Follow
Below are some of my favourite horse racing memories
1. St Jovite (Pleasant Colony ex Northern Sunset by Northfields) winning the 1992 Irish Derby. I regard it is the best middle distance performance that I have seen in my horse racing lifetime (post 1987). He smashed the track record and I can’t think of a single horse that would have been able to live with that relentless gallop on that day. Pleasant Colony was a grandson of Ribot who sired two Irish Derby winners in the brothers Ribocco and Ribero. They used to say that the Ribots needed the sun on their backs and that seemed to be the case with St Jovite who showed huge improvement that Summer.
2. Arazi (Blushing Groom ex Danseur Fabuleux by Northern Dancer) winning the 1991 Breeder’s Cup Juvenile. This was stunning and was the kind of performance you normally only see in Hollywood films where one horse scythes through the field.
3. Peintre Celebre (Nureyev ex Peinture Bleu by Alydar) winning the 1997 Arc. What acceleration..
4. Dayjur (Danzig ex Gold Beauty by Mr Prospector) jumping a shadow in the 1990 Breeders Cup and gifting the race to Safely Kept (Horatius ex Safely Home by Winning Hit) . What speed, what drama, what outrageous bad luck for the best European sprinter of recent decades. Great horse,terrible stallion..
5. Hawk Wing (Woodman ex Lo Lorgnette by Val De L’Orne) in the 2003 Lockinge. An awesome performance where he beat Where or When by 11 lengths with Breeders Cup winner, Domedriver ,9 lengths further back. A lot of people knocked Hawk Wing, but he won Group 1’s at 2,3 and 4. He ran his heart out over the Derby Trip and would have been an easy Guineas winner only for the draw. As good a performance over a mile as you will ever see (Frankel included)…
So many of them were such poor stallions afterward not just Dayjur. Hawkwing was probably the only horse I heard APOB get annoyed with journalists about. He naively suggested he could win the triple crown and the media never let it go.
I hadn’t spotted that Leo, it really is a collection of massively disappointing sires (with the exception of Peintre Celebre who was merely an ok sire). Might re-title the videos section as the ‘hall of shame’ and could stick in Turtle Island’s Irish Guineas, Helissio’s Arc, a Sakhee video and a Pilsudksi Irish Champion Stakes 🙂