Epic by Simon Barnes

Author:Simon Barnes [Barnes, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

There is perfection in sport and it’s not all that hard to find. It comes before the event takes place. It’s found in the new morning a few days before the race, when the larks sing high above and every horse is a champion.

Newmarket Heath in spring: sporting perfection unsullied by competition. No victory and no defeat has marred it, not yet. And perhaps – perhaps – defeat never will. The dew wet and splashing around your ankles, the sun saving its warmth for later, the horses almost a mile distant, walking an eternal circle as if taking part in a slow ritual dance. ‘Yes,’ said Sheikh Mohammed. ‘This time is the best.’

Godolphin. He was fed up with trainers telling him how to run his horses so he founded his own racing organisation. And called it Godolphin. The Godolphin Arabian is one of the three founding sires of the breed of horses known as thoroughbred. Racehorses, in short. This was in itself a piece of daring: the Arabs coming to take back their own: for every speedster in the great thoroughbred dynasty that races across the entire world can trace its origins back to one of those three fleet-footed horses of Arabia. ‘I know more than a trainer. Trainers would not listen to me.’

His first memory was being on horseback. He was two, his father was riding the horse and he was sitting just in front of the saddle with his father behind him. Horses are to some people walking, breathing symbols of their own wealth and power; when they love their horses it is their own wealth and power that has inspired their passion. But some – even the wealthiest and most powerful of all – love horses for their own marvellous selves. Here unmistakably was one such: a passion for horses and for putting them to the test in sport. Sheikh Mohammed rode regularly in 100-mile endurance races. Around his horses, he was freed for a while from the cares of state and from the dignity of royalty; at that time he was both a prince and minister of defence for United Arab Emirates. He stood there in the same jeans, the same white tee-shirt, the same Godolphin-branded windcheater as everybody else. Just one horseman among many.

But it was simultaneously clear that Sheikh Mohammed was nothing like everybody else. He held out his hand without looking: at once a pair of binoculars was placed in his grasp. As he surveyed the distant circlers the circle broke up, and the horses set off in pairs along the Al Bahathri gallop, the little work-riders crouched oddly motionless over the withers.

But all the same, a filly. A filly in the Derby. Cape Verdi had won the 1,000 Guineas and looked certain to win the Oaks, the one-and-a-half-mile Epsom classic for three-year-old fillies. But Sheikh Mohammed wanted her to run in the Derby, believing she had the speed to beat the colts. The last filly to win the Derby was Fifinella in 1916.

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