Horse racing

With the Cheltenham Festival close, the quest for serious punting money intensifies. I had one potential contributor identified at Kempton on Saturday. With trainer Dan Skelton on red-hot form, and his jockey brother Harry currently winning on 22 per cent of his rides, I reckoned that their candidate for the Sky Bet Dovecote Novices’ Hurdle, the clearly useful Calico, a decent horse on the Flat in Germany, was the business at a tasty 10-3. Three hurdles out, Harry had Calico travelling strongly behind the two leaders and I was not only counting my money but also starting to frame a few ante-post doubles for the Festival. When he eased into

What has happened to forgiveness? That question hangs heavy over the Gordon Elliott controversy. He’s the racehorse trainer currently in the eye of a media storm after a photo emerged showing him sitting on top of a dead horse. There has been virtually no discussion about forgiving Elliott for this error. Instead the knives of cancellation have been drawn. He must be destroyed. It’s the only way, apparently. The fury has been relentless. The photo, taken in 2019, shows Elliott atop one of the racehorses that he trains. The horse had just died from a heart attack. It’s an unpleasant image, for sure. The horse’s eyes are glazed over, its

Since coup conspirators nearly won £10 million from the bookies, the sport has divided into two camps. Some grinned and wished good luck to the schemers in their efforts to worst the Old Enemy; others insisted with sober faces that it was a scandal which besmirched racing and diddled honest punters who weren’t in the know. With most racing eyes firmly fixed on the Dublin Racing Festival on 7 February, bookmakers became aware overnight of potentially huge liabilities on three horses in obscure races, each saddled by a different trainer, who had been linked together at long prices in multiple trebles and doubles. Their panic grew as first Fire Away,

Dry January it wasn’t and I am not referring to the trainers who normally undergo an annual abstinence but who abandoned the effort this year in sheer frustration at racing’s woes. The unrelenting downpours that have seen a whole string of race meetings called off through waterlogging struck again last weekend. Cheltenham, which had already lost its New Year’s Day fixture to the weather, had to call off its Trials day too, the last scheduled fixture before the Festival in March. With so many opportunities lost for testing individuals’ mettle round the Gloucestershire Valhalla’s undulations and gradients, there will be an extra question mark dangling above many Festival entries this

Doing good doesn’t always work out as expected. A regular entering his local pub takes pity on an old lady seemingly fishing with a bent stick and string in a kerbside pool of rain. He invites her in for a drink. As she raises her gin and Dubonnet, he asks amiably: ‘So how many did you catch today?’ ‘You’re the eighth,’ she replies. Imagine another pub scene. As lockdown is relaxed, a customer’s order of three pints of bitter and two G&Ts is refused by the landlord: ‘Sorry, Squire, but according to my government boozometer that takes you over your permitted weekly Alcoholic Spending Limit of £100. You signed for

Greville Starkey’s great victories as a jockey included the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe on Star Appeal at 119-1. In 1978 he won the Derby and Irish Derby on Shirley Heights and the Oaks and Irish Oaks on Fair Salinia. He was also known for his unerring mimicry of a Jack Russell terrier’s bark, a distinction that once had an airliner’s departure delayed while stewards sought in vain the animal aboard. When he deployed his trick during a celebratory dinner at Quaglino’s, trainer Henry Cecil wrapped a napkin round Starkey’s neck and led him yapping out of the restaurant on all fours. In races he used it to disconcert his

Who owns Altior? I ask because of the brouhaha over Nicky Henderson’s late withdrawal of his stable star, winner of a record-breaking 19 consecutive races over jumps, from last Saturday’s Betfair Tingle Creek Chase. Official description of the chase course going was ‘soft, good to soft in places’. Nicky’s description was ‘a bottomless glue pit’ and he withdrew Altior despite the gelding’s proven ability to cope with normally soft ground. The racing public, trade press and bookmakers had all been keenly anticipating Altior’s renewed clash with Politologue, the Paul Nicholls-trained grey who won the Champion Chase at the Cheltenham Festival in March following Altior’s late withdrawal from that race with

Why hasn’t Bristol De Mai become as beloved by the racing public as his fellow greys Desert Orchid and One Man were? Probably because the jumping world has become obsessed with the Cheltenham Festival and the best Bristol De Mai has achieved there is a third place in the 2019 Gold Cup. For quite some time Bristol’s trainer, Nigel Twiston-Davies, has declared that his stable star has not been given the credit due to him and he has had good reason: after Bristol De Mai’s victory in Haydock Park’s Betfair Chase last weekend, there can be no doubt about his rightful place in the pantheon of top chasers. People like

Fortunately for me and the politicians we entertained over my years covering the darkest profession, Mrs Oakley didn’t do a Sasha Swire and keep a gloriously indiscreet diary. Indeed her rule was that politicians who came to our house and talked only about themselves didn’t get invited a second time, a test that was frequently failed. The Swires’s guests, especially the Cameroons, seem to have talked about nothing else. But Mrs Oakley can on occasion do the Swire sardonical. As our young flatcoat retriever, who longs to grow wings, disappeared over the horizon last weekend in pursuit of an indignant partridge, a one in three gradient loomed and I puffed

Feeling oddly confident, clairvoyant even, I entered a bar to place a bet on Sunday’s Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. I had researched the internet for advice on how to place a bet in France and I knew I wanted to bet on a couplé gagnant, that is to say make a prediction of the first two horses past the post. Feeling almost supernaturally confident, I thought I would follow up with a wilder bet called a trio ordre, adding a third horse from among the outsiders. Because my desire to bet large on a classic horse race was overwhelming, and my conviction that I would win grandiose, I think

It is all, it seems, in the tweaks. So said Aidan O’Brien, Ireland’s master-trainer supreme, before his tough filly Magical defeated Ghaiyyath, the world’s highest-rated horse, in the Irish Champion Stakes on Saturday. He wouldn’t have run her against the relentless galloper who had beaten Magical the month before, he insisted, if he hadn’t felt there was something he could tweak to make the difference. If ever there was a man in racing who shouldn’t have any regrets it is Aidan O’Brien, but in a fascinating Racing Post interview last week with David Jennings Aidan revealed: ‘Every single race we’re beaten in hurts. The bigger the race the more it

Lester Piggott was famous for pinching other jockeys’ rides. He used his friendship with owner Ivan Allan to have Luca Cumani’s regular rider Darrel McHargue ‘jocked off’ Commanche Run in the 1984 St Leger. The disgusted McHargue said that he would spend the day playing tennis rather than watch the race, which duly supplied Piggott with his 28th Classic victory. Asked on Leger morning if rain would spoil Commanche Run’s chances, Lester replied coolly: ‘No, but it will ruin McHargue’s tennis.’ Piggott is famously a man of few words but he can make them tell. Former jockey Dean McKeown told me once of riding 33-1 shot Miss Merlin at Windsor

We know about the endlessly jaw-dropping greatness of Ben Stokes (a peerage soon, surely), the furious power of a supercharged Stuart Broad and even Joe Root’s increasingly skilful captaincy. But another highlight of the brilliant Test series against West Indies was the presence of Carlos Brathwaite as a Test Match Special summariser and general benign presence. Always funny, astute, and thoroughly likeable, with the bonus of a magnificent voice, Brathwaite — the man who smashed Stokes for four successive sixes to win the 2016 T20 World Cup — has been a marvel. He even read the shipping forecast, and no greater tribute can there be in British broadcasting. Funny, astute,

It wasn’t so much a Derby victory this year as an act of grand larceny. Aidan O’Brien isn’t just a master racehorse trainer. He is a master of psychology too. On Serpentine, a son of his first Derby winner Galileo, he put up a capable but little-known jockey who hadn’t had a winner for 260 days assuring him that his mount would last two furlongs more than the Derby distance. Emmet McNamara duly pushed Serpentine into a massive lead and the other jockeys assumed they would blow up well before the finish, just as two front runners had done earlier in the Oaks. By the time the others realised that

Horse racing, it turns out, wasn’t the first sport back in post-lockdown action: that distinction went to pigeon racing when some 4,400 birds took to the air and raced from Kettering to Barnsley. Nor did the first Classic, the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket, provide the hoped-for tonic headlines about a new super-horse to succeed the great Frankel. Pinatubo, a scintillating winner of all his six races as a juvenile and the highest-rated two-year-old since 1994, ran a perfectly respectable race to finish third, but the high hopes that the hot favourite was going to prove to be something truly special were dashed. It seems that the bigger, rangier types caught

There is racing elsewhere in the world. It restarted in France on Monday, la course de chevaux being classed in that fine country as an agricultural activity. My friend the form guru, who combs back six races in search of clues, has even cast his net to include somewhere called Morphettville in Australia where last week he succeeded in backing a 65-1 winner. When, over the phone, he sensed my raised eyebrow at a horse with truly believable form being allowed to start at such odds, he explained that the animal had won two previous races: ‘The horse wasn’t to know they were lower-class events. He still got the same

Sport may well be ‘the great triviality’ as Timeform founder Phil Bull once put it, and racing as trivial as any. But many thousands of jobs depend on it. To get an idea of the impact the pandemic is having on the 550 licensed training yards in Britain, I called up my friend Simon Dow at his Epsom yard. Back at Clear Height stables, where he has had his greatest successes with horses such as Young Ern and Chief’s Song, Simon has around 30 horses. Typically, the first thoughts of this articulate workaholic were with those living in the London tower blocks visible on clear days from the Epsom gallops.

Asked, after his Imperial Aura’s impressive win in the Northern Trust Novices’ Handicap Chase at the Cheltenham Festival, if he had been worried about one particular challenger in the race, Kim Bailey wryly replied: ‘Of course I was worried. I’m a racehorse trainer.’ Trainers now have a lot more to worry about. When we finally resume racing — and few expect it to be after the six weeks originally announced — how many of the 14,000 racehorses in training as the suspension was announced will be coming back? How many owners whose businesses have suffered from Covid-19 will see paying bills for forage, farriers and vets’ attentions as a priority

Every time the Cheltenham Festival looms, I recall a remarkable experience. It was already 25 years since Dawn Run’s recovery from a seemingly impossible position to win the Gold Cup of 1986, becoming the only horse ever to add victory in our greatest steeplechase to a triumph in the Champion Hurdle, when, for my Festival history, I interviewed her jockey. Jonjo O’Neill took me through every stride of the race as if it had been the day before: ‘We were flying down the hill and I could hear them coming behind us. I thought we’d gone a right gallop and couldn’t believe they were so close to us. We jumped