Author: GC

According to Timeform – notwithstanding the highly questionable, exaggerated ratings awarded to Arkle and Flyingbolt – Kauto Star was the joint fifth-best steeplechaser since the early 1960s, rated alongside fellow Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Mill House and just 1lb inferior to dual Queen Mother Champion Chase winner Sprinter Sacre.

 

Trained by Paul Nicholls at Manor Farm Stables in Ditcheat, Somerset and ridden, for most of his career, by Ruby Walsh, Kauto Star won 23 of his 41 races – including 19 of his 31 steeplechases – and over £2.3 million in win and place prize money. He famously won the King George VI Chase at Kempton a record five times, in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2011, and the Cheltenham Gold Cup twice, in 2007 and 2009. In fact, his impressive 13-length victory over stable companion Denman in 2009 – having finished second to the same horse the previous year – made him the first horse to regain the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

 

All in all, Kauto Star won 16 Grade 1 steeplechases, over distances ranging from 1 mile 7½ furlongs to 3 miles 2½ furlongs, during a brilliant career and is rightly remembered as one of the finest racehorses of all time. On his retirement from racing in 2012, owner Clive Smith announced at a press conference in London that Kauto Star would be moved to the Berkshire stables of professional event rider Laura Collett, without informing his former trainer Paul Nicholls. The move led to an acrimonious split between Nicholls and Smith, with Nicholls saying, “I can’t see that [any further Smith-owned horses in the yard] happening”.

 

Kauto Star demonstrated his new dressage skills a few times, including at the London International Horse Show at Olympia in December, 2014, but six months later was injured in a fall at home. He suffered complications resulting from neck and pelvic injuries and was humanely euthanised in June, 2015.

Man o’War was far and away the most successful racehorse of his generation and, arguably, one of the greatest racehorses of all time. In fact, according to panel of experts assembled by the Associated Press, he was voted the greatest horse of the twentieth century, ahead of Secretariat and Citation.

 

Bred by August Belmont II, owned by Samuel D. Riddle and trained by Louis Feustel, won nine of his 10 starts as a juvenile in 1919. His sole defeat came in the Sanford Memorial Stakes at Saratoga, at the hands of the aptly-named Upset, whom he had beaten on six previous occasions, but owed more to the ineptitude of the acting starter than anything else. In the absence of starting stalls, after several false starts the runners were sent on their way before all of them, including Man o’War, were ready. Man o’War was eventually beaten a neck, conceding 15lb to the winner, but as Fred Van Ness of the New York Times reported, “There was scarcely a witness of this race who did not believe after it was all over that Man o’ War would have walked home, with anything like a fair chance.”

 

Man o’War was never beaten again. He didn’t run in the Kentucky Derby because his owner considered believed that a mile and a quarter was too far for a three-year-old at that early stage of his career. He did, however, run in, and win, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes – which would become the second and third legs of the “Triple Crown”, although the phrase wasn’t coined until a decade later – in 1920. In the Preakness Stakes, he beat the aforementioned Upset by 1½ lengths and, in the Belmont Stakes, beat sole rival Donnaconna by 20 lengths, setting a new world record for a mile and three furlongs in the process.

 

Man o’War faced older horses or, rather, an older horse, just once. On his final start, he faced Sir Barton, who’d won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes in 1919, in a match race for the Kenilworth Park Gold Cup at Windsor, Ontario. Man o’War won by 7 lengths, taking his career record to 20 wins from 21 starts and lifetime earnings to just under $250,000.

Phar Lap was definitely the most famous horse in the world in his day and probably the most famous racehorse in the history of Australian horse racing. Bred by Alick Roberts in New Zealand, Phar Lap was bought as a yearling by Sydney trainer Harry Telford on behalf of American businessman David Davis. His name is derived from the Zhuang word ฟ้าแลบ (F̂ālæb) meaning ‘lightning’.

 

However, Davis emphatically rejected the big, ungainly chestnut and, instead, leased him to Telford, who duly had Phar Lap gelded. Immature and unfurnished as a two-year-old, Phar Lap made his racecourse debut in the autumn of 1928 and finished unplaced in his first four starts. He finally broke his maiden in the Rosehill Maiden Juvenile Handicap, over 6 furlongs, before being put away for the winter.

 

Phar Lap started his three-year-old campaign in similarly inauspicious style, again finishing unplaced in his first four starts before chasing home Mollison – the winner of 13 of his first 17 starts – in the Chelmsford Stakes. The Chelmsford Stakes proved something of a turning point for Phar Lap because, thereafter, he recorded a series of impressive victories, including in the AJC Derby and the VRC Derby, before taking on the older horses in the Melbourne Cup.

 

Despite the absence of regular jockey Jim Pike – who couldn’t make the allotted weight of 104lb, or 7st 6lb, and was replaced by Bobby Lewis – Phar Lap started even money favourite for “the race that stops a nation”. Having attempted to make all the running, though, Phar Lap faded in the closing stages.

 

The following season, the “Red Terror”, as Phar Lap became affectionately known to Australian racegoers, returned bigger, stronger and better than ever. He won 14 of his 16 races, including the Melbourne Cup, for which he started the shortest priced favourite in the history of the race, at 8/11, and won easily, despite carrying 9st 12lb.

 

In 1932, Phar Lap sent to the United States to contest what was then the richest race in the world, Agua Caliente Handicap at Tijuana, Mexico. He again won easily, breaking the track record in the process, but the race proved to be his last; he mysteriously collapsed and died at a farm in Atherton, California just 16 days later. All in all, Phar Lap won 37 of his 51 races and over A$66,000 in prize money.