SPECTATOR SPORT
NAMES matter, especially with horses. There are all kinds of superstitions about the danger of changing a horse's name, or of changing his stable-name, his nickname. A name is part of the way an owner under- stands and relates to a horse, and also how the public responds to a significant animal.
In Hong Kong it seems that owners have no concept of the notion of tempting fate. I rode, on a couple of occasions after his retirement from the track, an amiable, if rather undynamic, lump called Sure Win. Other names were still more basic: Money Pouring In is one that sticks in the mind.
There is a notion that no horse with a bad name ever won the Derby, but recent history gives the lie to this: High-Rise is uninspiring, and Benny the Dip would be a better name for a handicapper than a Clas- sic winner. Troy, Nijinsky, Sea Bird: these are names that have a bit of body to them — without quite tempting fate.
So there was a horse called Yaazer: one of those Arabic names that tend to wash over members of the British racing public. It was owned by Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum, and it had never raced. Sheikh Mohammed liked him. Something about the sleek, fine little colt stirred his horsey blood; and it is
Indubitably good
Simon Barnes
blood that gets a lot of stirring, one way and another. He thought the horse was some- thing special. And, for a man who has spent a billion quid on horses, something special means that he thinks it might just be the finest racehorse that ever set foot on a track.
And so he changed the horse's name. In a breathtaking tempting of the fates, he named the horse Dubai Millennium: a celebration of the horse, the time, the Emirate. Thus he trumpeted to the world his extraordinary belief in the horse: that he was to represent not just the sheikh, but his sheikhdom.
`I hope you are right,' said his elder brother, Sheik Maktoum. 'With a name like that, if he's not good he won't be able to run.' But with consummate audacity, Sheikh Mohammed not only went for the name, but declared to everyone who cared to listen that this was the best horse he had ever owned. Not a modest assessment; he also owned Lamtarra, which won the Derby, the King George and the Arc.
This has not been a straightforward busi- ness: Dubai Millennium flopped badly in the Derby last year, upsetting himself in the pre- liminaries and finishing ninth. The moral here is that even if horses do read the script, they cannot be relied on to deliver their lines.
But, undaunted, Sheikh Mohammed and Dubai Millennium marched on, and last weekend the world's racing press were gasping, groping for superlatives as the horse with the most reckless name in racing won the Dubai World Cup in Dubai in the year 2000 with a display of blinding speed that made a sheikh's boldest pronounce- ment look like a mild litotes.
Dubai Millennium's ultimate target in the sheikh's modest dreams of global conquest is the Breeders' Cup Classic in the United States in the autumn. This, like the Dubai race, will be run on dirt, but the horse will take in some big races on grass in between. The greatest horse ever seen, master of all surfaces, and an ambition to go with a name that is a hostage to fortune. Whether he succeeds or fails, there is no ducking the fact that this is Dubai Millennium's year.
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