The glory of Glorious Goodwood

You wouldn’t want to have been collecting the empties from Robins Farm, Chiddingfold, last week. There is no more sociable man in racing than George Baker: when I parked alongside him at Royal Ascot once, he had a flask of Bloody Marys on offer almost before I had the car door open.

Nobody could have been better suited to celebrating triumph in the Goodwood Stewards’ Cup as he was on Saturday after Pat Cosgrave had led all the way to win the historic sprint on the 40-1 shot Get It. The cheery band who constitute the MyRacehorse & Partners syndicate and their friends provided the most joyous scenes I’ve ever encountered in the Goodwood winners’ enclosure.

As a local boy who has been attending Glorious Goodwood since he was five, George declared: ‘It’s been a long week and we’ve had a house full of hooligans and reprobates. The party started on Tuesday and it will probably go on now until next Tuesday.’ In a quieter vein he noted: ‘Races like this are incredibly hard to win: just to get horses to run in them is hard.’

Nevertheless he is managing. A few years back he won the Royal Hunt Cup and the Golden Mile at Goodwood with Belgian Bill and the publicity around his Stewards’ Cup victory couldn’t have come at a better time: in January he moves into the refurbished stable in the centre of the course at Epsom Downs while simultaneously developing a satellite yard in Bahrain.

Sometimes we beat ourselves up about what’s wrong with racing: Glorious Goodwood was the perfect antidote with so much to celebrate. Another Goodwood local boy is the French-born trainer David Menuisier, who has rooted himself in West Sussex. He doesn’t have the 200 horses housed in some super-yards but he’s advertised his talents this year by winning the German 2000 Guineas and providing the second in the Irish Derby and the third in both the Oaks at Epsom and its Irish equivalent.