SPECTATOR SPORT
His kingdom for such a horse
Simon Barnes
IT sounds a bit daft to say that you feel sorry for a sheikh, and presumptuous to say that you know how he feels, but T do; and every child in the Pony Club is in the same position. Last weekend one of Sheikh Mohammed al Maktoum's horses broke a leg.
Sheikh Mohammed has several thousand horses; but this Was Dubai Millennium, and Dubai Millennium is as precious to him as any Buttons or Snaffles that carried its joih- pured girl to victory in the bending race and the apple-bobbing race. As precious, for that matter, as my mare, with whom I won so many rosettes in show-jumping and cross- country. She broke down irretrievably a few years back, and I can never ride her again.
Dubai Millennium was the Horse of a Lifetime, Sheikh Mohammed's personal Pegasus. He loved him not only because he won things, but because he was beautiful and perfect. The sheikh was filmed in the horse's box the day before he won the Dubai World Cup: Sheikh Mohammed majestically sheikhly in white gandoura, showing off the horse's majestic conformation; the horse ducking his head beneath the sheikh's armpit with boisterous affection.
This was the real thing — the horse a sheikh had spent his life looking for — and Dubai Millennium was loved for his victo- ries and for himself. Sheikh Mohammed was in the throes of setting up a sensational multi-million-pound match-race with Dubai Millennium's only possible rival, Montjeu.
And then the blow fell. Blows tend to fall when you have horses. A training accident — it happens all the 'time. You feel the loss regardless of value; but you do hope it's not your favourite that suffers the blow.
It wasn't fatal. The horse has been operat- ed on and will, with luck and good care, sur- vive to become a polyphiloprogenitive stal- lion. There are plenty of worse fates. But it's not the same as being the best horse ever.
Dubai Millennium won the Dubai World Cup and the Prince of Wales Stakes this year with unbelievable dominance, and was to run in the Breeder's Cup Classic in the autumn: part of a plan for global conquest. But it is not to happen.
Yet it is not thwarted ambition that will be gnawing at Sheikh Mohammed. It is a loss of joy and promise and hope. He has been robbed by the furies that surround the horsey world of the chance to see the horse fulfil himself doing what he was made for.
And it brings out a very curious kind of disappointment. You are disappointed, not simply for yourself as owner, but rather for the horse. A relationship with a Horse of a Lifetime goes impossibly deep with deeply horsey people.
It would not altogether surprise me if Sheikh Mohammed pulled out of racing on the back of this disappointment, because he fears, perhaps knows, that he will never have a horse as good. The quest is over. On balance, I expect his addiction to challenge will keep him at it. But the loss of a horse you love — even if it can hang on to lead an agreeable half-life — is a powerful thing. If you love horses, people tell me, you must love power, boots and spurs and whips, ho- ho. But horsey people are in thrall to the power of the horse, and, in the end, it is the horse that has power over its owner; sheikhs and Pony Club members alike.
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