By Paul Hayward
The common man or woman rarely owns a Derby winner but they are peppered across the 244-year history of what Disraeli called 'the Blue Riband of the Turf.'
The race tends to be exclusive, but the urge to win it was always universal. The finest challenges in sport go beyond financial incentive to the Corinthian urge to achieve victory for its own sake. This year, we scan the field for a romantic outcome knowing there will probably be a familiar one. Despair not. It was always thus, and the wealthy dreamer has more in common than you might think with the less affluent one.
The last seven Derbys have gone to Coolmore, Godolphin and Saeed Suhail, a Dubai businessman. Anthony Oppenheimer (2015) and the Aga Khan (2016) interrupted another Coolmore sequence of four consecutive wins from 2011 to 2014. Princess Haya of Jordan and the late Prince Khalid Abdullah of Saudi Arabia are other 21st Century winning owners. Nowadays nobody takes any notice of Lord Weinstock's joke: “It is vulgar to win the Derby two years running.”
We tend to think of great wealth as being incompatible with romance. It may not always be so. Horse, trainer, jockey and stable staff are also part of the package. Wins in the saddle for Adam Kirby, Richard Kingscote, Emmet McNamara and Padraig Beggy in the last seven runnings qualify as Epsom fairytales. Motivator (2005) and Sir Percy (2006) were relatively recent reminders that the best horses sometimes evade the reach of the mightiest operators.
The Derby is having another identity wobble. And no wonder, when the easy Dante Stakes winner, Economics, sidesteps Epsom to take a different route to stardom. In this year's field the underdogs are perhaps most strongly represented by the James Fanshawe-trained Ambiente Friendly and Dancing Gemini from Roger Teal's yard.
With nearly 250 years to draw on, the Derby is predictably rich in context, perspective and anecdote.
The owner of the second Derby winner, Young Eclipse, in 1871, was so short of cash when he arrived in England from Ireland that he carried sedan chairs for coins. Dennis O'Kelly also had a spell in the Fleet Street prison as a debtor. On his socially upward trajectory later he would announce himself at various points as Count or Colonel O'Kelly.
Nowadays nobody takes any notice of Lord Weinstock's joke: “It is vulgar to win the Derby two years running.”
John Gully was a butcher, publican, prize-fighter, MP and “polished gentleman” who fought a man called Gregson at Six Mile Bottom in 1807 so violently that some of the 'seconds' in the fighters' corners were said to have fainted. Gully's switch from boxing to betting ring led him to own the 1846 and 1854 Derby winners. Said to be “totally without education,” Gully was an early (though rare) exemplification of the Derby as democratic event.
In 1865, Comte de Lagrange, the son of one of Napoleon's generals, delivered Gladiateur to become the first French winner of the race. In the late 19th Century, Hungarian and Russian noblemen entered the fray, along with an Italian senator and rich Americans. Lined up against them were the royals and landed aristocrats of Victorian England: the Dukes of Westminster, Portland and Rosebery. By then Epsom was the No 1 playground of the internationally titled and wealthy. These days it faces fierce competition for that role.
All this is gleaned from the marvellously atmospheric 'The Romance of the Derby Stakes' by Alan Macey (1930), which features a filmic passage about a group of women making their way to the first running of the race in 1780…
“They had been dancing until early morning and their pencilled eyelids were a little weary. They asked for their smelling-salts and yawned discreetly behind their fluttering fans. These high-born ladies were inclined to boredom; they had seen most of the pageant of life and were inclined towards ennui. The prospect of a new horse-race could scarcely be expected to excite them.”
But the Derby has excited generations across the world for the 244 years of its life. The thrill of owning the winner, though, tends to extend only to the super rich, the cleverest breeders and every now and then the lucky, plucky dreamer who finds a Derby horse cheaply in a sales ring. It's not meant to be easy to win. If it were, everyone would be doing it.
What Alan Macey's book and the Derby's history say is that romance is embedded in the race's very nature. Always has been, always will. Decades and centuries ago, titled owner-breeders dominated. Now, the industrialised production and acquisition of the best bloodstock by the biggest operators sets a pattern familiar from the rest of economic life. Example: 60% of UK veterinary practices are now owned by six companies.
The knack is to look deeper than the headline of which owner or trainer is etched next to the name of the winner to the myriad of tales and struggles that led up to the victory. Each is a small miracle, and we see one every year on Epsom Downs.
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