Large, if invisible, earnings
John Oaksey QUEST FOR GREATNESS: A CELEBRATION OF LAMMTARRA AND THE RACING SEASON by Laura Thompson Michael Joseph, £20, pp. 224 Laura Thompson was presumably as flummoxed as the rest of us when the Maktoum brothers announced the sale to Japan for a mere $30m of their unbeaten Derby, King George VI and Arc de Triom- phe winner. Of course $30m (about £19.35m) is an awful lot of yen to pay for a stallion whose first live foal has yet to touch the ground. (Lammtarra got most over 90 per cent — of the 56 mares he cov- ered at Newmarket this spring in foal, but al that proves is his fertility. No one yet
knows, how many of his offspring will go fast enough to keep themselves warm.)
The bid, from a consortium of breeders in Japan (where, thanks to a flourishing Tote Monopoly, the average race is worth £170,000), may well have sounded 'an offer too good to refuse' to Sheikh Mohammed and/or his accountants. But the Maktoum brothers have so far been much better known for making such offers than for accepting them. Even if — which no one has ever suggested — the ruling family of Dubai did, for some mysterious reason, have a short-term cash-flow prob- lem, how on earth could they bear to sell this, of all horses?
How indeed? No one can blame Laura Thompson for regarding this monster some would say monstrous — transaction as evidence, if not proof, of the 'greatness' she claims for Lammtarra. But, make no mistake, that claim, which is fundamental to this book, is by no means undisputed. Since the second war the late Phil Bull,
orange-bearded inventor of Timeform and scourge of the bookies, has been the first name most interested racing people would think of when it comes to rational assessment of merit in a racehorse. In the essay on Lammtarra in the latest Time- form Annual, Racehorses of 1995, the gospel according to Bull runs as follows: 'There's more than one school of thought about what constitutes greatness in a racehorse . . . .' And, later in the same piece:
A great horse means to us one of such superlative merit as to make him or her far superior to the general run of classic winners.
But then, in words which Miss Thompson either ignores or did not see, the Annual dismisses poor Lammtarra as 'only a little better than average, as recent middle- distance champions go'. So Mr Bull would certainly not have permitted the word 'greatness' on the title page and Miss Thompson's dedication 'To Lammtarra, a great horse' would have got similar blue- pencil treatment.
As, I'm afraid, would quite a bit of her more elaborate prose. I doubt if the thought of a racehorse ever 'curved inside him like a rose stem' — and although Lammtarra did just occasionally look as though his emotions were 'standing inside him like a hedgehog's spikes', that was defi- nitely not the kind of imagery Phil Bull encouraged. But even if Miss Thompson sometimes strays dangerously close to Pseuds' Corner, it is mostly because she is trying — quite often successfully — to con- vey the moments of 'magic, mystery and beauty' which she found in the 1995 flat race season. The miraculous way in which Lammtarra (the word means 'invisible) flashed across three famous days that summer meant much more to her than the narrow margins by which he won, the brevi- ty of his career or the quality of his opponents. Lammtarra's story has enough twists and sub-plots for Dick Francis or John Fran- come — only one murder, but several mys- teries and some still unanswered questions. Does anyone know why, after winning rides including the Derby, Walter Swinburn was jocked off in favour of Frankie Dettori? Laura Thompson doesn't claim to. But, with the Maktoums and their Derby winner at the centre of her stage, the author gives a fresh, female, up-to-date impression of Epsom, Ascot, Longchamp, and the actors, human and equine, who used them as a backcloth.
She 'hates the Grand National', and, though fond of Red Rum and Desert Orchid, does not reckon that the greatness of a mere jumper can ever be 'absolute or 'pure'. Did she ever hear of Arkle, wonder? It is certainly hard to measure Lammtarra's four-race 43-furlong joy-ride against the 26 gruelling three-mile-Plus steeplechases of which Anne, Duchess of Westminster's immortal champion won all but four. If Arkle's greatness can, in any meaningful sense of the word, be called less 'pure' or 'absolute' than Lammtarra's I will cheerfully swallow the next hedgehog I meet.
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