A vile motto

It's been a week since Royal Ascot ended but, as Problemwalrus has correctly pointed out, no review of the meeting would be complete without the doffing of one's hat towards the mighty 12-year-old Caracciola, who usurped Brown Jack as the Royal Meeting's oldest winner. Good on 'im - and good on those whose campaign kept the Queen Alexandra afloat, thus making special results such as this possible. That happy victory, though, wasn't actually the final nice result of the day, because at the evening meeting at Haydock Clare Lindop recorded her first British winner, posting a win and a second from two rides for Jeremy Gask. She's over in the UK on a working holiday for a small amount of weeks, staying mainly with Jeremy and his family, which is a natural tie-up as Clare's boss Leon Macdonald was Jeremy's mentor. I've never met Clare (but hope to rectify that before too long) but even so was delighted to cheer her home, as she is extremely popular in her native land. What made the result even easier to enjoy, incidentally, was that this was the first winner to salute in the colours of the very decent and very shrewd ex-Timeform man Simon Rowlands. Clare is the only female jockey to have been champion in a mainland state in Australia (South Australia - the only other girl to have won a riders' premiership there is Beverley Buckingham, in Tasmania) and is the regular rider of one of my favourite horses, Rebel Raider, on whom she has won this season's VRC Derby and SAJC Derby, as well as of Augusta Proud, on whom she won last year's Magic Millions. She was rapt to have won the race, thus fulfilling an ambition to ride a winner in her mother's homeland, and fingers crossed she can ride a few more before she goes home - in fact, she already has added to the total, having had a winner and a second for Jeremy at Doncaster yesterday, the winner being Medicean Man, who got home by half-a-length from Leverage, representing the Luca Cumani/Ryan Moore combination, which is always a hard one to beat.


Clare is not, of course, the only Aussie hoop in the country just now. I don't think my favourite jockey Steven Arnold has ridden out in Newmarket at all - he was here for the pre-Ascot press day but didn't ride Scenic Blast, then went to France for a few days before returning to the UK to ride that horse in the King's Stand, and is currently back in Melbourne - but Jay Ford is now here and has taken over (from Dominic Gibson) the daily riding duties on his best mount Takeover Target. We've also got Michelle Payne (pictured at Caulfield earlier this year, on board the Richard Sims-part-owned and -part-bred, and Colin Little-trained, Kalatruce) here for three weeks, riding out for Luca Cumani. She was in Europe for a working holiday last summer but, although spending a short amount of time here with her sister and brother-in-law Cathy and Kerrin McEvoy (when she rode out for James Fanshawe), was mostly in Ireland with Aidan O'Brien, for whom she had one ride in a Listed fillies' race in which he had several runners. She also had a ride at Deauville for either the brother or father (I forget which) of Olivier Doleuze. She's a great jockey as she demonstrated earlier this year when posting the rare feat of riding five winners on the card one day at Yarra Glen, and also when winning at Caulfield in February on Bart Cummings' notoriously quirky Galileo gelding God's Hand; and as she is bred to be, as seven of her elder siblings are or have been good jockeys (and that total includes one great one, Patrick). Anyway, I was delighted today to have an early start when taking advantage of her availability to get her in here before she went to Luca's at 6.15: we only just failed to beat Clive Brittain's first lot up the Al Bahathri when taking Stardust Memories and Douchkette one step nearer their debuts in a pleasing work-out.

If that gallop was pleasing, it pales into insignificance behind one which I had the pleasure of watching yesterday, when Takeover Target and Scenic Blast matched strides up the July Course yesterday at 7.30, under Jay Ford and Danny Morton respectively. When I heard that this was to take place, it was an easy decision to make a start to the day a bit earlier than usual, thus leaving the way clear to take an hour off at 7.10 to head up there to savour this very special moment. On balance - not least because he must have been conceding around 10kg - one would have to say that Scenic Blast did marginally more to promote his July Cup credentials, but Takeover Target looked, moved and worked really well, and he should not be discounted from that race at all.

I've seen quite a few races on the July Course over the years, but I don't think I've ever seen horses pass the post there as quickly as these two did (after, obviously, having taken things more easily in the first half of the gallop than they would be able to do in a 5-furlong race) and it was a very special occasion - one which this photograph of the two horses heading off down to the start will help me to remember.

Those two horses are, naturally, extremely special - and made all the more special by the unremarkableness (if that is a word) of their backgrounds and the unassumingness (ditto) of their connections - but I hope that they won't mind my saying that not even they do enough to convince me to dispute Brough Scott's claim that his maternal grandfather's horse Warrior was the greatest horse ever. The specialness of Warrior, about whom Brough has written, was made abundantly clear to us on Thursday evening when Brough gave a lovely talk, in aid of the National Horseracing Museum, at the Racing School about him. In short, Brough's maternal grandfather Jack Sealy was a Boer War veteran and cabinet minister who, after having lost his post in 1914, joined the army in his mid-40s and, not wanted by the British army because of fears that he was too much of an individualist to fit in, was foisted onto the Canadian cavarly, with whom it appears he formed a formidable partnership, leading from the front. Warrior was his horse, and thus headed off to France and Belgium with General Sealy. Both were clearly heroes, and charmed ones too: at least twice General Sealy survived when his horse was shot dead from under him (by snipers who, one can assume, were actually aiming for the general rather than his mount), but the happy coincidence being that on each occasion he happened not to be on Warrior that day. In total, Warrior survived eleven incidents which ought to have killed him before eventually arriving back on the Isle of Wight on Christmas Day 1918 - and subsequently proved just how well he had survived the war by winning the Members' Race at the Isle of Wight point-to-point in 1920.

It's a pity that people like Jack Sealy aren't around any more - and in particular that people like Jack Sealy no longer run the country. Half-mad he might have been, but I think that things would probably function considerably better were he in charge today. In particular, I suspect that the national plague of Health & Safety Officers wouldn't be an issue under a Sealy regime. Before the talk, I had enjoyed a chat with the former Fitzroy House trainer and Someries Stud manager John Waugh, during which I had enjoyed reminding him that, of all the many things which he definitely would not enjoy about training nowadays, the ubiquity of red tape would come pretty near the top of the list. It was, therefore, very timely that Brough should then quote a sentence from one of his grandfather's books, the magnificently-named 'Fear, and be slain'. This particular pronouncement was that "'Safety first' is a vile motto". Which I think is as good a motto as any to head this chapter, and possibly for life itself.