By Paul Hayward
Around eight hours before Ryan Moore gave Auguste Rodin a lethally cold ride under a radiant Californian sky, his father Gary was winning a Grade 1 hurdle at rainy, mucky Wetherby.
On a day of coverage that stretched from the drenched English provinces to the honeyed light of Santa Anita, Luke Harvey, the ITV commentator, happened to make a point about trainers born without silver spoons and licences and yards handed down by right. Gary was never one of those. And his son Ryan might have spent his career slogging round Plumpton and Fontwell as Gary did in his riding days, before rising in painful increments to be one of our best National Hunt trainers.
Botox Has was a nice winner for Gary in Wetherby's Bet 365 Hurdle, worth £28,475. But Auguste Rodin's victory in the Longines Breeders' Cup Turf was a whole other kind of 'nice.' This was global spectacle, a statement win, and (best of all, for us), a door into a possible four-year-old career for Auguste Rodin, who shot round the inside rail on the home turn to take the shortest way home for Moore. Two calculated risks were in play: one, that the route would close, and two, that his mount would strike the front too soon and fall prey to a counter-attack.
We should have known Moore would guess right. Like all great pilots at this level, where tactical miscalculations are brutally magnified, Gary's son has the eyes, the brain, the hands and the confidence of a jockey who can feel pace and position as if they were his own heartbeat.
Far away in England, the people of Sussex delivered a knowing nod as he landed the £1.7m first prize for Aidan O'Brien, whose need for a world-class rider with a negligible error ratio is obvious. The sheer volume of Classic and Group 1 winners emanating from Ballydoyle requires steering on a level beyond the capabilities of most merely good jockeys. Moore is Coolmore's dependable finisher: in technical terms, the modern-day Lester Piggott, who will almost never get in the way of the best horse in a race winning.
Yet Ryan Moore arrives at those finishing posts with beautiful precision carrying a story that transcends Group 1 prize money, private jets, plutocrats and bloodstock valuations. He is the superstar emissary of the whole Moore family – arguably the most remarkable and redoubtable in British sport, rooted in National Hunt racing and no strangers to ambulances and hospital beds. The Moores are frequently on the canvas, but never stay on it for long.
Watching Auguste Rodin's win at Santa Anita it was obligatory to marvel
that a family of brilliant and hardy operators in the jump racing sphere
should also have bequeathed the world's best jockey in Flat racing
Decades ago for The Independent I interviewed Charlie Moore, father of Gary, a wisecracking gaff track trainer who told me about swapping piles of tractor tyres for horses and “nailing them together” to win a bad race at Plumpton. Gary meanwhile was often to be found at the bottom of a fence or hurdle.
Years later the job took me to Gary's yard near Horsham, where he could be found feeding, mucking out and attending to every tiny task in horse management before the interview could begin. He had the wiry, weathered look of a man who had been figuratively thrown against a wall for his art. In 2015 he found himself in intensive care after being kicked in the back by a horse and was profoundly ill.
And where should we start with Jamie, Josh, Hayley, Candy and Jayne, his phenomenal wife – all Moores, all stalwarts of the winter game. In April 2022, Josh was lucky to survive a fall at Haydock that put him in critical care for weeks after he developed a complicated chest infection to go with his broken leg, ribs and punctured lung.
A filmic family history of the Moores would be framed as a tale of bravery: modest, hard-working folk refusing to be broken by the vicissitudes of the sport they love (Gary has trained a Queen Mother Champion Chase winner, Sire De Grugy, with Jamie on board – so it's not all 'Only Fools and Horses.')
And yet, watching Auguste Rodin's win at Santa Anita it was obligatory to marvel that a family of brilliant and hardy operators in the jump racing sphere should also have bequeathed the world's best jockey in Flat racing, where Ryan displays the unwillingness to boast or emote that runs right through his remarkable clan.
That modesty will have cost him, commercially; but, as Piggott maintained, to be drawn into self-promotion is to jeopardise the thing that made you good in the first-place. Moore's focus and consistency locate him in the highest echelon of world sport. Without him, Coolmore's business model would be far more prone to the winds of human error.
And he was not put there by privilege, family tradition, robotics or Artificial Intelligence. Ryan Moore is his own special talent, an ambassador for his family – their devotion and persistence. People of such distinction deserve a splash of genius to go with the everyday skill and graft. Auguste Rodin was the bearer of that tale, 5,000 miles from Wetherby.
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