2010 – A Review
AN EXCEPTIONAL YEAR FOR HIGHCLERE BY ROLF JOHNSON
Now Highclere, and all other syndicates, are fully accepted into the owners’ league table we can roll into 2011 on the crest of 2010. The acceptance of Highclere’s position demonstrates that racing politics, currently in turmoil over the Levy, need not always end in acrimony.
Forty two victories, £1.5m winning prize monies, in there scrapping with the Maktoums, Ballydoyle and Khalid Abdullah, visions of future titles: in the moment of Harbinger’s Ascot triumph Harry Herbert said, “We may never see the like again”: perhaps, Harbinger is the highest-rated horse on the planet, but that won’t stop Highclere trying; there are still fresh fields to conquer.
Harbinger winning the King George and afterwards entering the winners' enclosure at Ascot
Phil Bull, creator of Timeform, maintained that the best reason to carry on living was to see how the two-year-olds turned out at three. Memory is one that would have had Bull burning the winter midnight oil tinkering with his ratings and dreaming dreams.
There’s not a single Highclere owner who doesn’t identify with the entirety of every runner in light blue, dark blue hoop on sleeves and cap (velvet): not just an ear or a leg but every hair of the tail – and an even wider audience took Memory, the filly with hardly a tail but that almost indefinable quality, charisma, to their hearts.
At Goodwood, Royal Ascot and Newmarket, Memory swept past her fields with an irresistible surge. It didn’t happen on the Curragh for whatever reason – going, track, traffic problems; there will be no excuses come One Thousand Guineas day in May. And the way she carried herself at the Highclere Yearling parades suggests, strongly, that there will be no need for any.
We were utterly delighted Memory helped Richard Hannon become champion trainer. Richard is happily recovering from a heart operation (whether the staff at Southampton General will recover from their experience of “the worst patient since Lazarus” is another matter).
Despite one Group One success after another the 2010 British Classics evaded Richard: Memory gives him as good a chance as ever he’s had in the fillies’ Guineas.
Memory winning the Group 3 Albany Stakes at Royal Ascot (left). Approve winning the Group 2 Norfolk Stakes at Royal Ascot (right).
Had the season been no more than Harbinger and Memory we could have whiled away the winter satiating ourselves on the replays of their races. But from the third day of the season when Print kicked things off winning at Kempton, to Ritual’s victory at Lingfield two days before the close, Highclere were in the thick of it at meetings great and small.
Small but sweet were the claiming race victories of Syrian and Hierarch, the latter a handsome horse, same sire as Harbinger and who, once-upon-a-time, carried equal expectations, but eventually rated a small matter of 64lb behind the champion!
Nobody dwells on failure in this game except to debate whether that failure was relative or excusable. Look at Paco Boy who, though he was never under the Highclere banner, has now entered Highclere Stud. Doubtless his offspring will attract John Warren and Harry at the Sales in two years time.
Paco Boy never beat the almost incomparable Goldikova in five meetings yet every time he gave her 3lb and a start: if ever they had met on a level playing field, what might have been? The nearest ‘Paco’ came was at Royal Ascot in the Queen Anne Stakes: perhaps had he been under the Highclere banner by then he may have prevailed; the Highclere assault on the grandest of all meetings was virtually irresistible.
Memory, Approve, Harbinger were almost joined in the winners’ enclosure by Theology – a whisker away in the Queen’s Vase.
And yet there was a leavening of ‘might have beens’ in Highclere’s season, not least had Poltergeist and Plume remained sound in wind and limb and Decorative overcome her problems more than that single occasion first time out at Nottingham. Admission was the first turf winner of the season but could never assert himself again.
Martyr hardly put a foot wrong again and left the fold, with some regret, at the Sales: Activate and Herculean could hardly put one foot in front of the other in the spring yet in the dying days of the season, but for minor setbacks reasserting, they might have crowned the seasons of Michael Bell and William Haggas.
Rose Blossom winning a Group 3 race at York (left) and Marytr winning at Glorious Goodwood
Both three-year-olds had shown similar winning form. A winter’s sojourn and there’s little reason why the stayers’ world won’t be at the feet of Activate and Herculean next season.
2010 was one long commercial (“Go compare, go compare”…the one about insurance – oh well, suit yourself) for Highclere: Conduct and Rose Blossom, while not guaranteed Group status in 2011, are another pair with their futures ahead of them.
Rose Blossom already has a Group Three to her name and was one of five winners first-time jockeys’ champion Paul Hanagan rode for us.
Indeed Highclere had a big part to play in the absorbing championship battle which ensued in the closing days between Paul and Richard Hughes.
Paul rode the first two winners of the season, at Doncaster , and the crucial one, Ritual for Highclere at Lingfield three days before the end. Having ridden our emerging sprinter to his two previous wins, the champion elect had to keep the mount despite Hughsie’s eight wins for Highclere.
Since the final gap was two victories had jockeys been switched at Lingfield they would have finished level, as did Seb Sanders and Jamie Spencer two years ago.
That is the knife-edge margin on which racing fortune oscillates. Indeed overtures were made towards early purchases of Wootton Bassett, eventual unbeaten juvenile winner of over half a million pounds, and also Breeders’ Cup Turf hero Diamond Midge. Neither bid bore fruition.
Tallahasse was brought in and though she only ran the once in Highclere colours, in a Listed event at Ayr , she is a ‘sleeper’ or ‘lurker’ (your preference) among next year’s three-year-old fillies.
On our doorstep is the immense promise of Dominant with Michael Jarvis; surely there is more to Academy than his last outing; Census is on an obvious upward sweep, so too Baptist and then there are the unraced ‘dark horses’ who will emerge from the shadows. Harbinger didn’t race at two.
Highclere have never had a yearling team with the strength of this year’s draft. It’s easy to say shares swept off the shelves faster than knickers in the Harrods Sales on the back of 2010′s heroics when we were hardly ever out of the headlines.
But Harry’s ‘Haka’ after successive Ascot winners showed outsiders that racing evokes greater expressions of passion than mere tears.
Herculean winning at Haydock (left). Pepe Simo making a successful chasing debut at Sandown (right).
Of course favourable publicity helped give Harry and John the financial muscle to dig deeper for the real nuggets at Tattersalls. Anything less than the four juvenile Group wins of this past season will appear a step backwards.
But the future is what concerns us. One hopeful feature of racing in this country has been the growing popularity of jumping. Phil Bull might have champed impatiently on his everlasting cigar during the flat’s winter hibernation – he regarded racing “in the context of life as a whole… a triviality” and jump racing with disdain.
But National Hunt is no longer the impoverished relation of the flat and we’ve given ourselves the best chance of becoming a major player by patronizing Paul Nicholls, Nicky Henderson and Emma Lavelle.
On the day Highclere’s flat season of seasons (nota bene, to date) closed, a new chapter opened – with Pepe Simo’s novice chase victory at Sandown.