Dettori takes on double mission
Reach For The Moon can earn Queen’s 25th Royal Ascot win Stradivarius looking to equal Yeats’ record four Gold Cups
Frankie Dettori and John Gosden have two targets today; a winner for the Queen with Reach For The Moon, and a record-equalling fourth Gold Cup with Stradivarius in, most probably, his last attempt.
The Queen has had 24 Royal Ascot winners in her 70 years on the throne, but a 25th – she also has chances today with Tactical, her last Royal winner in 2020, and Saga – would unquestionably test Ascot’s grandstand roof.
This may be plan B for Reach For The Moon after a hiccup last year delayed his preparation for the Derby, a race in which there was no guarantee he would stay 1½ miles anyway. In today’s Hampton Court Stakes over 1¼ miles, he faces only five rivals and on ratings – not always a guarantee – has 6lb to spare over his nearest rival Claymore.
Reach For The Moon is clearly working like a good horse, but the biggest clue is that he has been entered for the Group One Eclipse Stakes a fortnight on Saturday at Sandown. Today’s race is a Group Three, a couple of rungs down the ladder of what they believe might be attainable for the colt.
In theory, Reach For The Moon is the more likely of the two tasks to be ticked off as “job done”, while Gosden has likened Stradivarius to an old boxer getting back into the ring as he nears the end of his career.
Both trainer and jockey will be sad to see him go, if owner-breeder Bjorn Nielsen finds a stud for the eight-year-old entire to go to at the end of the season, as much as anything because he is such a character to have around Clarehaven Stables.
He is the first horse you meet when you go into the yard and takes his role as front-of-house seriously, greeting any visitors. He is vocal, always letting the fillies know he is about when on exercise, and quite often in the pre-parade ring is happy to show off the length of his “equipment”. Depending on where you are coming from, he is somewhere between the worst kind of letch and a harmless jack-the-lad who is always wolf-whistling at the ladies; either way, if he was human, he would probably be cancelled. Most male horses who race on to eight, indeed most jumpers, are gelded (usually a simple operation done under local anaesthetic) either because they are never going to be good enough to be stallions or because they are “colty” and cutting off the source of testosterone usually has a calming effect. Keeping a lid on that, and Stradivarius’s mind on racing rather than sex, is the trainer’s greatest challenge. “It’s one thing training an eight-year-old gelding, but it’s another training a full horse,” Gosden said. “But he’s happy and well, and he’ll love the ground.” When asked the difference between training a gelding of that age and a full stallion, Gosden replied: “I think I can answer that by saying testosterone is the most dangerous drug in the world,” before adding by way of an aside, “we’ve lost a lot of good friends to it! They’re going to start thinking about other things, aren’t they? He was at his prime at five, maybe six, but at eight we have to face the fact that he is like the boxer getting back in the ring when it is too late in his career. But he’s fine, and it’s just the jockey who gets out of control!”
Gosden is worried, however, that Stradivarius might not have much of a future at stud because of the trend for speed.
He would most likely be marketed as a jumping stallion, but if there is any consolation it is that Yeats, so far the only four-time winner of the Gold Cup, was the sire of this year’s Grand National winner, Noble Yeats. It is not all bad.
“We have this terrible aversion to staying races,” pointed out Gosden.
Last year, there was even a suggestion that Irish mare Princess Zoe was parked alongside Stradivarius for much of the race to cause a distraction. But with Trueshan likely to be taken out because of the ground, Princess Zoe could be the big danger – having finished second, in front of Stradivarius, last year.
When it was put to Dettori yesterday that he had only two jobs today, he replied: “Like I need telling.” He knows what he needs to do, but even the world’s most famous jockey will not be devoid of nerves as he tries to execute the safe delivery of that pair of scripts.