Boris Johnson, Remainers might like to be reminded, does sometimes change his mind under pressure. Some years ago, as editor of The Spectator, he dropped the then weekly Turf column, as he told me, ‘to provide more room for politics at the front of the magazine’. Fortunately for me, so many readers protested at its
There is a danger that memories of the 2019 Epsom Derby will be swamped by statistics. By training his seventh Derby winner in Anthony Van Dyck, the self-effacing Aidan O’Brien equalled the totals set by Robert Robson, John Porter and Fred Darling between 1793 and 1941. The first of Aidan’s Derby successes, Galileo in 2001,
Newbury is as fair a test for a racehorse as you can get with its galloping track and a wide-open finishing straight that minimises hard-luck stories. It also gets the little things right: in contrast to the skimpy offerings from places such as Kempton Park, last Saturday’s racecard was a model, containing details in colour
So the Silver Fox has called it a day. We will never see Ruby Walsh, the man whom even Sir Anthony McCoy modestly calls the best jump jockey ever, riding competitively again. Though sad for his countless fans in Britain, it is entirely understandable that Ruby chose to announce his retirement at his beloved Punchestown
There are people I know who regard racing as a cold-hearted business that exploits animals and achieves little besides putting money into bookmakers’ pockets. Sadly for them they will never ever see the passion, subtlety or teamwork that goes into persuading fragile, sensitive or complicated horses to produce their best; the almost parental pride that
If you’ve never been to a Grand National and are approaching an age when it is appropriate to list ten things to do before you die, then put Aintree near the top of your list. The Cheltenham Festival provides a glorious championships to test the best in our sport but the Grand National, the People’s
As jockeys, trainers, punters and media folk gathered at Newbury on Saturday to say farewell to Noel Fehily, the ultimate professional who fittingly rode Get In The Queue to victory in his final race before retirement, I couldn’t help contrasting his departure with the picture of her Cabinet allies and those lovely forgiving folk in
Encountering a generous-hearted bookmaker is normally as rare an occurrence as finding a picture of the Duchess of Sussex without her hand on the Markle pregnancy bump. All credit, then, to Coral and Betfair and one or two others for their behaviour last Saturday. After a thrillingly close finish to the EBF Matchbook VIP Novices’
Owner Phil Simmonds from Rochdale was 17 when he first went racing, joining a friend’s stag party at Haydock Park. For years he dreamed of owning a racehorse and finally took the plunge. He bought a bumper horse called Burns Cross and placed it with Neil Mulholland, whose response appealed to him when he wrote
The pre-war Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb apparently had a pre-marriage agreement. It wasn’t like today’s Hollywood prenups, designed to protect the assets of high earners when lascivious eyes roll on elsewhere. They simply agreed that Sidney would make the big decisions and Beatrice the small ones. Beatrice, however, had it sorted: she was to
Last Saturday morning, Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google, was on the radio explaining his algorithm for happiness, apparently a publishing sensation. Happiness, it seems, is equal to or greater than the events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be. That was a tricky proposition for the 20,000 of
‘Deer-stalking would be a very fine sport,’ W.S. Gilbert once observed, ‘if the deer had guns too.’ We who love jump racing have to acknowledge that there are plenty of folk out there who feel that horses, too, are helpless victims with no alternative but to hurl themselves at obstacles to profit heartless owners, trainers
You never know who you might meet on a river cruise. It was my 89-year-old father-in-law, Noel, who first recognised a tall, professorial man only a few years younger than him remonstrating with an uninterested official at Munich airport about a pre-paid taxi to Passau, where we were due to board our ship. ‘That’s Humphrey
‘Welcome to the free territory of Trieste,’ reads the sign in the shop window. ‘US and UK come back!’ For me, this is the sort of thing that makes Trieste such a beguiling place. Sixty-four years since those British and American troops departed and handed this disputed seaport back to Italy, it still feels like
I don’t know who coined the old racing saying ‘The only person who remembers who came second is the guy who came second’ but he was wrong. What draws us aficionados to racetracks on blazing summer afternoons when we would be better off in a swimming pool, or on soggy winter days when sensible folk
How lazy, snobbish and wrong it is to mock Gibraltar for the lager and fish and chips clichés. Yes, you can get lager and fish and chips there; nothing wrong with that. The pint of lager I had in a pub in Gibraltar Main Street was excellent. And the funny thing is that, unlike consciously
The Scudamores are one of the bedrock families of jump racing. After being shot down and spending two years as a PoW, Geoffrey Scudamore trained racehorses in Herefordshire, including a Cheltenham Festival winner ridden by son Michael. Michael, one of the great horsemen of his day, won the 1957 Gold Cup on Linwell and the
It may yet turn out that the most significant development in racing this year was the sale of some 250 dairy cows. Back in 1995 Colin Tizzard, a dairy farmer on the edge of the Blackmore Vale, started training point-to-pointers for his son Joe to ride. Joe Tizzard, one-time stable jockey to Paul Nicholls, went
Trainer Dan Skelton and his jockey brother Harry have 100 winners on the board already but for most of us the jumping season proper has only just begun. It wasn’t long, though, before I was reminded of one essential difference between the Flat and jumping codes: the sheer fun element of the winter game. In
Fairy tales can happen. On Sunday the filly God Given won Italy’s only Group One race of the season, the Premio Lydia Tesio, providing Newmarket trainer Luca Cumani with his 50th Group One winner. Just days before he had moved many of his staff to tears by announcing that on 1 December he will retire
