperament. In the saddling box Andy Turnell, in what looked much too good a suit for such an operation, sought to fit a mildly indignant Rhapsody with a strap to prevent him swallowing his tongue and so once more abruptly running out of gas, as he had at Lingfield. Fitting a tongue strap, in my observation, is about as easy as lining up jelly beans in order in a tub of Vaseline. They had to have another go at the start, only for that to prove equally impermanent. It can be done with ladies tights, but I didn’t know any of the female company well enough to suggest the sacrifice. At least the racecard for once struck a note of optimism. After Lingfield’s tart one-word summary for punters: ‘Ignore’, Worcester’s compiler instead recorded: ‘Well beaten behind Joli’s Son when 13th of 14 on his latest outing on the Flat. Can only improve over hurdles.’
It had been a shock to find the morning papers suggesting Rhapsody in Blue’s starting price might be 7-1. A more realistic 25-1 was available on course and I felt quids in when finding some 33-1. For a moment or two it looked as though we might be in the money. Rhaps took his hurdles easily and was clearly enjoying himself, and in the back straight jockey Luke Harvey moved him sweetly up to the leaders. But then once again disaster struck. As Luke put it afterwards, ‘In a hundred yards he had gone.’ Once again his breathing had seized up with a fearful noise. Almost certainly he had swallowed his tongue again and Rhaps’s race was over. Only the fact that he was a natural jumper saw him beat a couple home. Luke’s wise advice was a soft palate operation pronto rather than souring the horse by running him again with such a physical handicap. After all, the experience must have been even more of a shock for him than it was for us.
I had only recently learned from speaking to Newmarket vet Richard Greenwood that horses are obligatory nose-breathers. They don’t breathe through their mouths and the palate is closed off from the mouth when they are galloping. Sometimes the soft palate becomes detached and flaps, causing turbulence and gurgling in the airway. Tongue strapping, if it holds, can work by pulling the larynx forward and anchoring the soft palate. If it does not then surgery is pretty well the only answer.
It looked like a few vet’s bills would soon be coming: for me Rhaps was too promising not to give him that chance. I had felt truly excited as he surged down the back straight and Luke was impressed enough to express an interest in taking on the horse if the Eternal Optimists did not want to persevere.
One of Paddy Ashdown’s fellow Lib Dem MPs once told me of an encounter with a man who had served with the restlessly energetic Paddy during his SBS career. ‘Ah yes, Captain Ashdown,’ he had mused. ‘The men would follow him anywhere, if nothing else, out of a sense of sheer curiosity.’ By March 1999 sheer curiosity was about the only thing left for those of us still following Rhapsody in Blue around Britain’s racecourses. Nine duck eggs in nine races was not much of a record as he faced the starter at Newbury. To be honest, even I was becoming fainthearted. What would the explanation be this time for his failure to oblige? The wrong going? The wrong trip? The assistant starter’s aftershave? Obliged to be at another racecourse that day, this was how I recorded what happened next.
No more need we suffer the slings and arrows of cynical friends with their unfeeling cracks about cat food and glue factories. We have a real racehorse. First of all the apologies. I must apologise first to those Warwick racegoers who at around 4.08 observed an apparently sober racegoer past the first flush of youth in front of a TV screen screaming ‘Come on Rhaps you little beauty’ and giving a passable imitation of a whirling dervish as from a course 50 miles away he attempted to assist Tony Dobbin with his finish. (The jockey was managing quite well without any support.) I must apologise to Andy Turnell for ever doubting that he would produce our strapping four-year-old at full race fitness after a five-month layoff since an operation and I must apologise to Rhapsody in Blue himself for ever suggesting that he might be destined for a permanent life among the also-rans.
So what did Rhapsody achieve at Newbury on Saturday? Had they switched the Dubai World Cup to Berkshire? Had he stormed home the winner of a big sponsored race? Not quite yet. What Rhapsody had done was to gallop his heart out round Newbury’s two-mile hurdle track making a real race of it with the eventual winner Allgrit. So well was he going entering the straight that, having assured everyone from the friendly Warwick gatemen onwards that Rhaps was on no account to be backed, I feared for a moment I might have to be driven out of the course under a blanket. Only in the dying strides was Rhaps eased out of second place by Satwa Boulevard. He hadn’t won but for the first time ever, and in only his second race over obstacles he had finished in the money. And since Rhapsody had cost us less than a tenth of the 47,000 guineas paid for Jim Old’s winner Allgrit it was a truly promising run. His operation appeared to have been a success and at last it seemed we had a horse who could realise the potential we had all seen on the gallops. Yes, taking part is fun. But getting in the frame is a lot more fun.
After Newbury I had raided the superlatives cupboard and Andy Turnell too was chuffed. He reckoned that Rhaps remained in fine fettle and that we should strike while the iron was hot, so it was off to Uttoxeter two weeks later to see how the horse could improve on his Newbury showing. Racing, alas, rarely pulls you to your feet without following up with a blow to the solar plexus. The first time I saw Andy at Uttoxeter was in the hog roast queue and he wasn’t looking at the quality of the meat, he was gazing nervously at the sky as the rain continued to fall. With Richard Johnson riding, I went in heavily at 16-1. Andy told him to make the running if he could but they were never in contention from the fifth and trailed home tenth and last. Our horse had given him a lovely feel early on, said Dickie Johnson, but he had a daisy-cutter action with little knee lift and he simply couldn’t handle ground that had become like a pudding. He had therefore left us some horse for another day.
For most of the syndicate that was it. Enough. Off Rhaps went to the sales. We had expected him to be bought as a potential hunter. Instead he was acquired, at a bargain price of about a quarter of what we had paid, for a small group of owners in Eric Cousins’ old yard at Tarporley in Cheshire, now being run by Richard Ford, then husband of Carrie Ford, the leading woman rider.
Rhapsody in Blue was kitted out with an Australian-style tongue strap for his first run for Bricks Bills and Beer, a group comprising a builder, a publican and twenty Post Office workers from Liverpool. Their trainer advised the new owners to back him each way. He finished third of 23 at 25-1 and went on to win two or three races for his new connections before being retired to go hunting in the Morecambe Bay area, from where his new owner later contacted me to say that he was enjoying life. It was, I suppose, a typical life story for a jumper and one with a happier ending than some. Funds permitting I would
do it again tomorrow.
Racing abroad
When travelling abroad for business with politicians or for pleasure with Mrs Oakley I have always seized any opportunity to extend my experience of racing in other countries. I have been racing in Australia and New Zealand, in Mauritius and Hong Kong, in France, in Ireland, in Dubai, in Cyprus and in Turkey, although one of my biggest regrets – to be rectified in semi-retirement – is that I have not yet attended a Breeders’ Cup meeting in America or a Kentucky Derby.
Friends tell me to expect a whole new vocabulary wrapped around the sport when I do go racing in the USA, and Her Majesty the Queen and her advisers experienced that one year when she was privately visiting stud farms in Kentucky. One of her former press secretaries told me that when news of the trip became local knowledge he had drafted a small press release for the US media, which he headed ‘Queen to visit studs in the USA’. After he was reminded by more earthy souls of how Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language, he rapidly redrafted it to read ‘Her Majesty to visit US breeding establishments’.
New Zealand
It was thanks to the Queen that I once went racing at the Ellerslie Park track in Auckland during a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting I was reporting there in 1995. She was to present the prize for a NZ$30,000 race named after her and I felt it my duty to miss some of the politics and follow her to the races to ensure no misfortune befell her.