Riding high
Robin Oakley psom last weekend was simply awash with emotion. Show me the racing man who didn't have a tear in his eye when Henry Cecil marched back to the top of his profession with Light Shift's victory in the Oaks — his eighth victory in the Fillies' Classic after seven years in semi-obscurity — and I will show you a curmudgeon. Cecil may be a toff, but he is somehow the people's toff, a quintessentially British combination of upperclass style and self-deprecation.
And then there was Frankie. Dettori didn't, after all, like Sir Gordon Richards, have to wait for a 26th and final appearance to win a Derby, he staked the hoodoo on only his 15th attempt with a majestic win on the magnificent Authorized.
Frankie, who had yelled with delight in his car when his agent Ray Cochrane told him he had the ride, yelled again as he passed the winning post. He jumped up on the trophy table to kiss his prize and salute the crowd, he fell to his knees in supplication on the weighingroom scales. And then came an osculatory assault from which no living being was safe. He kissed almost everyone in sight, from his valet to Ray Cochrane to the whiskered Saeed bin Suroor. And then he complained that he hadn't had time to sit down and have a cry. UnBritish? Forget it. He put a smile on every face at Epsom.
The intriguing thing was that after widespread predictions that Authorized would start at odds-on he went off at 5-4 against. The bookies, it seemed, perceived a pressure factor. And it was not pressure felt by Authorized. The burly son of Montjeu pranced a bit but handled the preliminaries as well as any. No, the layers must have reckoned that Frankie would crack. He admitted it had been an ordeal: 'I do like a bit of pressure, but this was over the top.' But he coped, allowing him to enter the Press Room, champagne glass in hand, declaring, 'I won the effin' Derby, didn't I?'
Frankie is giving himself ten more years. The advertising man, then trainer, Graeme Roe, now the author of the Jay Jessop racing novels, didn't even start his career as an amateur rider until he was past 40. He wasn't the best, but he was, he reckons, the fittest, and David Nicholson described him as 'too brave for his own good'. It was a horse of the Duke's known in the yard as 'Bob' which ran away with Graeme on the gallops one day, carting him past the whole Nicholson string. The crestfallen rider trotted back expecting a vintage bollocking only for a different kind of wounding: 'Don't worry, Graeme. He's run away with better jockeys than you'll ever be.'
Graeme was good enough to have some Irish trainers make use of his services. One explained on his arrival at a country track that an influential owner wanted him to take a spare ride in an earlier race. The horse's diminutive trainer told him, 'We're a selling stable, not a betting stable. If it will help you to finish in the first four I wouldn't be complaining if you gave her a couple of cracks over the last two hurdles.'
Getting to the last two was the problem. Approaching the first, Graeme's mount veered wildly towards the wing. He hauled her back and she ran right across the field before jumping it. You can imagine the rich language being used by the pros about the visiting English amateur.
There was another torrent of expletives after a repeat performance at the next, after which Graeme anchored his mount on the inside running rail. Somehow he managed to finish fourth. When he told the trainer who'd engaged him for the main ride, 'I was a bit worried at the first two,' the trainer replied, 'I was worried before you got to the start. I asked our friend what sort of a jumper she was and he replied, "I wouldn't know. She's never jumped a twig." ' Going back to the horse's trainer Graeme contented himself with observing that his animal had jumped rather green. 'Oh, I don't know. It wasn't bad for a horse that had never left the ground before.'
'Why didn't you tell me?' he asked. 'Oh, no use doing that. You'd never have ridden her with any confidence then.'
Nerves showed a little more when he was training, with some reasonable horses including Le Grand Maitre, Nippy Chippy, Fairly Sharp and All Bright, an old favourite whom he rode out on Christmas Day every day for 26 years. One day at Bangor he had three runners in a bumper, two of them running for the first time. After he'd saddled them a friend inquired, `G, do you know you've got a lighted cigar in each hand?'
Combining the advertising business with his training Graeme was edgy, too, when he first began and the Jockey Club's inspector of premises came down to check his facilities. His gallops weren't quite ready but luckily there was three inches of snow. The official peered in a few boxes then accepted the offer of a warming drink, making it clear that it wasn't cocoa he had in mind. They finished half a bottle of Glenfiddich and he was in business.
No wonder the Jay Jessop novels, having started as a self-publishing enterprise, are now earning an appreciative audience. The plots may take a little unravelling, but they have about them the proper flavour of stable routine and the authentic smell of leather, hay and sweat.
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