King of the sprint

After last Saturday’s Stewards’ Cup, trainer Dandy Nicholls was bouncing around the unsaddling enclosure like one of those rubber balls one always coveted as a child: small and perfectly formed but hard and indestructible, too. He carries several stones more than he did when he won the most competitive sprint of them all as a jockey on Soba in 1982, but not an ounce of it is soft.

Nicholls is a tough Yorkshireman who turns out tough horses, but for a while after the last-stride victory of Gift Horse we saw the softer side of a man in a state of what one can only call dazed elation. For a minute or two he clearly thought he was Frankie Dettori, kissing everyone in sight, from the horse to the owners to BBC Radio’s distinguished Cornelius Lysaght, who received a smacker in mid-interview and never deviated from his course. Lord Reith would have approved.